Despite all the new advances in technology one of the key causes of neck pain when using an office chair doesn’t look like disappearing anytime soon.

Yes the humble telephone incorrectly used is capable of creating a lot of neck problems both now and in the future.

How does this happen? You see it all the time, people trying to take calls and write at the same time, what do they do? They wedge the phone between their ear and shoulder and contort their neck into a horribly unnatural position, this places excessive strain on the neck and shoulder muscles as well as the vertebrae in the neck.

Invariably people always take calls on the same side so they don’t even give their neck a chance to balance up the distortion this creates.

And the problem has got worse as mobiles are more commonplace and smaller than ever and so encourage this bad habit.

At least with a hard wired office phone it is quick and natural to switch to speakerphone and make writing notes and taking the call easier, although for confidentiality and annoying colleagues nearby in a large office this isn’t always practical.

Fortunately many modern mobiles let you take calls via a speaker and they nearly all come with a cheap earpiece and microphone so there really isn’t any excuse for sitting screwed up in your office chair cradling your phone and trying to take notes at the same time.

And if the supplied earpiece and mic are really poor replacing them with a better quality headset with built in microphone won’t cost you that much.

So, if you are a neck cradler when taking calls you need to break the habit and consciously become aware of when you are abusing your body like this. Fortunately if you do it frequently enough your body will tell you by inflicting a good dose of neck pain on you.

Break the habit now before you do any lasting damage and start running up chiropractor’s bills, for as the years go by you’ll be glad you did.

In an earlier post I looked at the importance of making sure you were interacting correctly with your LCD monitor and covered 4 key points you need to be aware of.

Now it’s time to look at some other useful ways of making sure you are working comfortably and of course begin by making sure you office chair is correctly adjusted.

Obviously where you use a laptop or notebook a monitor arm isn’t really of use. Fortunately there are ergonomic laptop holders available and these allow you to position your screen correctly when using a portable PC. Some require the use of a separate keyboard as the holder obscures the built in keyboard, this is a good thing as generally a stand alone keyboard is easier to use.

If the lighting is poor where you work and you are getting screen reflection issues, try moving your seating position to minimize this and always face a window rather than having your back to it given the choice.

Where you can’t do this it’s worth looking at fitting a glare filter as it can substantially reduce the level of glare from your monitor screen.

If you are like me you may prefer to hand write stuff before typing it in which case a copy holder can be a great help. When using the sort which is freestanding needing to be placed by the side of your keyboard, get into the habit of changing it from left to right after each completed page of type otherwise you can end up with stiff or painful neck muscles.

Another handy accessory is a keyboard tray which holds your keyboard and generally fits to the underside of your desk. The better ones can be angled and include mouse pads giving you more flexibility when typing as well as releasing valuable desk space.

Finally, always pay attention to your body if you are feeling pain observe how you are working and see if you can work out what might be causing it and correct your posture accordingly.

If you study people’s postures when you are out and about you will often find it’s easy to spot those who work at a PC all day.

They are the ones who often carry a certain stiffness in the neck and shoulders as well as restricted lateral movement. The most common cause of this is usually poor positioning relative the desk and VDU screen and also not taking sufficient breaks during the day’s work.

Whilst these symptoms are often easy to spot in others, they aren’t so obvious in ourselves and it’s only when we stand in front of a mirror we begin to see we are burdened by the same problems. Although shoulder and neck pain act as a timely reminder from our body that something we are doing is not helping our body’s well-being and comfort.

So how do we become more aware of how we are sitting and what can be done to correct bad habits?

Assuming you have your office chair properly adjusted next make sure you are addressing your workspace correctly. Key to this is the relationship between you and your monitor ensuring you are properly set up.

Here are some vital points:

Screen Height – your eyes need to be set at or slightly below the topmost menu bar on you screen.

Screen Angle – monitor should be angled slightly backwards such that your line of site is square to it.

Screen Alignment – body, keyboard and monitor should be centered together. Imagine a line starting from your nose through the middle of your keyboard’s spacebar and finishing in the center of your screen.

Screen Distance – as a broad rule of thumb the screen should be approximately an arm’s length away. This will vary from user to user depending on eye sight and body size, make sure you can clearly read on screen text clearly while keeping your back in good contact and supported by your chair back, avoiding leaning forward.

Although it’s probably easier to set up a flat panel monitor than an old bulky CRT monitor it still isn’t always easy to get things just right. An LCD monitor maybe a lot lighter nonetheless it’s still a lump of equipment sitting on your desk which will rarely be moved allowing bad posture habits to set in.

Screen height can be particularly awkward with the stand height often being fixed and frequently too low. You can improvise and build it up with books however it doesn’t look very pretty.

The best answer is to invest in an LCD monitor arm, the design and flexibility of modern VDU arms allows us to position our screen very precisely, fine tuning it until finding perfect positioning.

There are additional benefits as well, when you need clear desk space to carry out other tasks, or you want to discuss something you have on screen with a colleague or visitor, an LCD monitor arm allows effortless movement of the screen to where it needs to be.

I’ll return to this topic in a future post to look into further ways of helping posture and comfort in the office.

Even the best office chairs will give us some discomfort occasionally, especially when you sit in one for hours without getting up for a stretch or break, the human body simply isn’t designed to be locked in the same position for hours at a time.

If you study yourself as you work, you’ll likely discover when pain and discomfort begin to set in, your unconscious reaction is to move and vary the way you are sitting. This is your body’s way of telling you what you’re doing is unhealthy and you need to activate your muscles, get things moving and blood flowing through the arteries.

So, it’s important to make sure you sit in a high quality office chair ergonomically designed to move as you move and give proper support to your body all day long.

With that said, simply having a good chair doesn’t mean you can ignore the way you sit in it and interact with it. You need to address your work properly making sure you have your monitor set at a comfortable reading distance so you aren’t craning your neck forwards as you strain to read the screen.

Slouching is another common bad habit and this is all too easy to slip into particularly with cheaper budget chairs as they tend to force us to sit in a fairly rigid way usually at 90° and slouching is a means of trying to escape this straight jacketed posture.

More and more office chairs are being designed to give people a more open seating position where the angle at the hips is 110° or more. In the past this has presented manufacturers with a challenge because as users recline in their seats they lost visual contact with their screen and reclining tipped them up in the air.

Fortunately, a number of quality products now allow you to recline and stay in contact visually and bodily with your work area. Additionally, they also correctly support the back, neck and shoulders moving as you move allowing you to decide how you choose to sit and this all helps to greatly reduce niggling back pain, aches and discomfort.

Chairs worth taking a look at include the Embody, Leap, Aeron and Futu.

I imagine hardly anyone ever stops to think what their back is worth to them, they all just take it for granted it’s only when it starts to ache most of us are even aware it’s there

Fortunately or maybe unfortunately our back can withstand a great deal of misuse and until it becomes a real problem we will happily go on abusing it.

However, all this misuse does have a price particularly as you get older, it becomes more and more difficult to shake off the aches and pains.

It can creep up on you little by little until you end up with a serious problem which there isn’t a quick fix solution for.

Humans weren’t designed for sitting for long periods of time and so it becomes ever more important to make sure we give our back and body every assistance in sitting in a properly supported dynamic posture.

Guess what? Those $79 chairs at the discount store don’t come close to providing what you need, in fact they will likely do a good job of messing your back up once you sit in one for a few years.

So, to return to my opening question: What is your back worth?

For me the answer can be summed up in one word, priceless. If this means spending several hundred dollars to get the right chair to properly support my back and body then this is a small price to pay.

When you buy a quality office chair look on it as an investment which will last years, while others continue to keep buying cheap chairs and replacing them several times compared to the life of the right chair, they seem destined to keep making the same mistake again and again.

Factor in the cost of regular trips to your chiropractor to sort out your back and you will begin to see the false economy of budget chairs. Here is a quick summary of reviews of quality office chairs designed to look after your back.

Here’s a great resource I came across recently 50 Simple Techniques for Staying Fit While Stuck at Your Desk which contains links to a wide selection of ideas for keeping fit when working in the office.

The site includes 50 useful links under 3 broad headings. General Techniques for Office Fitness covers sites with advice and tips on exercising in the office as well as some sites advising on healthy eating when stuck in an office.

The next category, Best Tools for Office Fitness covers things like Ball Chairs, Exercise Tools, Chairs and Back Supports.

Finally there is a Videos section with links to show you how to exercise, as well as Yoga and Pilates routines for the office, even how to massage away a headache.

There is a total of 50 links to some excellent sites and each link comes with a brief summary explaining what the site is all about.

All in all these Office Fitness Ideas will provide you with an excellent compilation of useful sites to explore on the area of healthy office working.

It’s generally accepted that sitting isn’t what humans were designed for and so it’s perhaps not surprising so many people suffer discomfort as a result of working long hours in conditions which are poor for your posture.

Undoubtedly a good office chair will go a long way to making your working life healthier and more comfortable. Yet, in many ways it would really help if we could reduce the amount of time we spend sitting at our PC each day, the question is how?

The answer actually lies in making some simple yet effective changes.

The first is to follow the 80/20 principle in your work and understand we spend 80% of our time to get 20% of our results, or put the other way round just 20% of our time produces 80% of our results.

Whichever way you look at it the chance to improve our productivity is huge.

Begin for the next 3 days, by  keeping a daily log and note what you do and how long you spend on each task, because you need to find the tasks you are spending way too much time on which actually aren’t productive at all. Next, pore through your notes and see what unproductive stuff can be eliminated and what productive stuff can be ramped up.

This then leads to the second part of the answer how to build the discipline to stick to working on your productive stuff, this just got a lot easier using this simple desktop application which helps you maximize the hours in your working day and gives you the correct framework to really get your working day highly productive and into shape.

Click here to discover more about how it can help you reduce the time you spend sitting in front of your computer each day and still get the stuff that matters done.

There’s a lot of interest these days in alternative seating like Ball Chairs.

Ball Chairs are great for improving your sitting posture as they make you sit dynamically, you can’t just slob around on one, as you’ll likely end up on the floor!

Whilst some use them as their main chair, a lot of people find they have difficulty in sitting all day on a Ball Chair. This is highly likely to be the case for those trying to use an exercise ball as a chair.

So, it’s probably best to look on a ball chair as an additional seat that you use for part of the day to give your body relief and variation from your normal seating position.

I’d recommend that you keep your existing chair and see how you get on with your Ball Chair, that way you can either use it full time or occasionally depending on how you find it.

I suggest that you go for a proper Ball Chair rather than an exercise ball, you can find further details on popular ball chairs here.

How you sit in your office chair is very important for your body’s posture, long term health and comfort.

Humans weren’t really designed to be seated for hours on end, but unfortunately we are frequently faced with having to do so.

So, let’s begin with how not to sit.

You should avoid slouching or slumping in your chair as this will cause your spinal joints to open up and be in a state known as kyphosis.

This can cause problems with trapped nerves which can get caught when you return to a more upright posture.

Another thing you should be mindful of is sitting in the same position for extended periods of time. So, always make sure you keep your muscles and body moving frequently. Fortunately, our bodies tend to do this as a natural reaction to discomfort.

Take frequent breaks, use a countdown timer to prompt you. And do some simple exercises, I’ll post some in the Blog in the next couple of weeks.

Try to sit with your back reasonably upright, but make sure not to crane your neck forwards and be sure that your lower back is well supported to emphasize it’s natural ‘S’ curve known as lordosis.

Recent research suggests that sitting at a reclined angle is actually good for your back and posture.

Some of the better quality chairs like the Aeron, Life and Leap allow you to do this easily whilst still keeping your feet on the floor and remaining in touch with your work space.

From time to time nearly everyone will suffer some back discomfort from working long hours in their office chair.

This is not very surprising as we weren’t designed to spend hours in a sedentary position.

It’s always advisable to invest in a good quality ergonomic office chair, but that alone is not enough.

You need to sit correctly in your chair, avoiding slouching and craning forwards. Make sure that the chair back is properly supporting your back, particularly your lower back as this tends to align your back better.

However, sitting rigidly at 90 degrees isn’t necessarily a good thing either. Research by Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen Scotland found that an angle of 135 degrees body to thigh seating position reduced the strain on the spine and its ligaments.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always practical in most office chairs as they aren’t designed to work at this kind of angle, at least not without tipping the user up in the air and so making it impossible to work normally.

Fortunately, some of the better quality chairs like the Miller Aeron and Steelcase Leap will allow the user to work in this more open angled position.

So, if you are troubled with back pain it’s well worth looking at this type of chair.