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" pa...
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 ...
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...
Back Pain: The Feldenkrais Perspective
A Guest Blog by Uwe Mester, Certified Feldenkrais Teacher, Member of the Feldenkrais Guild of America I would like to introduce you to Uwe Mester, a body movement and posture expert who has been...
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 ...
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, ...
You sit still, you get old We often hear from folks who want to talk about our chair project; usually as emails but sometimes as phone calls. One of the most interesting comments lately was from...
Obesity and Health: The roles of diet and activity
This week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine blandly recounts this stunning conclusion: “By 2030 nearly 1 in 2 adults in the US will be obese, and 1 in 4 will have severe obesity”. Th...