A Brief History of Active Sitting
Humans have been sitting for millions of years, initially favoring squatting over sitting due to its practical benefits. With the advent of agriculture, chairs evolved from simple stools to more el...
We recently got an email from Doug, an enthusiastic active sitting convert that read in part: “… the seat disappears”. We’ve heard this phrase before from other customers who are pleasantly surpr...
Mediation is perhaps the quintessentially internal pursuit: the mind turned inward, examining itself. So, it’s perhaps surprising that almost every meditation tradition pays close attention to th...
How We Move Changes Our Very Bones
“It’s not so much what you know as it is who you know”. Often quoted in life and in business, this truism sometimes turns up in surprising contexts. Take human evolution. As a puny species with...
Ergonomics and Its Discontents
Although the word ergonomics joined the English language less than 100 years ago, the idea of ergonomics goes back over 2,000 years. Hippocrates himself weighed in on how a surgeon should set up h...
Balance is simply how our spines and limbs dance with gravity. But really balance is much more than this: balance is what defines our species. We are the most graceful of bipeds, able to naviga...
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...
What I Learned at the National Ergonomics Conference
A few weeks ago, I attended “National Ergo”, an ergonomics conference that’s held once a year in Las Vegas. I was there to give a lecture on the problems caused by our currently available “ergonom...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Posture, Good and Bad: We know it when we see it
Posture is simply how we arrange ourselves in response to gravity, so it seems a simple idea. The word posture comes from the Latin ponere, meaning "to place", and thus has an innate static qu...
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...
Why does my office chair hurt my back?
If you’ve ever shopped for an office chair you’ve likely noticed that all the designs are startlingly similar. All have backrests and a lumbar support arrangement, and most have armrests. Addition...
Unnecessary "ergonomic" chair parts
Why do office chairs have so many parts? People searching for the “best ergonomic office chair” are nonplussed when they land on our website and see a chair that's missing most of its "key" par...
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...
Sitting Active While Making Music
Because sitting still is bad for people, the less one sits, the better. But, some activities require a seated posture, and for these beloved or necessary tasks it seems sitting was unavoidabl...
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.
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 ...
The Feldenkrais Approach to Healing Back Pain
Uwe Mester is a Certified Feldenkrais Teacher, and Member of the Feldenkrais Guild of America. In this second guest blog post, Uwe explains more about the Feldenkrais Method® approach to healing b...
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...
We force kids to abandon squatting so as adults, the position is nearly impossible and uncomfortable. Try this… drop a pencil on the floor and pick it up. Notice - did you bend over at the waist, ...