This Is Why Your Gaming Posture Will Define Your Success

The Myth of a Proper Gaming Posture

So what is a proper gaming posture? While there has been a lot of research in the field, the latest findings describe a situation where there is no such thing as a “proper” gaming posture. There are certain things you need to take into account but the truth is that no matter how you sit in your chair, any form of prolonged inactivity in a single sitting position is bad for you.

At the same time, certain sitting positions can severely affect your health while others can be less damaging.

The truth, in the end, is that the human body is not made to sit down for hours on end, and a way to circumvent injury is to change your position in your chair every time you feel tired.

You can’t maintain a “proper gaming posture” for too long so try sitting cross-legged for a bit, or recline your chair to change the position in which your body is. As long as you take breaks by changing positions and standing up but return to what is considered to be an acceptable gaming position your health should not suffer.

Best Gaming Posture

So if in the end, you need breaks for all postures you can take on your chair, what should be the baseline posture that you should return to once you feel like your muscles are relaxed?

Source: Federica Litrico

Once again there are many myths and a bunch of information but as a baseline, you should do the following:

• Have your feet firmly planted on the ground with your knees at a 90-degree angle
• Have your elbows also bent at a 90-degree angle and at the same level as your desk
• Do not roll your shoulders forward and instead try to keep them relaxed
• Keep your neck in line with your shoulders and do not roll it forward either
• Keep your monitor a good 15-20 cm (at least) from your face (do not be a CS:GO player)

Source: Ron Rambo Kim

If you follow these basic posture steps, take breaks between gaming sessions, change your posture when feeling fatigued to something more relaxed, and finally work out to maintain a healthy body and there should be no major health issues you will face as a gamer.

So Then Why Is a Good Gaming Posture = Success?

To understand what is the correlation between gaming posture and success let us think of a situation where somebody ignores everything we have mentioned in this article completely.

This person will often look like a gremlin in his little gaming cave slouching towards their monitors (you know who they are). Feet dangling in the air or on the chair, weird arm angles, monitor close enough that they can see the individual pixels.

In the case of this theoretical person, they will quickly develop neck pains, lower back pains, eye strain, elbow or wrist injuries in the long term. Short term because of the unhealthy posture that strains the back with double the amount of weight that it should carry you are contracting your muscles and limiting the amount of blood circulating to your brain.

This effectively shortens the attention span and focus in gaming conditions and leads to less success in-game.

This process can be explained in further detail but in short, all you need to know is that: bad posture = less blood flow and more strain on your body = less performance in-game.

Basically, if you want to perform you need to take care of your posture, and since we already told you how to fix your posture while gaming all you need to do now is actually implement this knowledge!

Once again, do not be a Gaming Gremlin! 🙂