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Golf At Its Core

Golf At Its Core

Golf, tracing back to ancient Rome, gained popularity in 15th century Scotland. Today, 40 million Americans play golf, continually aiming to improve their game. A key aspect of golf mastery is core...

Step Counting Is Better than Minutes for Measuring Exercise

Step Counting Is Better than Minutes for Measuring Exercise

Recent research published in JAMA suggests that counting steps may be a more effective way to measure physical activity than tracking exercise minutes. This shift could make it easier for people to...

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...

Kids, ADHD, and the Science of Sitting

Kids, ADHD, and the Science of Sitting

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is an immense and growing problem for school age children, diminishing their ability to thrive in educational settings that often demand sustained at...

Better Balance For Better Health: an easy test predicts longer life

Better Balance For Better Health: an easy test predicts longer life

Balance is essential for health and wellbeing, so it’s concerning to learn that our balance begins to deteriorate precipitously after the age of 60. We humans are the preeminent bipedal species. Ou...

It’s Legit to Fidget: Not only is fidgeting natural, it’s essential for good health

It’s Legit to Fidget: Not only is fidgeting natural, it’s essential for good health

Fidgeting, a natural and essential part of human movement, plays a crucial role in maintaining good health by helping to offload excess calories and promoting energy homeostasis.

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...

Active Sitting: From the Hysterical to the Practical

Active Sitting: From the Hysterical to the Practical

Active sitting, mechanically assisted Sitting, and beyond I was reminded of a delightful video clip recently by a morning eNewsLetter (The Hustle). If you haven’t seen The Hawaii Chair in action, y...

More on the Perils of Passive Sitting

More on the Perils of Passive Sitting

A research paper published last month is the definitive summary of the many harms that sedentary behavior causes. Published in the prestigious journal Physiological Reviews by Pinto and co-workers,...

office chairs

Breaks From Sitting: Now we know how often and how long

We all sit far more than is good for us.1 And by now the physiology of sitting and the epidemiology of its aftermath have been pretty well worked out: We sit for more than 8 hours every day, and ...

asian woman squatting and cleaning cilantro

Passive Sitting Is Associated With Dementia

Passively sitting supported by “ergonomic” chairs has been associated with a host of health problems: poor posture, weakened core, metabolic syndrome, and even some forms of cancer. It’s a worriso...

man running up stairs

How to Add 3,000 Steps to Your Day Without Getting Up From Your (Active) Chair

Every physician knows that exercise is the best medicine. If doctors could write a prescription for exercise every patient would get one before he left the office. Hypocrites understood this wel...

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...

doctor with arms crossed

New Research Shows Back Pain Isn’t Helped by Opioid Drugs.  What’s a Doctor to Do?

A recent paper published in the premier medical journal The Lancet1 underscored again just how poorly low back pain is understood. In their paper Opioid analgesia for acute low back pain and neck...

health monitoring watch

Real-Time Feedback from Automated Sensors Improves Health

Real-time feedback is how humans learn. Babies babble, listen to themselves, and then modify their babbling to match the babbling of their parents, eventually becoming fluent speakers of whatever ...

The Gravity Paradox: How Evolution Redirects Gravity to Hold Us Up

The Gravity Paradox: How Evolution Redirects Gravity to Hold Us Up

Gravity holding us up? Sounds silly. We can all feel gravity pulling us down, and we all have experience with falling down. Every physics book shows this vector, a representation on the page of ...

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...

minimal office chair and desk

Could Simply Changing Your Chair Add Years to Your Life?

The profound difference between sitting and ‘active resting’ Note: Although I’m an academic researcher, because I too suffered from back pain for quite some time, so I’m hardly a disinterested ...

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...

man walking dog

Every Bit of Exercise Counts

A paper recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine will revolutionize our approach to exercise. Here’s the executive summary: if health is your goal, then visits to the gym aren...

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...

fidget spinner

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 ...