Sitting is extremely bad for our bodies, but it doesn’t have to be this way. With a QOR360® active chair, you can experience full-body health by remaining subtly active while you sit. Allowing you to sit free, finally. For office or home, hand-finished wood or brushed metal, there is a chair for any personal aesthetic. Experience the difference, your body will thank you. – Compare our chairs here.

An active chair is one that encourages people to move while sitting. By simply making the seat of a chair slightly unstable, people find that they instinctively sit with a balanced posture over their sitting bones. This constant rebalancing of one’s body requires muscular effort of the core muscles and further requires that the spinal reflexes adjust the spine moment to moment. The result is constant muscular engagement and perfect posture, all without conscious effort or even conscious awareness.

Very simply, humans need to move to remain healthy and vital, and we believe their chairs should support this need. Sitting still is profoundly unnatural, and causes a panoply of problems. Sitting for long periods of time increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and even cancer. Indeed, epidemiologists estimate office chairs shorten our lives by as much as 2 years… and because sitting itself is the risk factor, exercising daily at the gym cannot undo the harm caused by prolonged passive sitting. Additionally, the various supports of traditional office chairs lock us into a single position resulting in poor posture, and a weakened core, often leading to bouts of back pain which may eventually become a chronic condition. By requiring subtle, continuous, rebalancing active sitting improves posture and strengthens one’s core musculature.

So, if you must sit, sitting actively is quite simply the healthiest way to sit.

Active sitting almost immediately improves posture, because it requires people to take charge of their posture rather than slouching against the external supports of conventional office furniture. Everyone knows what good posture is, because their spines know how to efficiently balance in gravity. Active sitting succeeds in improving posture by simply requiring people to bring their best posture to sitting.

Many people report that active sitting improves, or eliminates their back pain. We don’t yet have controlled, double-blinded, research supporting this, but we’ve heard this story so often that we believe it. Will active sitting relieve your back pain? We can’t promise that it will, but, if our chair isn’t a big help to you, you can simply return it for a full refund.

Our chairs don’t have a backrest because you don’t need one. For most of time, humans have sat comfortably without backrests, and you can, too. Counterintuitively, backrests actually invite poor posture and weaken core muscles, problems that in concert often lead to back pain and in the longer-term sitting disease. By contrast, our chair encourages your spine to express its naturally perfect posture without trying to match the expectations of a chair that likely doesn’t fit your unique body very well. Although ergonomists have solemnly pronounced that it is impossible to sit all day without a backrest, we have thousands of customers around the world (some of them octogenarians!) who sit on our chairs all day, every day, and are delighted with the results. We’re pretty sure you will be too.

Our chairs don’t have lumbar support because you don’t need it. Lumbar support is added to conventional office chairs to “correct” the rounded back that is an anatomically unavoidable result of forcing people to sit with their hips at an apparent 90-degree angle. Unfortunately, the human hip only flexes to around 60 degrees, so to accommodate the 90-degree requirement people must round their backs, a concession to their chair is unnatural and uncomfortable. To correct the problem “ergonomic” office chairs add lumbar support, a solution that only compounds the fundamental problem of sitting with one’s hips at 90 degrees. By contrast, our chairs encourage people to sit higher, establishing an open hip angle. This encourages the lumbar curve to reassert itself naturally, and allows you to sit with excellent posture; no lumbar support required.

The addition of lumbar support to standard office chairs causes a lot of mischief. Fortunately, almost no one actually uses the lumbar support which has become an expected, but irrelevant, part of every office chair. Bottom line: because you don’t need lumbar support we don’t waste your money building one into your chair.

Armrests are unnecessary, because with your arms hanging comfortably from your shoulders and your wrists resting comfortably on your desk no further support is required. Moreover, armrests can actually cause mischief, by distorting posture and over time even damaging the ulnar nerve. So, armrests add problems rather than value. The real question is why are armrests so common in the world of office furniture?

Active sitting is a whole new way to sit, and requires some effort. It’s hard to believe that sitting can be work, but active sitting is. So, we recommend that people start slow, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes the first day, and increase the time they spend sitting day by day as their cores strengthen and can accommodate to taking control of their posture. Most people make this transition in a week or two, but some people take several weeks or even a few months.

Some people require a little guidance with the transition to active sitting. We’re happy to support people as they acclimatize to active sitting with extensive website resources, a blog, and email support. We even offer our customers a free postural consultation over Zoom with Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher, Uwe Mester.

A few people find that active sitting just isn’t for them. We understand and are at peace with it: it would be too much to expect that a single design would be perfect for everyone. So, if you find that active sitting just doesn’t work for you, rest easy. You can simply return your chair for a full refund if you live in the United States; we’ll even pay the return postage.