Working from home is breaking London’s backs

As hybrid working settles into permanence, a generation of desk workers is discovering what a kitchen chair does to a spine over four years.

The complaint arrives in roughly the same shape every time. A stiff neck that never resolves. A shoulder that clicks. A lower back that objects to standing up after a long call. The patient is in their thirties or forties, plays no sport, and cannot identify a moment when anything went wrong.

Nothing did go wrong, exactly. That is the problem.

“There was no accident,” says Marcin Laguna, a mobile sports therapist working across southwest and central London. “People wait to remember the incident. But tissue adapts to whatever you ask of it most often, and for a lot of people that’s now eight hours a day at a laptop on a dining table.”

The hybrid hangover

The migration to home working was executed at speed and improvised in furniture. Offices came with adjustable chairs and monitors at eye height. Kitchens came with none of that. Four years on, the bill is arriving.

Laguna’s caseload has shifted with it. A decade in the fitness industry gave him a clientele of athletes and gym regulars; increasingly his appointments are with office workers presenting the same pattern — compressed chest, rounded shoulders, locked hip flexors, a neck doing work it was never meant to do.

What manual therapy does about this is less mystical than the industry often implies. Pressure and movement applied to tissue trigger a mechanical signalling response in the cells themselves, which is why sustained, specific work changes how tissue behaves rather than merely how it feels. The reliable results are unglamorous and worth having: better range of motion, less pain, reduced soreness after training, and a nervous system dialled down from its default setting — that last one accounting for the sleep improvements clients report and rarely expect.

Post-injury rehabilitation remains core to the practice, alongside personal training, and the two run together: rehab restores the movement, training stops the problem returning. He also offers Brazilian lymphatic drainage, a lighter technique popular before weddings, holidays and events — a different job from deep tissue work, and one he is careful not to conflate with it.

If the office came to the home, so can the therapist. Laguna treats clients in homes, hotels and offices across Wandsworth, Putney, Wimbledon, Fulham, Kensington and Westminster, removing the friction that stops people booking at all — the trip to a clinic being, for someone who already sits too much, one more thing to sit through.

The unglamorous fix

“I don’t do relaxing massages,” reads his booking page, prominently, in a business where relaxation is the standard product. It costs him enquiries. He keeps it because the alternative — an hour of mutual disappointment — costs more.

The same directness extends to what he won’t claim. Ask him about the perennial favourites — flushing toxins, breaking down scar tissue, permanently lengthening a tight IT band — and he will tell you the evidence doesn’t support them, which is an unusual position for someone paid by the session.

His assessments start with how you sleep, how you sit, what you actually do all day. The mechanics rather than the symptom. It frequently produces advice that reduces his own income. “If the problem is the chair, I can loosen the muscle and you’ll feel great for three days,” he says. “Then you’ll sit back in the chair.”

His route into the work was not a straight line. Before therapy there was security, construction, management — jobs covering most of the ways a body gets used badly, from standing all night to lifting all day to sitting through meetings. A decade of sport supplied the rest of the education. “I’ve injured most parts of myself doing sport. I know your pain. I might cause a little more of it to help you.”

He is candid, too, that the practice isn’t his only income, which he considers the point rather than a caveat. No month depends on selling someone a course of treatment they don’t need.

Nobody is going back to the office five days a week, and nobody is buying a proper chair. Which, Laguna concedes, has been good for business. “I’ve built a career on other people’s furniture.”

Marcin Laguna offers mobile sports therapy, post-injury rehabilitation, personal training, deep tissue massage, Brazilian lymphatic drainage and assisted stretching across southwest and central London. He holds numerous professional qualifications and has worked in the fitness industry for ten years. Bookings: massagehub.app/marchin