#sitting
"What happens if instead of slumping onto the couch, you choose instead to sit on the floor? When you sit on the floor, with your back unsupported by anything other than your own musculature, you in fact strengthen that supporting musculature otherwise known as the postural muscles of your trunk aka your core. A daily practice of sitting on the floor with your back unsupported (this means you don’t sit against a wall or couch) strengthens the stabilizer muscles that protect your spine, as well as trims your waist in a natural, functional way. I would put my money on floor sitting over abdominal crunches as the optimal way to strengthen my core ANY DAY. When your postural muscles are firing at their optimal lengths, you become strong enough to align or stack your vertebra, bringing back the natural, compression reducing, curves of your spine. When you sit on the floor, you are more likely to be on your sitting bones rather than on your tailbone, which is better for your pelvic floor musculature and your low back. Hanging out in seated postures on the floor increases your tolerance to greater ranges of motion in your joints, which results in a sensual experience of more flexibility. You feel less stiff, less tight.
When you sit on the floor supporting your own spine, you squirm. You don’t sit still. You move about. Frequently changing positions articulates your joints into many different angles, causing a seemingly infinite variety of loads to the tissues of your spine, pelvis, hips, groin, and legs. Different loads stimulate different muscles which, through the process of mechanotransduction, pushes blood into the smallest of blood vessels, innervates the tissues, and removes waste products.
When you sit on the floor, you do something you almost never do on furniture – you stretch. Just sitting on the floor in a cross-legged position provides passive tensile and compressive loads to your connective tissues, increasing strength and suppleness. But active stretching is likely to happen as well. Once you’ve shifted your position a dozen times to get comfortable, you’ll usually give in and just begin actively stretching your muscles! This would not happen if you were in a chair. Just sayin."
Sitting on the Floor…A Proposal https://web.archive.org/web/20200928060514/https://footloveyoga.com/2015/03/10/sitting-on-the-floor-a-proposal/