Do Not Take This Information Sitting Down!

An ill-named malady preys upon the sedentary.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

My heartfelt thanks to the New York Times for bringing to my attention one more damned health condition to worry about in my dotage. As if weakening eyesight, questionable hearing, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and receding gums weren’t enough.

To these I now must add a condition known as “dead butt syndrome.” It typically affects people who spend hours at a time sitting. People like me, in other words. A lifelong writer who has always preferred to type in a sitting posture, I am a poster child for a person at risk.

It is small consolation that dead butt syndrome can also impact “rotational athletes” – those whose sports involve rotating the body to swing. Think tennis, pickleball, baseball, and golf. But the sedentary are the more likely victims.

What’s in a Name

The medical name for this condition is “gluteal amnesia,” which translates more accurately to “forgetful ass.” I have been called worse. But in our attention economy, where a click is worth a thousand words and 1,000 clicks may kick off your career as an influencer, “dead butt syndrome” attracts more eyeballs than Greek words.

The silly, semi-prurient name notwithstanding, physical therapists assure us that dead butt syndrome is a serious condition that can lead to dire physical consequences. They say it can lay the groundwork for such health risks as depression and cardiovascular disease.

The problem starts when a muscle in the buttocks (gluteus medius specifically) grows weak from inactivity – so weak that it “forgets” to activate when it should. The job of this muscle, along with its siblings g. maximus and g. minimis, is to stabilize the hip, lift the legs, rotate the thighs, and keep the pelvis and core stable. When one or more of the glute triplets falls down on the job, other muscles and joints strain to compensate. Result: low back pain, knee pain, hip pain, ankle pain, and possibly balance issues.

“Our bodies aren’t designed to be seated for long periods of time,” says Kristen Schuyten, D.P.T., a physical therapy clinical specialist at Michigan Medicine. If you sit for hours a day, she adds, it’s going to lead to issues.”  She also notes that it takes nearly twice as long to restore weak glutes than it does to develop the condition.

How To Know

How do you know if you have dead butt syndrome? One warning sign is if, after a few hours of sitting, you stand and feel numbness (or a pain) in your backside.  Another test is to lie on your back with hips in the air (i.e., the bridge pose in yoga). If you consciously engage your buttocks five or ten times and they burn a little, you’re in the clear, but if you feel major strain in your hamstrings, your glutes are probably not firing. The curvature of the spine can also indicate that the hip flexors are overcompensating.

Physical therapists can also administer the Trendelenburg test, in which a patient lifts one leg in front of them while standing. If the pelvis dips down on the side of the body on which the leg is lifted, that suggests the gluteus medius is weak on the opposite side.

For those sedentary souls like me who are in the high-risk group for dead butt, the standard advice is what you’ve heard all your life: Get up from your chair frequently. Stretch every day, even when you don’t need to. Sit up straight and maintain good posture. Buy a standing desk.

There are also great exercises you can do to prevent the dread condition, or to correct it once you have it. I won’t bore you with them now, but you can click here if you want to see illustrated instructions.

Despite my risky behavior, I seem to have escaped the ravages of dead butt syndrome so far. It’s certainly not a condition I want my name associated with. So I will be carefully modulating my sitting time with frequent breaks for snacking, walking about the neighborhood, and possibly – just maybe – getting more exercise.