Counter Sitting

Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Nashville sit-ins

No wonder sitting has been described as 'the new smoking'. For our bodies, it's absolutely ruinous. But it's also an easy habit to develop. And I say 'habit' here on purpose, because while many of us are office workers, that doesn't necessarily mean to have to spend all day sitting down. L et me give you a little more detail to help you visualise what I mean.

The average commute in London is 45 minutes, each way. The good news is that there are easy 'fixes' to rectify things. Studies suggest that getting up and moving regularly throughout the day can counteract the negative effects of sitting all day — so you can be an office worker and still give your body the movement it needs to stay healthy. Those four little tricks will help to get you moving — but if you really want to counteract the ill effects of sitting down, I'd suggest adding stretches to your day.

Sitting is a static, passive action that actively inhibits your range of movement.

In the video below, I've demonstrated six stretches that will help to balance out the restrictive sitting position you adopt while at a computer. Do report all serious incidents to your leader. Do refer information seekers to your leader in a polite manner. Love and nonviolence is the way. The trials of the sit-in participants attracted widespread interest throughout Nashville and the surrounding region.

On February 29, the first day of the trials, a crowd of more than people lined the streets surrounding the city courthouse to show their support for the defendants. Alexander Looby , represented the students.

Doyle dismissed the loitering charges against the students and then stepped down from the bench, turning the trial over to Special City Judge John I. The students refused to pay the fines, however, and chose instead to serve thirty-three days in the county workhouse. The same day the trials began, a group of black ministers, including James Lawson, met with Mayor Ben West to discuss the sit-ins.

Coverage of the meeting by the local press, including a scathing editorial in the Nashville Banner denouncing Lawson as a "flannel-mouth agitator", [39] brought Lawson's activities to the attention of Vanderbilt University where he was enrolled as a Divinity School student.

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The newspaper was owned by James G. Stahlman , a Vanderbilt trustee who was "strongly anti-integration"; [40] it published misleading stories, including the suggestion that Lawson had incited others to "violate the law. He was immediately expelled from the university by Chancellor Harvie Branscomb , and arrested the next day. Robert Nelson resigned in protest and paid Lawson's bail with three of his colleagues, [44] and the school was placed on probation for a year by the American Association of Theological Schools. On March 3, in an effort to defuse the racial tensions caused by the sit-ins, Mayor West announced the formation of a Biracial Committee to seek a solution to the city's racial strife.

The committee included the presidents of two of the city's black universities , but did not include any representatives from the student movement. The committee recommended to partially integrate the city's lunch counters. Each store would have one section that was for whites only and another section for whites and blacks.

This solution was rejected by the student leaders, who considered the recommendations to be morally unacceptable and based upon a policy of segregation. Alexander Looby's home in north Nashville, [50] apparently in retaliation for his support of the demonstrators. Although the explosion almost destroyed the house, Looby and his wife, who were asleep in a back bedroom, were not injured. More than windows in a nearby dormitory were broken by the blast. Rather than discouraging the protesters, this event served as a catalyst for the movement.

Within hours, news of the bombing had spread throughout the community. Around noon, nearly people marched silently to City Hall to confront the mayor. Vivian read a prepared statement accusing the mayor of ignoring the moral issues involved in segregation and turning a blind eye to violence and injustice. Diane Nash then asked the mayor if he felt it was wrong to discriminate against a person based solely on their race or skin color.

Nashville sit-ins - Wikipedia

West answered that he agreed it was wrong. Nash then asked him if he believed that lunch counters in the city should be desegregated. West answered, "Yes", then added, "That's up to the store managers, of course. Coverage of this event varied significantly between Nashville's two major newspapers. The Tennessean emphasized the mayor's agreement that lunch counters should be desegregated, [55] while the Nashville Banner emphasized the mayor's statement that it was up to the city's merchants to decide whether to desegregate.

The day after the bombing Martin Luther King, Jr. During the speech, he praised the Nashville sit-in movement as "the best organized and the most disciplined in the Southland. After weeks of secret negotiations between merchants and protest leaders, an agreement was finally reached during the first week of May. According to the agreement, small, selected groups of African Americans would order food at the downtown lunch counters on a day known in advance to the merchants. The merchants would prepare their employees for the event and instruct them to serve the customers without trouble.

This arrangement would continue in a controlled manner for a couple of weeks and then all controls would be taken off, at which point the merchants and protest leaders would reconvene to evaluate the results. Also as part of the agreement, the media was to be informed of the settlement and requested to provide only accurate, non-sensational coverage. On May 10, six downtown stores opened their lunch counters to black customers for the first time. The customers arrived in groups of two or three during the afternoon and were served without incident.

At the same time, African Americans ended their six-week-old boycott of the downtown stores. Nashville thus became the first major city in the South to begin desegregating its public facilities. Although the end of the sit-in campaign brought a brief respite for civil rights activists in Nashville, institutionalized racism remained a problem throughout the city.

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Over the next few years, further sit-ins, pickets, and other actions would take place at restaurants, movie theaters, public swimming pools, and other segregated facilities across Nashville. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Nashville sit-ins Part of the Civil Rights Movement Nashville's sit-in campaign targeted downtown lunch counters such as this one at Walgreens drugstore.

Business lunch counters at: Alexander Looby Robert E. Businessmen Fred Harvey John Sloan. Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee. Racial segregation in the United States. The initial story in The Tennessean claims 75 were arrested; a story in the Nashville Globe and Independent states that 79 were arrested; most later sources, such as Halberstam's The Children and Wynn's "The Dawning of a New Day" , state that 81 students were arrested.

Lindsey; and Eugene White. Nashville Globe and Independent. The convergence of social goals with news values". Howard Journal of Communications. To breathe properly, the abdominal diaphragm and the pelvic diaphragm should be in sync, but when we sit, all the pressure from gravity blocks this from happening.

Do you sit down all day? Here's six stretches you need to stop your body seizing up

On top of that, if we slouch, we bring the entire weight of our shoulders and our rib cage up on the belly, locking our abdominal diaphragm. This causes most people to breathe shallow, only in the rib cage this is called thoracic breathing. Breathing is a very important mechanism not only for optimal oxygenation of the body, but also to properly massage the abdominal and pelvic organs think of seaweed and plankton being moved by the tides and ensure optimal venous and lymphatic drainage flushing out toxins.

This can prevent the body from clearing the exhaust of the cells, resulting in toxic build-up and eventual sickness. An analogy would be not taking the trash out for many days and it keeps accumulating in and around the house, becoming highly toxic. How do the ways in which we hold ourselves with poor posture, in front of a computer, eventually wreak havoc? Sitting in front of a computer adds another issue: This causes more pressure on our spine because the head is not being properly and evenly distributed over the circumference of the vertebrae and the whole spine.

For an average adult, the head weighs about ten to twelve pounds and should sit straight on the cervical spine. For every inch you lean your head forward, the pressure added to the cervical spine is about ten pounds. So, if you move forward about three or four inches, this adds about thirty to forty more pounds to the spine—quadruple the weight that is meant to sit on the cervical spine.

When the head sits properly straight on the spine, the ligaments hold the spine vertebrates together, allowing the muscles to be relaxed.

But as the head moves forward and adds more weight and pressure, the ligaments initially stretch but over time they lose their tension and the muscles have to kick in, ultimately doing the job the ligaments are meant to do. Neck spasms can ensue and this can result in a visual bump at the base of the neck and eventually degeneration of the spine. Forward head posture can also lead to a decrease in the motion of the cervical spine, which various studies, including research by neurobiologist and Noble laureate Roger Sperry , have illustrated can lead to a decrease in endorphin production, lowering our threshold for pain.

If you maintain certain poor habits, such as bad posture or sitting crossed-legged, your body will eventually adapt to the habit and your muscles will start to shorten. Every single patient I see has at least one of these issues. This is the disease of modernity. I also see a lot of children who, at age one or two, are already playing on a phone, bending, slouching, or twisting to look at the screen. When I grew up kids used to play, and now so many kids are hunched in front of a TV or device, bending forward and causing all sorts of abnormal curving and twisting in their spines with potentially chronic and sometimes irreversible changes in their normal growth and development.

Unfortunately, with many of the implements of modernity, we are creating a whole slew of new diseases that could be so simply addressed by avoiding them in the first place. Can you talk about instances where sitting is common practice, say in an office setting or at a job that requires a sedentary position: What are some healthy improvisations we can make?

I tell my patients for every fifty minutes of sitting, take ten minutes to stretch or move. Get off your chair, give your eyes a break from the computer, drink a glass of water, and do some light walking or stretching.