What Commuting Without a Car Does to Your Shoulders

Plenty of people move to Bangkok and give up driving for the first time in their adult life. It is usually a good decision — the traffic is what it is, and the BTS and MRT are quick. But a car-free commute loads your body in a way a car does not, and after a couple of months it shows up in one specific place.

The bag is the whole problem

In a car, your laptop goes on the passenger seat. Without a car, it is on you — for the walk to the station, the wait, the ride, and the walk at the other end. Call it forty minutes each way with several kilograms hanging off one shoulder.

To stop a single-strap bag sliding off, you lift and hold that shoulder slightly. You do it without noticing, continuously, twice a day. That is a sustained, one-sided, low-level contraction of exactly the muscle that runs from your neck to the point of your shoulder, and it is why the ache is almost always worse on the side you carry on.

It is the clearest cause-and-effect relationship in this whole category of complaint, and the easiest to fix.

Standing still is not resting

A full train means standing, holding a rail, bracing gently against movement, for twenty minutes. Your shoulders end up slightly raised and slightly forward — the same shape a desk produces, which means your commute is not a break from your working posture but an extension of it. Ten hours of one shape rather than eight.

Stairs add the rest. Most BTS stations mean two flights up and two down, twice a day, often while carrying the bag on one side.

What to change, in order

Get the load off one shoulder. A backpack, or a cross-body strap worn properly across the chest. This single change resolves a surprising proportion of one-sided neck and shoulder ache within a fortnight, and it costs nothing if you already own a rucksack.

Halve what is in it. Most people carry a laptop, a charger, an umbrella, a water bottle and a gym kit every day and use two of them. Weight is the multiplier on everything above.

Swap sides deliberately if you will not switch bags. Not as good as fixing the load, but far better than always the same side.

Hold the rail with the other hand. Trivial, and it stops one shoulder doing all the bracing.

What the platform wait is good for

You are standing there anyway. Let your shoulders drop, put the bag down, and roll your shoulders through their full range a few times. It looks like nothing and it interrupts the position, which is the entire mechanism by which these complaints accumulate.

What treatment helps

This is a one-sided upper-trapezius and neck complaint, which responds well to targeted work. Head, neck and shoulder massage is seated work through the shoulders, neck and scalp — through clothing, no oil, no space to clear — at ฿900 for forty-five minutes or ฿1,200 for an hour. For a commuting complaint this is usually the efficient choice.

If it has been going on for months and one area will not release, deep tissue massage is firmer and more specific, from ฿1,400. And if your legs and feet are as tired as your shoulders — which they will be, from the walking and the stairs — foot massage at ฿1,000 for sixty minutes covers the feet and lower legs with no undressing.

Since the point is that you are tired of travelling, having it come to your address rather than adding a third journey to the day is not a small thing. There is no travel surcharge in any of the twelve areas we cover, and the service areas page lists them with arrival estimates.

If it is not muscular

Numbness, tingling or weakness down an arm is a different problem and needs a doctor or physiotherapist first — a bag strap compressing a nerve is a real thing and worth ruling out properly. Say so in the booking notes if it applies.

Book a session, or read why your body aches in your first month here if you have arrived recently. The home page lists everything.