After phone neck comes phone knee: excess usage associated with knee pain
Move over, text neck, here comes the phone knee! Excessive usage of your smartphone has been associated with numerous physical and mental wellbeing disruptions, but a new study brings some unexpected entrants in the long list of overuse grievances.
It turns out that when you overuse your phone, you underuse most of your body parts and the lack of movement is causing all kinds of musculoskeletal ailments. One of those is, surprise, surprise, persistent pain in your knees.
Knee pain cure goes through your phone
According to a new research published by the NIH, spending more than four hours staring at your phone screen in a day greatly increases the chances for all kinds of joint and muscle disorders, and the study authors found a clear link between excessive phone usage and knee pain. Commenting on the study, Geonode's Technology Expert Josh Gordon clarifies that "when we're constantly hunched over our phones, our body weight shifts, and this can place added stress on the knees."
Needless to say, that goes for all other ailments caused by developing osteoarthritis due to a sedentary lifestyle. Since our bodies are designed for motion that lubricates the joints and keeps tendons, muscles and ligaments stretched and flexible, sitting still for prolonged periods of time interferes with those processes to the point where stress can develop in the complex knee construction and throw it off balance.
In addition, the tendency for being overweight from a sedentary lifestyle associated with more than four hours of phone usage per day results in extra strain put on the knee's joints, tendons, or ligaments, whose position shifts improperly with us hunched over a smallish phone screen at all times.
According to another study a few years back, tilting out heads down to stare at a phone applies 66 pounds of pressure to the spine resulting in the so-called texting or messaging neck problems due to the unnatural posture. At the time, it was thought that forward tilting altered the curvature of the whole support structure - from the cervical spine, through the neck and shoulder muscles, or supporting ligaments - and the same thing seems to be happening with other major load bearing joints in our body.
That is why the researchers now recommend cutting down on phone usage as a rather overlooked way to lower your knee pain via setting screen time limits and replacing the period otherwise spent staring at the phone with moderate exercise activities.
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