The 2024 Floor Sitting Experiment (Re-Thinking How You Sit)

I don’t know how many years ago it was now, since the age old mantra of sitting being the new smoking.

At least 10 years, probably more.

And obviously dozens of ‘first world’ countries have now put immense taxes in place to deter/force you from even being able to smoke regularly, let alone wanting to.

But what’s been done to combat sitting?

The odd campaign for hitting 10,000 steps per day and the (these days) dying & unelaborated ‘sitting is the new smoking’ slogan. With precious little else. Go anywhere, especially western countries/territories and you’ll see people sitting in chairs to do almost everything.

I coach a super wide range of movement practices each week, working with the younger to the older and when I work with the older folks, I always will have at least one person per class come to me to prewarn me they ‘can’t get on the floor or sit on the floor’, and if they can ‘do it in a chair?’.

I then have to bite my tongue and answer with political correctness and say ‘if that’s what you need to do, sure’. But my internal dialogue is much different….

‘The whole idea of these classes is to get you out of the chair, not back into it!’

So, is chair sitting really so bad?!

There are two avenues we can explore in answering this. One is the metabolic impact of chair sitting and the other is the biomechanical impact of chair sitting.

The first one I will keep brief and simply reiterate the simple fact that sitting more lowers your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), as you’re literally not needing to use any energy as you’re not moving. Less TDEE means you’re able to eat less calories without weight gain, and more importantly it increases your risk of weight gain and things like diabetes, as you’re not using the sugars your body is breaking your food down into.

The second point is one I will elaborate far more on as it’s one I’ve spent pretty much the entirety of 2024 musing on, and experimenting with; the biomechanical implications of how you sit, how often etc.

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of regular mobility & stretching; it makes total sense.

You can’t expect your body to do things easy if it’s not practiced or deemed normal to your brain/nervous system. Flexibility/body positioning is exactly the same….

Stop climbing stairs = climbing stairs becomes harder/flatout impossible.

Walk less and less = your perception of a ‘long walk’ becomes less and less, to where just walking to the bottom/top of the road is now hard.

Never sit on the floor/hardly ever get on and off the floor = an inability to get down to the floor and if you can get down, you probably can’t get up without being hoisted back up.

Never reach down to your toes with straight(ish) legs = needing to bend the knees more and more to reach the feet (the infamous case of ‘tight hamstrings’).

Never straighten or extend your spine/reach up for anything overhead = not being able to extend your spine or get your arm fully overhead.

I could keep going but I’ll stop there. I’m sure you thought of many people you know, who one or all of these apply to?

They’ll tell you they’re just old now and they used to be able to do it. Or they’ll tell you you’re weird/exceptional for being able to do it…

And I’ll tell you they’re only unable to do it because their bad habits have led them to being unable to do it.

The Cross Legged Floor Sit & The Deep Squat, Nature’s Real Chairs

Two positions that are now seen as ‘stretches’ or extreme ranges in any western/westernised country. Because let’s face it, they are stretches to most of us as they’re not natural or comfortable.

Why? Because of what we touched on earlier. Let’s look at them in more detail and see why they may not be comfortable to you now, despite them being quite literally child’s play when you were young.

The Deep Squat

In order for this to be even remotely close to being comfortable you need to have the following joint freedoms…

• Ankle Dorsiflexion (a classically stubborn range to improve & one that allows the knees to go over the toes easier, allowing for a nicer squat, easier lunges, a better gait cycle and healthier knees)
• Knee Flexion (the ability to fully flex the knee; think heel to butt with hamstring to calf contact – a range terribly lacking in most thanks to a tight rectus femoris & by extension, the psoas)
• Hip Flexion (the capacity for the femur/thigh bone to flex deep into the hip socket without pain/restriction. So many of us nowadays face painful impingement when trying to fully flex the hip and/or just hit a brick wall-like block when trying to flex the hip deeper)
• Spinal/Thoracic Extension (in an ideal deep squat the spine has some extension, or at the least neutrality to it, whereas most of our spines can’t even extend when standing, let alone in a squat position because we spend so much time with our spines stuck in flexion, thanks to sitting, slumping etc)

If freedom is lost in just one of those categories it’s enough to make the resting/deep squat significantly less comfortable. Lose freedom in 2 or more and that can pretty much write the position off for you – a position that we evolved to defecate in, sit in and a range we still see kids default to, even today.

And with that in mind, how can you say we’ve evolved beyond that position now if kids default to it? We’ve not evolved, your body has de-evolved.

Cross Legged Sitting

For this classic eastern sitting position to feel even semi-comfortable you need to have freedom in the following areas…

• Ankle inversion/eversion/ankle pressure tolerance (depending on how flexible your groin is you will need a varying pressure tolerance to the weight of your legs, weighing down on your ankles. The ability to roll your ankles out or in slightly will affect the comfort of the position)
• Hip Abduction/External Rotation (the openness of your adductors/groin will influence how easily the knees & legs can fall out and down to the floor. The ability of your hips to externally rotate will also play a key role here. Limited adductor length which is often coupled with limited hip external rotation, will lock the legs towards each other & put more pressure into the knees when attempting to push them down)
• Knee Flexion (For a low knee/deep cross legged sit you will need the knees to be happy to flex. This becomes even more apparent if you lack hip external rotation/abduction as the pressure from the locked up hips will go downstream to the knees, and make the knees uncomfortable)
• Spinal Extension/The Ability To Anteriorly Tilt The Pelvis (for a nice straight back in a cross-legged sit, you will need the ability to straighten your spine out against gravity – both in the upper & lower back. The capacity for a natural curve/extension in the lower back is a key point in allowing more external rotation at the hip, which in turn allows the knees to drop lower, and the groin to open up further)

This ancient Buddhist posture of peace is one the eastern world will opt to sit in without thought, and one that aligns the spine nicely – providing you can sit in it to begin with.

The problem most of us face with this posture is our hip external rotation is severely lacking, which causes the knees to be held high, pulling the pelvis under which draws the lumbar region of the spine into flexion, along with the upper back following.

Whereas if you have enough external rotation at the hips to allow the knees to fall/drop down, your low back will be able to keep a natural arch and your upper back will extend with it.

It’s a posture I struggled with massively throughout my 20s. I would teach classes based around Pilates/Yoga and whenever we would finish or spend time in this position, I couldn’t sit straight for long without a serious burn in my upper back!

And I could only sit with the legs configured one way and not the other, or my right knee would scream at me and so would my right hip capsule. It just felt totally unnatural this way around and even the ‘normal’ way felt difficult after about 30-60 seconds.

How I Fixed It & How You Can Too

In light of my daily routine, which I’ve written about in detail HERE, I noticed my hip external rotation was definitely lacking when compared to my other movements. It was all butterfly, pancake, pike, hip extension, deep squats, shoulders, spine but no hip external rotation to speak of.

No cross legged sitting, no 90/90, no pigeon stretch variations. Nothing.

This led me to the work of the great Belgian flexibility coach, Joachim Hilderson, who extensively promotes the benefits of improved hip external rotation.

And who does so in a no nonsense way, emphasising the need for both softening of the adductors (longer time spent in gentler positions) and more loaded protocols (Tailor’s/Butterfly pose with external load & heavier contractions), as well as the requirement of ‘shortening side strength’; in this case being the capacity of the hip external rotator muscles to actually pull the knees down & out into external rotation.

Those are all pieces of the complete puzzle that is improved hip external rotation in a nutshell. Of course, where the magic happens is the programming and dosing of such movements and in what ratios.

But Joachim is a big proponent of starting out by restoring your cross legged floor sit – and in a scalable way.

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And you guessed it, it would only feel nice one way!

With all this in mind, at the start of the year I vowed to try and floor sit much more. Just to see what it would/could do for me. At first it was simple things like eating dinner in the position, and when I would I’d often need to straighten out one of my legs after just a couple of minutes.

But with time, I gradually exposed the body to sitting the other way (right leg under more external rotation stretch), and for longer (now I’ve done entire zoom sessions like that), and I actually feel weird if I eat at a table now, like I had to throughout my recent near 3 weeks in Australia.

I can now also access many more of the advanced variations in Joachim’s video above, which has had great carryover to both my Tailor’s pose & middle split combined.

The infamous ‘Firelog’ pose or sometimes called ‘double pigeon’ is now available to me whenever I want it, and instead of it being impossible like it used to be (my eyes would water when I would even attempt it, despite my knee being super high), it’s now just a mild stretch and I can advance it so much more by leaning forward, opening up the knees or combining the two.

My side split was always slightly ‘traingle’d’ – where the body has the hips pushed back behind the line of the heels & the body resembles more of an ultra wide pancake. I also would feel much more comfortable with the hips in a hinge as opposed to being upright.

Nowadays though I can hit similar depth with a nice arch in the low back and the legs at 180 degrees!

All thanks to the better hip rotation!

Even the resting squat feels nicer. Obviously the ankles play a huge role here as well but if you have poor passive external rotation, you damn sure won’t be able to actively push your knees out in the bottom of a squat.

In terms of where you should start it really is a case of less being more. We want to achieve two things, fundamentally:

1. Make the position a more ‘normal’ part of your movement repertoire.
2. Make the position comfortable and accessible enough, with respect to the right biomechanics.

Point #1 is spending more time where you can visiting the position, in layman’s terms. The big mistake here is trying to commit to an approach that’s not feasible or realistic. Spending a few minutes a day aggregately is a good start but that depends on how militant you like to be, and how precise.

In the past I have been super militant and still am with many things. However, when it came to cross legged sitting, I just started by eating my home meals there. So it wasn’t timed but rather task orientated….I only do said thing in said position now.

Or you could split 1-2 minutes up per day to start & scale up slowly until it just becomes so natural that long time periods are easy – periods of 20 minutes to even an hour plus!

This may take many months, though. But the time will pass anyway so you may as well do something. Just remember, whatever position you’re in you’re training something.

For good or for bad.

As for point #2 this is mostly about using the right progression for you or scale for you. Sitting on a yoga cushion, some normal cushions or blocks is a wonderful choice. Stupidly, these are seen as bad or not effective generally; I almost have to force people to elevate their hips when they need to in many sessions I lead.

The natural thought is that doing so means you’re doing lesser version of the move. No. You’re modifying it to suit your body perfectly and with full respect being given to the ideal positioning. Modifying the pose such that you can get your hips & spine aligned means the potential to spend more time there, and more time there means more adaptation/restoration of the position.

When all’s said and done you’re always training your mobility regardless of what position your body’s in. Be it sitting, driving, slumping, over-arching or anything in between. By re-introducing basic lost postures into your day to day habits, you can go a long way to improving mobility without having to stretch all the time, and without the fatigue associated with aggressive flexibility protocols.

With all the clientele I work with online & in person, I always encourage a refresh of daily habits to align with their movement/mobility goals. You’ll be astounded at how powerful this is, and you can see now empirically, too!

And yep, a huge portion of this article was written in a cross legged floor sit ;’).