TAKE all your telephone calls standing up, have meetings on the go and drink more water so you'll need to walk to the toilet more.

These are some of the top tips from an Oxford osteopathy clinic on how to beat life-long back problems, which it says are on the rise.

Staff at St Clements Osteopathy and Massage, who are celebrating the tenth anniversary this month, are convinced that sedentary working habits and an increase in computer-based jobs are causing a rising number of back pain problems in all of us.

The NHS spends more than £500m per year treating back pain and in 2013 the Office for National Statistics estimated that low back pain cost the UK 31 million days of work.

To mark their birthday, the staff at St Clements have given out some free advice for how to keep bones, joints and ligaments flexible and pain-free.

Senior Senior Osteopath Tom Bedford, who founded the clinic with his wife Summeara in 2006, said: "Most people are not aware of the risks of sitting all day long.

"The research evidence is very strong that physical inactivity is life-shortening.

"In July 2016 the Lancet stated that physical inactivity is as significant a risk to health as smoking and obesity."

Among the problems that sedentary lifestyles can cause are metabolic disorders which replace healthy muscle with fat, stroke and cardiac disease and diabetes.

Worst of all, most of the problems caused by a lifetime of sitting down don't manifest until retirement, when it is too late to do anything about them.

So what can you do when there is still time?

Here are some top tips:

1. Get out of your chair and stretch every 30 minutes: you don't have to do a lot, just 30 seconds of movement will be good for you. Set an alarm to help you remember.

2. Fidget: the main problem of working at a computer is compound pressure on the joints, ligaments and bones, and just shifting around in your chair helps alleviate that.

3. Take your phone calls standing up: if you start doing this it can soon become second nature so you don't have to force yourself to go for a walk to nowhere.

4. Have a litre of water on your desk: this will not only force you to go to the bathroom more, having lots of fluids also helps concentration.

5. Take your meetings standing up: instead of walking to another room just to sit down again, why not walk and talk? If it's a sunny day and you can go out, even better.

A lot of these practices don't just have physical health benefits, it is also good for mental health not to be staring at a screen all day.

St Clements also celebrated its anniversary this month by raising money for Ataxia UK which supports people who suffer from a group of neurological disorders that affect balance, coordination, and speech.