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A Brief History of Active Sitting

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...

The chair disappears…

The chair disappears…

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...

woman meditating

Posture and Meditation

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...

equestrian and horse

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...

woman working with laptop on couch

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...

kids using balance board

Better Balance

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...

woman using standing desk

Do I need a Standing Desk?

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...

dr osler presenting at the national ergo conference

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...

radiologist holding x ray film of spine

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 ...

woman with back pain

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...

bowl of paleo food

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...

man sitting at a desk taking calls with a headset

Better Posture

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...

medical drawing of the human spine

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...

Two senior people in a Tai Chi practice

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...

man seated at desk with hands rubbing back and neck

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...

frustrated woman sitting in ergonomic office chair

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...

young woman practicing yoga

Mindful Sitting

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...

Person running down a road

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...

gina petro, music producer and artist

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...

hands on a person's back providing relief from back pain treatment

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.

woman demonstrates exercise using QOR360 chair

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 ...

Feldenkrais session with Uwe Mester

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...

girl sitting in ergonomic chair

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...

woman squatting on path in the woods

Squatting in the 21 Century

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, ...