Seat Height Adjustment

When your seat height isn’t set up correctly it can cause you a good deal of discomfort although it shouldn’t be necessary to change it once you have it set properly, sometimes it gets changed without you realizing it. Maybe someone else used your chair and altered the height, how annoying is that!

Using the paddle lever or button take the time to set your seat’s height so your feet are squarely on the floor with your thighs facing slightly downwards when sitting.

You never want to have your feet dangling in the air because it puts excessive pressure on the underside of you legs. If you are short built and find difficulty with this you may need to think about buying a footrest to correct it.

Seat Tilt tension

Hopefully your chair includes this adjustment, generally speaking it most commonly adjusts using a tension knob under the front of the chair. Turn it inwards to increase tension and outwards to decrease it.

When this is properly set up you should be able to recline with relative ease in your chair with the back moving easily as you lean back on it. If you find it’s difficult to do this or the back offers little or no resistance it’s definitely time to check your settings.

Back Height/Lumbar Support Adjustment

Your chair will probably have a height adjustable back unless it’s a high back model which may be fixed and yet hopefully includes some form of lumbar support adjustment.

Most back height adjustment is either by a knob at the rear of back support stem or it may have a ratchet adjuster where you need to reach behind you and slowly lift the back up and down into preset positions. This may also involve pressing buttons to do this.

Try and set the back or lumbar support so that it is giving you good lower back support as this will help prevent slouching as well as encouraging your back to adopt a healthier more upright position.

So, why not check these 3 simple adjustments now, you may well find comfort levels improve significantly as a result.

• Herman Miller’s Embody
• Knoll’s Generation Chair
• Humanscale’s Freedom Chair
• Zody from Haworth
• HÅG Futu
• Steelcase Think Chair
• Evolution Ball Chair
• Kore Stool

Pick of the bunch not surprisingly was Miller’s Embody chair scoring a near maximum whereas the least favored was the Kore Stool mainly because it requires the user to balance on it which can be tiring after a time when muscles aren’t toned, mind you at little more than 10% of the cost of the winner maybe the result wasn’t so surprising.

Also the UK’s Financial Times weekend edition for 13 February 2010 carried an article on 4 top end models:

• Herman Miller’s Embody Chair
• Herman Miller’s Setu
• Steelcase Think Chair
• Humanscale’s Diffrient World Chair (not yet officially released)

With more and more senior managers spending part of their week working in their home office demand for better quality office seating appears to be on the rise.

Although it has never been a major product for them, it sold steadily over the years and was popular with people who find conventional chairs didn’t suit them. It was certainly amongst the best kneeling chairs particularly from a quality and design viewpoint.

If you had thought you might like to own one, fortunately it may still possible to get hold of one from ErgoDepot.com who still has a few available.

If you would like to understand more about this specialist seat, here’s where you can find a review of the HÅG Balans chair.

Why? Well, the basic principle of memory foam is your weight compresses the foam and allows it to mold to the shape of your body so you are cushioned where you need it – nothing wrong with that.

However, it’s different with office chairs because we weren’t designed to sit for hours on end, so we move around in the chair because our body maybe sends a signal highlighting our back is uncomfortable and needs to change position.

In the meantime, the memory foam has molded to your initial position and then you move, as a result your body weight distribution changes so the foam needs to decompress and recompress to a new position, and that takes time because memory foam has a real slow reaction time as it slowly readjusts to your new posture.

With modern high-quality polyurethane foams not only is the response time far quicker, it also gives excellent, comfortable support as well meaning as you change so does it by reacting rapidly without loss of support. What’s more it won’t flatten with repeated use always maintaining its original shape.

It’s for this reason I suggest you avoid memory foam in office chairs and stick with high quality polyurethane filled seat pads and backs which are the standard with most quality manufacturers.

So if this is you, chances are you are already spending six to eight hours each working day sitting in discomfort with inadequate support, which is not good. Now maybe when you get home, you spend a few more hours at the computer surfing online or working at an online business to escape working for the man.

Well, after the pounding your body has taken at work all day, the last thing it needs is to be given more of the same when you get home. So if you’re sitting in a dining chair or on a breakfast stool or in a cheap office chair, you really ought to think about giving your body a break.

By treating yourself to a new quality office chair, you will find it a pleasure to sit in after that back-breaker at work, and it may even motivate you to work harder on that online business too so you can sit in it even more. Here is a quick summary of some ergonomic office chairs worth considering.

You visit a site selling office chairs and you are presented with a scrolling page filled with 100 different chair images and they are all shouting “Buy Me! Buy Me!” and when you get to the bottom of the page it says page 1 of 4 meaning there are 400 to choose from, just how are you supposed to make an informed choice?

Maybe you decide to try Twitter for help, surely there must be someone there who can advise you? Well yes and no, these days there are a ton of spammy tweets from suppliers carpet bombing the same message nearly every time,  hardly fills you with confidence does it?

Add to that the shed load of fake reviews through multiple Twitter accounts sure the headlines sound good – “Why You Need An Ergonomic Office Chair” so you click in hope and what do you find? Well after you wade through the AdSense ads you get to a review where the English seems like it was translated from the original Portuguese by someone whose first language clearly isn’t English and so you end up baling out after the first paragraph.

What about an auction site like eBay, although there are undoubtedly bargains to be had it also is not without its problems. First there is the logistics of getting the chair from one side of the country to the other in one piece should you win it.

Second you can’t be sure of the condition it is in, often the image on the auction is from the manufacturer’s website and even when it is a shot of the actual item photos tend to make things look better than they are in real life, it may be immaculate or it may have 200,000 miles on the clock you won’t truly know until it’s on your doorstep.

One of the most abused words these days is “Ergonomic” especially when used to describe an office chair and the reason is there is no clear definition of what it means, it’s little more than a concept a convenient term for implied quality. It is frequently used by suppliers to enhance often poor quality seating, making it more difficult for genuine products to be heard. Here’s my take on what makes an office chair ergonomic.

So what should you do to find the right chair for you?

I believe there are 5 key features you have to have on an office chair if you insist on these it will narrow the choice down considerably.

Unless you’re an occasional user $100 chairs aren’t the answer, at this price there are just too many components which will be a compromise on quality to keep the cost down, you need to be starting around the $350 level and even then you may not get all the features you need.

Sites like Amazon.com and the better online seating stores have user reviews and this is a great way to gauge an idea of how good something is, however remember office seating is a very personal choice so what may be great for someone else may not work as well for you. For this reason it’s best to choose a site with a rock solid 30 day return policy, this way you get a good opportunity to really test it out to see if it’s right for you.

Lastly, you could always take a look at my office chair reviews section which has a quick summary with links to the full reviews of some of the better quality chairs available.

This makes it very difficult to get comfortable as it restricts your movements and so consequently you can end up sitting in a very rigid way which is bad news for your posture and muscles.

Fortunately, the answer is pretty simple to fix because just as certain manufacturers realized the need to make below average seat sizes for petite users, a number also produce larger than average sizes.

Frequently these are referred to as Big and Tall chairs which is a good thing as it alerts potential buyers who they are best suited for.

A word of caution though, just because a chair is referred to as big and tall by no means makes it a good chair, it’s just a name with no guaranteed level of quality.

Here are some ideas for quality built big and tall chairs from specialist manufacturers.

First, Neutral Posture really understands the sort of chair needed by well built and or tall users and its NP6000 and NP8000 ranges are well worth a look. You could also consider an Aeron it comes in 3 sizes and likely a size C will be best, you can check here on the size chart, the new Embody is another potential answer. BodyBilt is yet another manufacturer to check out

It offers amazing flexibility as you sit in it thanks to advanced plastics more usually found in domestic appliances and cleverly re-used here giving users great support and comfort however you choose to sit.

The seat and back give a far greater range of movement compared to most office chairs and no matter how you sit the memory encoded plastic returns the chair to the upright position once you leave the chair.

Here’s where to will find the full review of the Generation.

So why does this happen? Well there are 2 reasons, first people frequently buy chairs on looks and more often than not big looks good, it carries a sense of importance.

Second manufacturers try and produce seats fitting the widest spectrum of users and consequently usually make things bigger rather than smaller. I suppose it makes some sense, a small framed user can always fit into a big chair, whereas a large framed person may not be able to sit in a small chair.

You should never buy a chair which looks big and imposing unless you are the right build for such a seat. As a rule of thumb a suitable office chair should leave around an inch at each side of the seat. So, simply measure the distance across the top of your thighs when sitting and then check it against the seat width and make sure it is a good fit for you.

Some of the better quality seating manufacturers recognize the need for producing chairs specifically designed for a petite office chair user and lighter framed people.

So, if you need a more compact sized seat take a look at HÅG H04, HÅG Futu, Aeron or a Neutral Posture 5000 series as these should work well for you.

In the next post I will take a look at seating problems big and tall users face and how to resolve them.

You would sit there thinking how am I going to write that much on this subject? And then after a while you would resort to padding and stuff it full of unnecessarily long sentences and repeat things to get the word count up and make it look good.

Reality was your teacher saw straight through it and you were in trouble for stuffing it full of useless content and told it was all padding.

Guess what a lot of office chairs are just the same, you see them all the time in the discount office supplies stores, great puffed up padded low grade foam and usually with very poor quality leather upholstery. And yet as you try it out sinking into that heap of foam it feels like it’s really comfortable.

And for the first 10 or 15 minutes it probably is comfortable, it is only after you have been sitting in it for a couple of hours comes the realization it’s not comfortable at all.

Why is this? It’s because there is no real structural support it’s a bit like sitting on a giant sponge, it just moves to wherever your body weight is forcing it. Before you know it your body has adapted a most unhealthy posture as your lower back rounds like a medicine ball and the discs in your spine start bulging into a really unhealthy shape resulting in back pain.

It only gets worse because in time what generally happens is the low quality foam flattens out with repeated use and your once fluffed up padding becomes more like sitting on a rock.

There is nothing wrong with padding on an office seat as long as it is of good quality and well designed. There is a world of difference between low grade packing type foam rubber and high quality polyurethane foam carefully sculpted to follow body contours and of high density designed to retain its shape for years. This is why companies like Humanscale are able to offer a 15 year warranty on its Freedom chair.

So don’t get taken in by a so called ergonomic computer chair with loads of padding as chances are the initial comfort it gives will rapidly disappear.