Standing vs. Sitting I talk to lots of people about their office setups, but one recent conversation still haunts me. A few months ago, I was chatting with Anette, a very earnest 30-somethi...
Can Fidgeting Help You Live Longer?
The health benefits of fidgeting Likely you know someone who is a natural-born fidgeter; you may be one of these souls yourself. If so, you’re in luck: while it’s not easy to be a fidgeter ...
What Is an “Exercise Chair”? (Besides an Oxymoron)
Why do we sit? On the face of it an “exercise chair” seems an odd juxtaposition of words: don’t we sit to avoid the exercise that would be involved in some other posture, such as, say, squa...
This Just in (again): Passive sitting is bad for us.
Exercise cannot undo the harms of passive sitting. Evidence has been accumulating for years that passive sitting presents a unique health risk, different from lack of exercise. Importantly,...
You Need to Move More! According to Doctors and Scientists
The data is in, Americans move less than ever before, and this is extremely bad for our health. Our human ancestors used to travel up to 10 miles a day when we were hunter-gatherers according to D...
Changing how you sit might help you avoid back surgery
I was a trauma surgeon for many years and I loved everything about it. Trauma surgery is unique in surgery because it is a specialty that is almost pure surgery: very little need for elaborate ...
Can how you sit help lower your cancer risk?
We know not only that moving is good for us but also that sedentary behavior independently contributes to a host of bad health outcomes: obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the most frequently...
Your Back Pain Isn’t In Your Back
Your Back Pain Isn’t In Your Back Pain is a universal experience, the result of ancient neurologic pathways evolved to keep us safe by alerting us to injury. While pain is universal, however, i...
Are 10,000 steps too many? “Ten thousand steps” is now a well-ingrained idea that even epidemiologists embrace, but not because it’s true. Physicians have long known that walking is importan...
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting?
The Paleo Diet is Debunked, But What About Paleo Sitting? The paleo diet has had a good run, but for a bad reason. The underlying idea that our modern lives don’t match our hunter-gath...
Staying Awake at Work Staying awake at work has been a problem since the beginning of work. So, it’s not surprising that an array of anti-somnolence work-arounds have been tried over the mil...
Posture is a seemingly uncomplicated attribute of our every moment. It is simply the habitual way we array ourselves in response to gravity, and is as individual as our personalities. But, becau...
Sciatica: Causes, Cures, and … Chairs?
Understanding the cause of sciatica Sciatica is simply pain that radiates down the leg from the lower back. While “radiates” is a term loved by doctors, patients typically describe their pa...
Active Sitting: Can it keep you young?
It is a personal failing of mine that I don’t monitor my phone very carefully, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I had missed another call, but this was a call I’m sorry to have missed. The messa...
Are You Sitting Too Much? Here are the symptoms of “sitting disease”
What is sitting disease? “Sitting disease” is not a specific disease recognized by doctors. Rather, it is a lay term that epidemiologists have adopted because it neatly captures the health ...
Sometime ago I introduced a statistician programmer friend, Ramiro, to active sitting, and his eyes immediately lit up. But his first sentence took me by surprise: “When I sit on this chair, my mi...
The inventor of the Barefoot Shoe loves our office chair
We recently connected with the inventor of the VivoBarefoot Shoe, and he loves our office chair. His idea for how minimal shoes help your body, parallels how active sitting in a minimalist chair su...
Can active sitting help people with scoliosis?
Can active sitting help people with scoliosis? Possibly. In the least, it helped relieve the pain of sitting for one young woman.
Effortless Fitness: Why there are no gyms in Japan
Japanese people embrace walking as regular exercise. As a result, few people use gyms, but experience life-long health benefits. Could active sitting provide the same benefits as regular walking?
Active sitting - what's it for?
“What’s it for?” Or, occasionally, “What’s it good for?” I get this question about our chairs a lot, and I have to say, it’s a hard question for me. Which may seem a little odd, because I’m the ...
Every year, millions of people spend money on products that claim to improve their sports game. They might buy the latest running sneakers, or gloves for golfing, or refresh their daily yoga pract...
Somehow, Every Ergonomist Gets Sitting Wrong
The field of ergonomics hasn’t changed their approach and recommendations for chairs in many, many years, even while the rate of Americans with back pain stubbornly persists at 80%. With that sort...
Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work. Time for a Home Office Reboot?
We humans spent our first 3 million years as hunter-gatherers, and over that long period, we came to expect certain benefits: sunshine, fresh air, fresh food, and above all physical activity. And...
What if most of the advice you’ve been given is wrong?
We’re given a lot of advice over our lives, especially as children. And, because this advice comes from people we trust who want the best for us, this advice becomes the basis for how we live our ...