Nan

Almost everyone under about 170cm does at a standard desk. Desk heights were standardised around a taller average and never revisited.

The tray and footrest, and for your measurements it is not close. A 75cm desk at 165cm tall means that to type comfortably you have to raise the chair, then your feet dangle, then you slide forward on the seat to reach the floor — which undoes every feature an expensive chair has. Fix the geometry first for maybe 120 total, then put what is left toward a seat cushion if flat foam is the real complaint. A great chair at the wrong height is a worse setup than a mediocre chair at the right one.

Try active work rather than passive holds. Thirty seconds of hanging in a fold does far less for me than a set of slow controlled leg raises or a very light Jefferson curl. Passive stretching maintains range, loading through range builds it. That was the biggest thing that moved my numbers after a stalled year.

Six months of daily stretching with no change is exactly the evidence that longer is not the variable here.

Armrest height is the single most under-adjusted control on any office chair. Most people never touch it once.

There it is. A laptop screen sits 25cm below eye level and an hour a day of that is plenty to produce exactly what you are describing. A stand and a separate keyboard, even cheap ones, is the whole fix.

What changes is that you stop holding the good position. Nobody sustains a posture for six hours, and by the afternoon you are creeping toward the screen without noticing. The thing that worked for me was not a better setup but interrupting the accumulation: a timer every 30 minutes, stand up, roll the shoulders back, look at something far away for 20 seconds, sit back down. It sounds too simple and it took my afternoon neck ache from daily to about once a fortnight. Two other things to check: screen brightness against the room once the daylight drops, because squinting pulls the head forward, and whether you switch to a laptop for afternoon calls.

Speed it up by keeping a list of every word you reached for and could not find. Mine was about 40 a week at the start and around 5 a week two months later. Those specific words are worth more than any premade deck, because they are the ones your actual life needs.

Nothing is being lost. Recognition and recall are stored differently and you have only ever built the recognition side. Speaking is the first time you have tested recall, so it feels like a collapse when it is really the first honest measurement you have taken. It settles in six to eight weeks if you keep going.

Check the wrist extension itself. Flat palms put the joint at roughly 90 degrees and plenty of people do not have that range yet without compensating somewhere. A wedge or a rolled edge of the mat under the heel of the hand takes 10 or 15 degrees off the angle, and that is often the difference between aching and fine.

It is the most common single fix in this whole category. The number pad you use twice a month costs you 12cm of reach for eight hours a day. If you genuinely need one, buy a separate pad and put it on your left side.

Reach and abduction. Look at where the mouse actually sits: if it is to the right of a full width keyboard, your arm is held out at an angle and the shoulder holds it there statically all day. That static hold is exactly what burns between the blade and the spine. Three things that worked for me, cheapest first: get a keyboard without a number pad so the mouse comes 10 to 12cm closer, set the height so your forearm is level rather than reaching up, and rest the forearm on the armrest or the desk instead of floating it. The keyboard change alone stopped the burning within a week for me.

If you want the strength angle anyway, the specific quality is scapular protraction — pushing the floor away and rounding between the shoulder blades. Plank plus, where you push the ground away at the top of a plank and hold a couple of seconds, builds exactly that and it transferred directly for me.

Half right — movement is the actual variable. But a sit-stand desk is the easiest way to build movement into a job that keeps you in one spot, so I would not throw it out.

Locked knees with the pelvis forward is the default everyone drifts into. A soft knee and a foot rail fixes most of it without any conscious effort.

You bought a real solution and then implemented it at about three times the dose anyone should start with. Standing is a load too, and four hours a day from a standing baseline of zero is a big jump. That band across the low back after 40 minutes is usually fatigue in the muscles holding you upright, plus the very common habit of pushing the pelvis forward and locking the knees. What worked for me:

• Start with 15 to 20 minute standing blocks, and sit down before you are uncomfortable rather than after.
• Total about 90 minutes a day for the first fortnight, then build.
• An anti-fatigue mat. On a hard floor this is not an accessory, and the difference is obvious within a day.
• Shift your weight and put one foot up on a low rail or a box, swapping every few minutes. Static standing is worse than static sitting in some ways.
  If it does not settle with those changes over a few weeks, get it looked at properly rather than buying more gear.

The within-session looseness is mostly nervous system rather than tissue, which is why it resets overnight, and that is completely normal for the first couple of months. Lasting change is slower: most people notice something that persists between sessions somewhere around 8 to 12 weeks of consistent work, and real structural change is measured in months. Two things speed it up in my experience: hold long enough to matter, 90 seconds to two minutes rather than 30 seconds, and add some strength work at the end of your range instead of only stretching, because the body keeps range it can control and gives away range it cannot.

Not a mistake, just an early check-in. Take a photo of your forward fold today and another in six weeks. The change is invisible day to day and obvious across that gap.

Also stop thinking of it as one correct position. The healthiest change I made was not sitting better, it was sitting in three or four different ways across a day and moving between them. Static perfect posture for six hours is still static.