Back to the Desk:
5 Things to Do in Your First Week
Brussels empties in early August and refills in the third week. And every year, a few days after the city comes back, the same complaint starts arriving at the clinic: low-back pain that turned up within three days of the first day back at the desk.
I've written about why that happens — the bed changes, the travel, the sudden switch from walking all day to sitting all day. This is the practical half. Five things to actually do in the week you go back, so it doesn't happen to you.
Leave yourself a buffer day
Flying or driving back on Sunday evening and starting work Monday morning is the single most common version of this. You're asking a spine that spent eight hours compressed in a seat to do a full day of sitting the next morning, with no decompression in between.
If you can, come back Saturday. Use the Sunday to walk, unpack slowly, and sleep in your own bed once before the alarm goes. If you can't, accept that the Monday is a write-off and plan the week around it rather than scheduling your hardest meetings into it.
Move on the morning of your first day
Don't let the first sitting of the day be the eight-hour one. Get off the metro a stop early, or walk ten minutes round the block before you go up. It sounds trivial. It isn't — you're giving the hips and lower back a chance to load properly before you ask them to hold one shape until lunch.
Reset your desk before you sit at it
Two things happen over the summer. Someone borrows your chair and changes every setting on it. And you forget what your own setup felt like, so you tolerate a bad one for weeks without noticing.
Take two minutes on day one. Feet flat, hips level with or slightly above the knees, screen at roughly arm's length with the top of it near eye level, and the keyboard close enough that your elbows stay by your sides. If you're on a laptop all day, get it on a stand with a separate keyboard. That one change does more for necks than anything else I recommend.
Set a timer for 60 to 90 minutes
The problem with sustained sitting isn't the posture, it's the sustained part. Tissue that's held in one position stiffens, and the longer it's held the less it likes being asked to move again.
Set a repeating timer. When it goes, stand up — even for 30 seconds. Get water, walk to a colleague instead of sending the message, take the call standing. You're not trying to exercise. You're interrupting the stillness.
Don't do the inbox catch-up in one sitting
Nine hundred unread emails is a four-hour sitting marathon, and it lands on exactly the week your back is least ready for it. It's also the bit that generates the shoulder and jaw tension that comes with the first week back.
Split it. Two shorter blocks with a proper walk between them will not take longer overall, and your neck will notice the difference by Wednesday.
The pattern that ends up in the treatment room in October almost always starts in the last week of August. Break it in the first few days and it usually doesn't establish at all.
What About the Gym?
Careful here. Two or three weeks off means you've lost a bit of conditioning, and the instinct to go back at the weight you left off is a strong one. That's a good way to add a training injury to a back that's already grumbling.
Go back at roughly two-thirds of your previous load for the first week and build from there. You'll be back where you were within a fortnight, and you won't spend that fortnight injured.
When It's Not Just Stiffness
Some first-week stiffness is normal and settles as the body re-adapts. Worth getting looked at if the pain has lasted more than five to seven days without improving, if you can't bend forward without significant stiffness, or if it's the same pattern you had last year and the year before.
Anything shooting down a leg, any numbness, tingling or weakness — get that assessed rather than waiting it out.
First week back and already sore?
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