Lumbar support has been a staple of ergonomic office chair design for generations, but this “scientific” innovation wasn’t based on science. And big chair companies knew it.
The idea of lumbar support seems obvious: people sit all day and so must require support to survive the unnatural demands placed on their spines by a posture that isn’t natural for humans.
But the necessity of lumbar support wasn’t always obvious. Workplace health concerns only began to emerge in the 1970’s, and seeing an opportunity the Herman Miller company pounced. They asked one of their designers, William Stumpf, to explore designs that would address worries about the problems caused by sitting. This mandate led to a series of office chairs, culminating in 1994 in the Aeron chair, the first chair to include an adjustable lumbar support. The Aeron was a commercial breakthrough, selling over 8 million chairs to date and grossing $8 billion dollars for Herman Miller.
The Aeron chair was a commercial breakthrough, selling over 8 million chairs to date and grossing $8 billion dollars for Herman Miller.
Strumpf was first and foremost a designer, however, not an ergonomist, and his design aesthetic was really about comfort, not health. His philosophy as he later put it was poetic: “… when a chair is a perfect fit for your body, it becomes 'invisible' and you're not aware of it at all.”
But as Strumpf’s co-designer Don Chadwick later confessed somewhat less poetically: “We weren’t hired to design the ideal product for an eight-hour-workday; we were hired to update Herman Miller's previous best-seller. We were given a brief and basically told to design the next generation office chair.”1
Researchers in field quickly pointed out the ergonomic shortcomings of the Aeron chair. Dr. A.C. Mandal, a Danish doctor and authority on sitting and spinal health2, later recalled: "I visited Herman Miller … and they did understand the problems. … But as long as they sell enormous numbers, they don't want to change it.”3 Besides, Herman Miller held the patent on lumbar support, which gave it an advantage against its competitors (Steelcase, Haworth, Knoll, and Humanscale) in the war to control the office furniture space. Actually, Herman Miller had lots of patents on lumbar support, one of which was even inflatable4.
"I visited Herman Miller … and they did understand the problems. … But as long as they sell enormous numbers, they don't want to change it.” Dr. A.C. Mandal
So lumbar support became the defining feature of the Aeron chair and Herman Miller leaned in hard on this feature in their advertising.5 Indeed, even today 78% of Aeron chair users cite adjustable lumbar support as their primary purchasing factor.6
Unfortunately, lumbar support was a sham.
Just four years after the Aeron’s introduction and the rapid embrace of “lumbar support” researchers at the Faculty of Movement Sciences in Amsterdam published in the prestigious medical journal JAMA a careful randomized study of 312 workers that concluded “… lumbar supports did not lead to a reduction in low back pain incidence or sick leave… the use of lumbar supports cannot be recommended in the prevention of low back pain in industry.”7
“… lumbar supports did not lead to a reduction in low back pain incidence or sick leave… the use of lumbar supports cannot be recommended in the prevention of low back pain in industry.” JAMA 1998
This was not only a well-done study, but a well reported study, that has since cited over 200 times by other researchers. So, the makers of chairs with lumbar support surely knew they were selling a lie. But lumbar support was too profitable to abandon, and so continued to be pushed as “essential” by the office chair industry for those who sat all day until, well, until today. As one office chair designer confessed to me at a trade show recently: “The lumbar support in our chairs is pretty much avoided by most people sitting on them because it forces people into an uncomfortable position. But what do you want me to do? We’ve convinced people they cant’s sit without lumbar support, and now I can’t sell a chair that doesn’t have lumbar support.” Too much legacy, and too much money to be made, for science to have a chance.
Was lumbar support ever even plausible?
Think of it: We humans have pretty much had our current spine design for about 3 million years, so doesn’t it seem odd that we suddenly need lumbar support now? And strangely, we only need lumbar support when sitting; somehow, we don’t need lumbar support when standing, walking, or lying down.
What’s going on here? Well, it turns out that sitting in a conventional chair distorts the spine to the point that it requires support. When seated in a typical “ergonomic” office chair, you likely have your thighs parallel to the floor… ankles at 90 degrees, knees at 90 degrees, and hips at 90 degrees, a posture that’s been promulgated in ergonomics textbooks and by ergonomics experts for decades. Like this:
Unfortunately, “90/90/90” is an anatomically impossible way to sit. Your hip don’t flex past about 120 degrees without causing the lower spine to lose its normal curve (lordosis), which produces the natural “hollow” of your low back when you’re standing comfortably.
Standing allows your lower back to curve inward, naturally. This curve flattens out as you raise your knees. When your knees are at 90 degrees to your hips, it is impossible for your spine to produce this curve naturally. “Lumbar support” in conventional chairs, is an attempt to force this curve.
Because this “90/90/90” position forces you to hunch your lower back, the standard office chair adds “lumbar support” that shoves your lumbar spine forward — a vain attempt to recreate the spine’s normal posture.
Lumbar support: a bad fix for a created problem
To sum up: the standard office chair first distorts your posture, and then tries to “fix” the problem by further distorting your posture with lumbar support. The fix is the problem! No wonder people hate their office chairs, and no wonder 80% of Americans have low back pain.
Trying to impose posture on the spine by pushing on it is utterly misguided. Really, your spine wants to adopt its naturally perfect posture — there’s no need to force it. And in fact, simply lowering one’s knees below one’s hips restores the normal lumbar lordosis automatically.
The mechanism is a little technical, but surprisingly simple: the psoas muscle originates on the five lumbar vertebrae, travels over the inside of the pelvis, and then attaches to the femur. This arrangement ensures that when one lowers the knees, the femur gently stretches the psoas muscles and thus restores the normal low back curve, it’s lumbar lordosis.
The real fix
Raising your chair high enough so that your knees are lower than your hips will improve your posture enough that you won’t require any artificial “lumbar support”.
Raising the seat of your chair so it is above your knees allows your hips to open, and the curve of your spine to return, naturally.
We sit on average for 10 hours a day, so it’s important that we have chairs that are comfortable, and which don’t damage us. Dispensing with conventional “lumbar support” paradoxically better supports your lower back by allowing it to support itself from within.
But suppose you’re stuck with an “ergonomic” chair that came with your job?
Remarkably, the key to sitting well in an “ergonomic” office chair is to ignore or defeat most of the chair’s design features. This seems counterintuitive: after all, someone paid good money to design and manufacture all those features, doodads, and adjustments. But your body actually has its own perfectly evolved internal ergonomics: your skeleton. Unfortunately, the various “supports” provided by ergonomic chairs (back rest, foot rest, head rest, arm rests, and the coup de grace: lumbar support) serve only to distort one’s naturally perfect, internally generated, posture. So, what is required is a full-on hack of your chair that will allow you go get back to a more normal, organic, balanced, posture. Like this:
Once situated you should have the feeling of “perching” on your chair, rather than collapsing into it. Your head should float on the top of your neck. If you feel the need to extend your head or allow it to slump forward, adjust your monitor to be higher or closer, or both. Your arms should hang comfortably from your shoulders.
Although most office chairs create postural mischief with their compulsory embrace of lumbar support, a few companies offer chairs that are designed to encourage natural posture by dispensing with chair backs altogether, and instead provide a slightly tippy seat that encourages subtle, continuous, postural readjustment while sitting. CoreChair in Canada, MiShu and Swopper in Germany, and QOR360 all sell chairs that encourage muscular engagement and excellent posture from the inside out. (Full disclosure: I’m the co-founder of QOR360).
And it does feel we’ve come full circle. When Strumpf was designing chairs 50 years ago he believed: “A chair should move the way the body moves. In the best of all possible worlds, the body is free to position itself spontaneously, constrained only by gravity.”8 And today, after a long detour through the misguided 90/90/90” posture and enforced lumbar support, we finally have active sitting options that realize Strumpf’s vision of unconstrained sitting.
“A chair should move the way the body moves. In the best of all possible worlds, the body is free to position itself spontaneously, constrained only by gravity.” Bill Strumpf
One last thought: because these designs require the continuous use of core muscles many people require a few days or weeks of adjustment before they can sit actively all day; but once they make the transition to active sitting, they never look back.
1 Cohen, A. (2010a, April 29). Your office chair is killing you. Bloomberg Businessweek. https://leadersedge360.com/articles/your_office_chair_is_killing_you.pdf
2 Mandal, A. C. (1981). The seated man (Homo Sedens): The seated work position—Theory and practice. Applied Ergonomics, 12(1), 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-6870(81)90089-2
3 Cohen, A. (2010b, April 29). Your office chair is killing you. Bloomberg Businessweek. https://leadersedge360.com/articles/your_office_chair_is_killing_you.pdf
4 Hand, R. S., Pekar, R. W., & Weber, J. A. (1998). Office chair and adjustable lumbar support therefor (U.S. Patent No. 5,711,575). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US5711575.pdf
5 Murphy, H. (2012, May 30). The quest for the perfect office chair. Slate. https://www.slate.com/.../ergonomic_office_chairs_a_visual_history_photos_.html
6 Bald, R. (2025, January 6). Herman Miller Aeron Classic vs. Remastered (8 differences). BTOD.com Learning Center. https://www.btod.com/blog/aeron-classic-vs-remastered/
7 van Poppel, M. N., Koes, B. W., van der Ploeg, T., Smid, T., & Bouter, L. M. (1998). Lumbar supports and education for the prevention of low back pain in industry: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 279(22), 1789–1794. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.279.22.1789
8 Herman Miller, Inc. (2007). The kinematics of sitting: Ergonomic criteria for the design of the Aeron chair (White paper). https://www.hermanmiller.com/.../se_The_Kinematics_of_Sitting.pdf
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