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...
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...
Can Active Sitting Help with Acute Low Back Pain?
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard P. Feynman I’ve been interested in the benefits of sitting actively for sometime now. N...
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...
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 ...
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...
What “Big Chair” Doesn’t Want You to Know
As with many other industries, a handful of companies make almost all of the “ergonomic” office furniture in the United States. These are ancient and immense companies. Steelcase, for example, is ...
Image Source: The Telegraph Recently, news emerged about a troubling finding: young people growing a “head horn.” Was this the physical manifestation of too much hand-held screen time? Are our ...