Picture a body in January 2019.
This person commutes to an office five days a week. Not a fitness enthusiast, but they move. Walking from the parking lot to the building, taking stairs sometimes, walking to meetings, standing at the copier, going out for lunch. They sit at a proper desk with a decent chair. On weekends they hike, work in the garden, meet friends for walks.
Their posture isn’t perfect. The usual forward head and rounded shoulders from desk work. But the body is reasonably mobile. Full head rotation in both directions. Able to squat down to pull weeds. Balanced gait.
Now picture that same body in July 2021.
Working from a kitchen table for sixteen months. The chair is a wooden dining chair with no lumbar support. The laptop sits directly on the table, screen at navel height. The gym closed and they never went back. The weekend hikes stopped when the trails got too crowded, and then when the motivation dried up.
This was the body that started showing up in my practice in the fall of 2021. Different in ways that went far beyond any weight gain. Thoracic spines that had stiffened dramatically. Hip flexors noticeably shorter. Lost range of motion in shoulders that had been there two years earlier. Shallower breathing. These people looked older, and they felt it.
This wasn’t an unusual case. It was every other client I saw that year.
The Pandemic Was a Postural Catastrophe
We’ve talked a lot about the respiratory effects of COVID-19. The cardiac effects. The neurological effects. Long COVID. All of it important and real.
But there’s another pandemic effect that barely made the news, and it affected nearly everyone, whether or not they caught the virus. The pandemic fundamentally changed how people’s bodies were positioned, how they moved, and how they carried stress for months and years. And the structural consequences of that shift are still showing up in my practice today, six years later.
This isn’t about blaming anyone. People did what they had to do. They survived a terrifying time. But their bodies paid a price, and understanding that price is the first step toward addressing it.
The Work-From-Home Body
Let’s be honest about what most people’s home offices looked like in 2020. Not the Instagram versions with the standing desks and the ergonomic setups. The real ones.
Couches. Kitchen tables. Beds. Dining room chairs. Breakfast bars. A laptop on whatever surface was available in a house that was suddenly also a school, a gym, and a prison.
The ergonomic problems of office sitting are real, but at least an office usually has a proper chair, a monitor at roughly the right height, and a keyboard at roughly the right level. Working from a couch with a laptop on your thighs is ergonomically catastrophic. The screen is a foot and a half below eye level, pulling the head and neck into severe flexion. There’s no lumbar support. The hips are deeply flexed with the knees higher than the pelvis. The shoulders are rounded forward to reach a keyboard that’s too low.
People sat like this for months. Then years. And their bodies did what bodies do: they adapted.
The fascial remodeling that normally happens gradually over years got compressed into months. I saw people whose tissue felt like it had aged a decade in two years. Thoracic spines that had been moderately stiff were now rigid. Hip flexors that had been moderately shortened were now almost locked. Shoulders that had been moderately rounded were now structurally fixed in protraction.
The Loss of Incidental Movement
Here’s the part that gets overlooked. It wasn’t just the bad furniture. It was the disappearance of all the small movements that made up a normal day.
Walking to and from your car. Walking through a parking lot. Walking the halls of an office. Standing up to talk to a colleague. Going out for lunch. Taking the stairs. Carrying things. All of these little movements, none of them exercise in any formal sense, add up to what researchers call “incidental movement” or “non-exercise activity thermogenesis” (NEAT).
Studies suggest that incidental movement can account for several hundred calories per day, but the calorie burn isn’t the important part. What matters is that all those little movements take your body through different positions throughout the day. They keep joints mobile. They keep muscles cycling through contraction and relaxation. They keep the fascia hydrated and responsive.
In lockdown, all of that evaporated. People went from maybe 4,000 to 8,000 steps a day to sometimes under 2,000. From dozens of position changes per day to almost none. From regular weight-bearing activity to hours and hours of pure sitting.
The body doesn’t distinguish between “I’m choosing to be still” and “I’m being held captive.” The tissue responds the same way. Less movement means less circulation, less fascial hydration, less neural stimulation, less proprioceptive input. The tissues stiffen. The patterns calcify.
Stress, Isolation, and the Fascial Body
And then there’s the emotional component, which I’ll write about more in a later post but needs mentioning here.
2020 and 2021 were terrifying for a lot of people. Fear of illness. Financial stress. Isolation. Loss of routine. Loss of social connection. Political upheaval. For many people, a sustained state of anxiety that lasted months or years.
Chronic stress doesn’t just live in your mind. It lives in your tissue. When you’re anxious, your body goes into a protective posture. Shoulders rise. Chest caves in. Jaw clenches. Breath gets shallow. The fascia responds to emotional states just as it responds to physical positions. Sustained fear creates sustained fascial tension, particularly in the front of the body, the chest, the diaphragm, the hip flexors.
Many of my clients from 2021 and 2022 had a quality to their tissue that I can only describe as “braced.” It was harder, denser, less yielding than what I typically felt. This wasn’t just from bad furniture. It was the physical residue of sustained emotional stress, written into the fascia.
Combine that emotional guarding with months of terrible ergonomics and almost zero movement variety, and you get bodies that were profoundly changed.
What I Saw in 2021 and Beyond
Let me describe the patterns I started seeing when people finally came back to my practice.
Dramatically increased thoracic kyphosis. Upper backs that were noticeably more rounded than they had been at their last visit, sometimes two years earlier. The laptop-on-the-couch position had driven the thoracic curve well past what I typically see from regular desk work.
Hip flexors at crisis level. I’ve always seen tight hip flexors in desk workers. But the pandemic hip flexors were different. More fibrotic. More resistant. These weren’t just muscles that had shortened; the fascial envelopes around the psoas and iliacus had thickened and densified in ways that felt like years of change compressed into months.
Shoulder restrictions. People who had been reaching overhead without difficulty in 2019 could no longer get their arms past about 150 degrees of flexion. The anterior shoulder fascia had shortened from months of arms-forward laptop use, and the posterior shoulder had stiffened from disuse.
Breathing changes. Almost everyone was breathing worse. Shallower. More into the upper chest. The diaphragm was restricted from both the postural compression and the emotional bracing. Several clients told me they’d noticed they were holding their breath while working, something they’d never been aware of before the pandemic.
Weight redistribution and tissue quality changes. Beyond the obvious weight gain many people experienced, the quality of tissue had changed. Less hydrated. Less elastic. More bound down. The fascia felt like it hadn’t been loaded variably in months, because it hadn’t.
Balance and coordination decline. Particularly in my older clients, I noticed balance had deteriorated. Less time on feet meant less proprioceptive input, which meant less balance capability. For adults over 50, this is not a minor issue.
The Bodies I See Now
It’s 2026. The pandemic is well behind us in many ways. But the postural changes it created are not.
Many people never went back to the office full-time. Hybrid work is the norm, which means the kitchen table or home office is still where millions of people spend their work days, often with the same suboptimal setups they cobbled together in March 2020.
Exercise habits that were disrupted during lockdowns never fully reformed for many people. The gym closed and they discovered they didn’t miss it enough to go back. The hiking buddy moved away. The routine that kept them moving dissolved and was never rebuilt.
And the fascial changes that accumulated during the pandemic years are now the baseline. They’re not “pandemic damage” anymore. They’re just how the body is now. Which means they’re also harder to change, because the body has had years to reinforce these patterns.
I don’t say this to be grim. I say it because understanding what happened to your body during that period is genuinely useful. If you’ve noticed that you’re stiffer than you were in 2019, that your back hurts in ways it didn’t before, that your breathing feels different, that your balance has changed, you’re not imagining it. And you’re not “just getting older.” Something real happened to your body, and it can be addressed.
What Can Be Done
First, if you’re still working from a kitchen table or a couch, please invest in a proper workspace. It doesn’t have to be expensive. A separate keyboard and a laptop stand that brings the screen to eye level will make more difference than any fancy chair. The goal is to get your screen up and your hands down, so your body isn’t folding in on itself for eight hours.
Second, rebuild the incidental movement. Walk more. Take phone calls standing up. Set a timer and move every 30 to 45 minutes. Park farther away. Take stairs. These aren’t dramatic interventions, but they’re the baseline of movement variety that got stripped away during lockdowns and often hasn’t come back.
Third, address the emotional component. If your body is still carrying the brace pattern of pandemic-era stress, no amount of stretching will fully open your chest or release your jaw. Breathwork helps. Mindfulness practices help. And structural integration directly addresses the fascial holding patterns that chronic stress creates.
Fourth, consider getting structural work done. If your body accumulated significant fascial restriction during the pandemic, it may have crossed a threshold where stretching and exercise alone aren’t enough to reverse the pattern. This is not a failure of willpower. It’s a recognition that tissue that has remodeled over years needs more than habit changes to reorganize. The 12-series is specifically designed to systematically address whole-body patterns like the ones the pandemic created.
An Honest Reckoning
I want to end with something that I think is important.
A lot of us are walking around in post-pandemic bodies and comparing ourselves to pre-pandemic memories. Wondering why we can’t do what we used to do. Feeling frustrated with stiffness, pain, or limited mobility that seems to have appeared “out of nowhere.”
It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a very specific set of circumstances that affected almost everyone. And the fact that your body changed in response to those circumstances is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that your body works exactly the way it’s supposed to. It adapted to what was demanded of it.
The good news, the genuinely hopeful news, is that the same adaptive capacity that reshaped your body during the pandemic can reshape it again. Given different inputs, different positions, different movements, and some skilled help with the tissue that’s already changed, your body can reorganize.
I see this happen in my practice regularly. People who felt like their bodies had aged a decade in two years, getting back mobility and comfort they thought was gone for good. It takes work. It takes patience. But the capacity for change doesn’t have an expiration date.
If you’re in Santa Cruz and you’ve been living in a body that hasn’t felt right since 2020, let’s have a conversation. No judgment about what happened. Just a practical plan for what happens next.
Next week, we’re going to look at something that affects you every moment of every day, something the pandemic made worse, and something most people never think about. How your screen changes the way you breathe.