If you’ve ever found yourself stuck on a Teams call for 90 minutes and then got up at the end and staggered to the kitchen, you’ll be all too familiar with the effect that work set-up can have on your back and overall physical health. But it’s not the fact that you’ve been sitting with your feet tucked under your bum that’s causing the problems – it’s the time you’ve spent sitting down.

Joshi explained that movement was the most important thing for back health, and immobility (ie staying in the same position for too long) was the root cause of most discomfort.

“Posture is an interesting one, because there’s no evidence to show that it contributes to back pain in any way,” she said. “We’re not sure how or why that story came about, but there is absolutely zero evidence to point towards posture causing back pain, neck pain or anything. It’s actually the lack of movement that’s causing the pain, so you can sit with ‘bad posture’ for eight hours and feel pain in your back, but if you fidget around regularly, you’ll be fine.”

No, poor posture isn’t causing your back pain – but this one common lifestyle habit is, according to an award-winning osteopath