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 ...
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...
Best chair for people with ADHD?
Can active sitting help people with ADHD focus better? Research shows that alternative seating and being able to move or fidget, can improve attention.
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...
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...