Bad Back Chairs
Why ergonomic chairs only give you a bad back

No chair can give you good posture. The best any ergonomic chair can ever do is be less harmful to your posture, less likely to give you a bad back, than other ergonomic chairs.

Here are twelve chair “features” and what they do for your posture:–
Chair “feature” → what it does to your posture

Soft seat → makes you a slumpy sitter

A padded seat spreads your weight over more of your bottom. It means that you can’t properly feel your sitting bones being supported by the chair. Your reflexes need that stimulus to work properly. If the stimulus isn’t there, your reflexes won’t tell your muscles to support you and you’ll have to make a constant deliberate effort not to collapse into a slumped heap in the chair.

It’s not even as though the padded seat would make you more comfortable. As you get used slumping, your buttocks will tighten up more and more. Hard surfaces are only uncomfortable if they press on tense muscles. As you sit on a soft surface, your buttocks tighten up and any comfort the padding gave you at first soon disappears. Discovering how to sit well on a firmer surface, your buttocks free up and any initial discomfort disappears.

No wonder you get “ants in your pants” after you’ve been sitting a while.

Contoured or dipped seat → also makes you slump

A contoured or dipped seat will do the same thing as a padded seat: it will spread your contact with the seat over a wide area so that there’s no strong stimulation of your back muscles to support you. Plus, depending how you sit in it, it may function as a sloped-back seat or a sloped-forwards seat. Why are those bad? Let’s see.

Sloped-back seat → forces you to use the back rest

A sloped-back seat is constantly trying to tip you backwards. It forces you either to fall back into the back-rest or stiffen your hip joints to avoid you tipping backwards down the slope.

Sloped-forwards seat → stiffens your legs

A sloped-forwards seat is like a mirror image of the sloped-backwards one. It forces you to stiffen your legs to avoid being tipped off the seat and on to the floor. You end up with stiffened hip joints, stiff knees and tight ankles. No wonder your knees hurt when you stand up.

Lumbar support → hollows your back

People often find a lumbar support in a chair more comfortable. That’s because they already have a hollow, sway back. The chair, by supporting them in that hollow part of their back, is actually encouraging that sway back.

A sway back is the result of over-shortened muscles in your back. Some of these shortened muscles are attached to the backs of your ribs. The immediate result is very restricted breathing. Others of the shortened muscles are attached to your shoulder blades. The immediate result is a great unnecessary weight on your shoulders and limited arm movement.

Your hollow back also tips the top of your body backwards. That tipping backwards forces the muscles in your front to tighten in order to stop you falling over backwards. The end result is a constant tug-of-war between over-tight back muscles and over-tight front muscles.

Do you suffer from shortness of breath? Well, those tight front muscles also aid your short back muscles in a conspiracy to restrict your breathing.

Short back rest → also hollows your back

A short back rest also hollows your back — if you sit back against it. That’s because it acts as a lumbar support and encourages your back to arch backwards over the top of the back rest. It’s because so many people already have sway backs and are comfortable with lumbar supports that they don’t notice the damage a short back-rest causes them.

Of course, if you didn’t use the short back rest, it wouldn’t matter that it was short.

Shoulder support → gives you a stoop

If the you’re lucky enough to have a nice, comfy, luxury arm-chair at the office, that’s not helping you either. Your comfy chair is probably contoured to your already-beginning-to-stoop body shape. In addition to having a lumbar support, the top of the chair will probably come forward around and above your shoulders. That will pretty much force you to bend your neck forwards. You’ll probably not notice because you’re already bending your neck forwards — both because you do that anyway and because it makes it easier to look down at your work.

Head rest → stiffens your neck

If you use a head rest, you will have to let you head fall backwards to rest on the head rest. If you stay there, your neck muscles will get used to the shortened state they’re in when your head is falling backwards. When you then get up to do something, you’ll find your neck is stiff. No wonder, your shortened neck muscles are not letting your head sit easily on top of your neck any more. You will end up having to tighten your throat and jaw to put your head where you want it to go.

Back rest → encourages you to lean against it

What’s so bad about leaning back into a back-rest? Think about what happens to your sight-line when you do that. You end up looking upwards, don’t you? That’s one problem: already you had to do a lot of looking down to see your work, now you have even further to look down. Looking down encourages you to bend your neck and shoulders forwards into a stoop. By contrast, when you’re sitting forwards as you need to do when sitting balanced on your sitting bones, your work is much closer to your eye-line and it becomes possible to look directly at it without bending your neck.

More, because your body is tilted backwards, you have to use front muscles to stop whatever part of your body is not supported from falling backwards. Front muscles are not meant for this and when they’re forced to take on this unnatural job, they become over-tight, making you stiff. They also become over-short, pulling you into a perpetual stoop.

Arm rests → encourage you to slump

If the arm rests are not exactly the right height for your arms you will either bend you back to reach down to them or pull your shoulders up to get up to them. Many ergonomists will argue that an arm-rest at exactly the right height for you is a very useful support. They are wrong for at least four reasons:–

As you move about in the chair, the correct height for your arm-rests will vary. So it is impossible to have arm-rests always at the correct height.
If you use arm-rests, you will hold your body stiff. A self-supporting back is constantly massaging itself: stretching and relaxing. A back resting through your shoulder onto your wrists and elbows is unmoving and soon stiffens up.
If you get used to resting on your arms, your back gets used to not working and becomes weaker.
You no longer have free use of your arms because your elbows are anchored to the arm-rests.

High chair → stiffens your legs

Many ergonomists recommend a high chair that allows you to sit with your thighs sloping downwards. You may have heard that 135 degrees is the optimum angle between your torso and thighs. It’s only possible to argue this because so many people have become so stiff in their hip joints that they can’t easily bend them to a normal 90 degree right-angle with their bodies.

However, the reason they got into that state is that they got used to not sitting up on their sitting bones. They got used, instead, to rolling their hips back onto their tail bones and sagging backwards into the back-rest. They never actually used a 90 degree bend in their hip joints and so lost the necessary flexibility.

If this is your problem, then using a high seat will only solve it temporarily. Eventually. you’ll get used to rolling back onto your tail-bone again and lose even more hip-joint movement. Then you’ll be forced to stand up to work and to shuffle around instead of walking. Not a future to look forward to.

Kneeling chair → stiffens your legs

You know the chairs I mean, they have a very strong forwards tilt to the seat that throws a lot of your weight forwards onto the padded kneeler.

The rationale here is similar to that of the high chair. If you’re used to slumping back onto your tail bones, the fierce forward slope will use gravity to forcibly roll your hips forward. However, in that position, you’re effectively wedged into the seat so that your legs are no longer able to move freely. You also no longer have your feet flat on the floor.

Whatever seat you sit in, having your feet flat on the floor provides another part of the reflex stimulus to your back muscles to do their work keeping you upright. If you don’t have that contact between the soles of your feet and the floor, your back will sag in a very similar way to what it does if your seat is more than very lightly padded.

So that’s another “feature” to avoid: any kind of foot-rest that stops you placing your feet flat on the floor.

What’s the best kind of chair then?

The best kind of chair is very simple. It has a solid, flat, level seat with very little padding. Its height is important: the height should allow you to sit with your thighs horizontal, not sloping downwards. If your hip joints are flexible enough to allow you to sit easily on it, resting your weight on your sitting bones and not rolling back onto your tail bone, then a lower seat will be even better. In that case, the advantage of a lower seat will be that it helps you to preserve your hip flexibility.

If, however, you don’t have enough hip flexibility and the chair forces you to roll your hips back, it will cause you to follow your fellow-sitters into that hell of stiffness and painful backs.

If the chair can’t do it, then how can I sit well?

What did I say at the beginning?

No chair can give you good posture. The best any chair can ever do is be less bad for your posture than another chair.

But that’s no reason to despair of being able to sit with good posture. Good posture sitting is perfectly possible if you will unlearn your bad sitting habits. So, when you’ve given your over-designed chair to some other person who’s still as clueless as you were before, what’s the next step?

The next step is to lie down. Not lie down any old way, though. What you need is my special adaptation of semi-supine.

This version of semi-supine is a highly accelerated way to exercise, rest and strengthen your back. Strengthening your back like this is the key to good sitting habits. It’s the quickest way (maybe the only way) to become comfortable with your marathon sitting sessions at work every day.

Good sitting habits - the first step

Your first step is to download “The Hows & Whys of Semi-Supine”. This free booklet tells you exactly what to do and how to do it. Read the booklet and practise doing what it tells you.

When you’ve done that, you’ll be able to follow the remaining steps for sitting totally comfortably and with perfect posture. (This same booklet will point your way to these remaining steps too).

Since every back chair is a bad back chair, the quest for the ideal chair is a fool’s errand — the royal road to the wheel-chair, in fact.

Resources

Since the ideal chair doesn't exist, how do you choose a good chair?

Here's your answer: Choosing an office chair for working at your computer.

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Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley

If you want to get the best kind of help, come to me for an introductory lesson in Liverpool.

If you’re too far away, then the next best thing is to get personal lessons and advice from me online at Repoise.com, my on-line school. (Both far-away and local pupils use Repoise).

In more detail:–

If you’re in Liverpool (or can get to Liverpool)

There’s nothing better than individual lessons. My practice is at 37 Hope Street, Liverpool L1. Ring me on 0151 708 6172 to book an initial consultation and first lesson. (Leave your number so I can get back to you).
If you’re short of funds, you can still have first class training from me — though it will require a little more work on your part.

The thing to do is have an individual, in-person lesson just once a month. That will entitle you to also get regular on-line lessons from me through Repoise. That way, you have the best of both worlds: in-person lessons and very regular, even daily, on-line Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley from me. That’s a real bargain because Repoise costs the equivalent of three lessons a year to everyone else.

Ring me on 0151 708 6172 if you want to arrange this.
I occasionally run group lessons. If you’re interested in these, go here for details.

If you’re further away and can’t get to Liverpool

There’s still nothing better than individual lessons. Here’s where you can find a teacher near you in the UK or elsewhere
I suggest you also get direct day-to-day guidance from me by joining Repoise.
If you’re having plain Alexander Technique lessons from someone else, you still need to discover the Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique. You’ll get a lot more out of your lessons when you do.