The Most Important Piece of Furniture in your Office

We spend hours sitting down every day, particularly if we work in an office. In fact, this sitting is a leading cause of heart disease, body stiffness, injury and fatigue, meaning it’s more crucial than ever that we’re committing to moving as much as we can within the office.

It’s also important that our office chairs are a good quality and will give us adequate support while we’re sitting down all day, to ensure that we’re sitting with the best possible posture.

This is the same for people who are working from home. Often this can be a matter of working from the couch, kitchen table, or a home office that simply doesn’t have an adequate chair to keep you comfortable for multiple hours.

It can be easy to assume that if your desk is at the best height and your hands are in the best typing position, you can get away with a cheap, poorly designed chair. However it turns out that this isn’t the truth at all.

In order for an office chair to provide adequate support and comfort, the key is for it to have a strong back. A good chair will have proper pelvic and lumbar support, which means that the muscles in your back are less strained and stressed.

Unfortunately, the majority of office chairs aren’t offering adequate support, which means that when people are sitting down and working all day, they have as much lower back pain as those who spend all day on their feet- along with all of the other poor signs of health from sitting, including increased rates of heart disease and obesity.

By slouching and failing to sit up straight, you’ll find that it’s common to have poor concentration, fatigue, headaches and backaches. However, when you have a healthy posture and your spine is aligned properly, you’ll have greater overall comfort, along with better endurance when you’re sitting down for hours (you should still take breaks to stand, stretch and walk), along with improved concentration.

While many people assume that proper lumbar support is enough, we actually need pelvic support as well. Many of the office chairs you’ll find in most businesses were only designed to provide lumbar support (if this was kept in mind at all), since they weren’t based on the work patterns that many of us have today, with most of us spending hours staring at a computer screen.

Since people actually move a lot- changing positions, answering phones, making notes, etc, and make, on average, 53 positional changes every hour, it’s important that an office chair will accommodate many different positions, permitting motion but being stable enough to allow for detailed, close-up work.

For this reason, office chairs have been undergoing a huge redesign, with ergonomic principles being more important than ever before, and the ideal chair allowing for multiple changes in posture and various different activities.