office chair

I frequently get questions about what makes a good office chair. Of course, some office chairs are primarily fashioned for style and aesthetic appeal. In general, I would say these may be easy on the eye, but, over time, hard on the body!

 This office chair sparkles with 1960s retro-chic. However, its markedly concave seat will internally rotate your legs, encouraging malalignment in the hips and knees, and flat feet. Its straight backrest leaves no space for your behind, encouraging you to sit on your tail and tuck your pelvis. lakeland-furniture.co.uk

Ergonomic chairs

People often ask my opinion on how various ergonomic chairs on the market might help them. This makes sense given the rising prevalence of back pain¹. “Ergonomic” means that something is designed primarily for the health, comfort, and protection of users, and among the specific chairs people ask me about, the Herman Miller Aeron Chair tops the list. To answer efficiently, I like to compare and contrast it with the chair I designed, the Gokhale Method Pain-Free™ chair, as this embodies the posture principles confirmed by my research and experience. 

The Herman Miller Aeron Chair. hermanmiller.com

The Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair.

Even though they are both designed to be “ergonomic,” they are clearly very different. The Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair reflects the paradigm shift that underlies the Gokhale Method® philosophy. This makes the chair quite different from every other office chair on the market.

How chairs shape your spine

The Aeron chair has been designed following the conventional wisdom of the S-shaped spine, the “S” being formed by alternating lumbar, thoracic, and cervical curves. Over the last 100 years or so, this shape has become the received knowledge learned by physical therapists, medics, and designers, resulting in chairs whose contours support a significant curve in the lumbar area, and accommodate a thoracic curve in the upper back. From a Gokhale Method perspective this excessive curvature is the primary cause of disc bulges and herniations, nerve impingements, muscular spasms, and the degenerative conditions that cause back pain. 

The Aeron chair is based on the concept of significant lumbar and thoracic curvature being desirable.  hermanmiller.com

The Gokhale Method advocates a J-shaped spine, which is the shape we see in infants and young children, in historical artifacts and photographs, and which still persists in non-industrial societies across the world. The J-spine is especially relevant when sitting upright, where, due to an anteverted pelvis, the behind is behind and the vertebrae of the spine can stack more vertically. We call this stacksitting.

No tensing the back muscles to get upright, no collapsing into a slump—and no alternating between these two problematic positions, which is a common strategy to try and relieve the discomfort they cause. Just comfortable, healthy sitting. You can read more about spine shape here.

Sitting upright at your desk

Both the Herman Miller Aeron Chair and the Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair have a waterfall front (where the seat pan front angles downward), which is ideal for upright sitting. If you know how to arrange your legs and trunk well, this will facilitate pelvic anteversion and all the good things for your spine and general health that come with it. Pelvic anteversion is central to the Gokhale Method and is taught in our in-person Foundations Course, Pop-up courses, or online Elements Course. 

The seat pan of the Aeron chair features a waterfall front in a mesh fabric. Some users may find the adjustment lever under the seat is too close for easy operation when the seat is tilted forward for stacksitting.  hermanmiller.com

I designed the seat pan of my chair using a combination of materials that give optimal support for sitting. The sitz bones need to experience a firm foundation for the pelvis and spine above, but they also need to be padded for comfort. In my experience this combination cannot be equalled or improved on by a single material or mesh fabric.

The seat pan of the Gokhale chair combines materials for optimal support and comfort.

Note that the metal backrest support is curved to accommodate the behind behind, another feature that helps in anteversion of the pelvis. 

To further aid stacksitting the Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair seat pan also has four soft, textured, rubbery nubs sewn into its front edge. These provide grip which help keep your pelvic position, and prevent any slipping off the chair. 

The Gokhale chair seat pan features four nubs which help you to stacksit for upright working at your desk.

Our seat pan is also slightly convex to facilitate external rotation of the legs and feet—that is, it encourages them to gently turn outward. This brings healthy alignment of the hip, knee, and ankle joints, and also the foot arches. A mesh fabric, pulled taut, cannot support external rotation in this way. 

Stacksitting with healthy external rotation of the legs. 

Armrests

Many office chairs come with armrests. It is healthier for the shoulders, which are very mobile joints, not to be continually fixed in position by armrests, however adjustable. Far better to learn to shoulder roll, which encourages range of motion and optimal arrangement in the joint. Shoulder rolls also help adjacent problem areas such as the trapezius muscle, neck, and upper back, and improve circulation to the area. A well-connected shoulder can support the weight of the arm effortlessly as you do your tasks.

Arm rests also create the significant problem of not being able to come close in to the keyboard, thus encouraging rounding of the shoulders. The absence of arm rests allows an almost cockpit like feeling of being surrounded by the desk and keyboard with no temptation to migrate the shoulders forward.

Backrests—traction trumps lumbar support

The Y-shaped feature at the back of the recent models of the Aeron chair has a support for the base of the spine which can be used to support the sacrum in mild anteversion. It also has a lumbar support which is less aggressively curved than that of earlier models. While these are considerable improvements, the mesh back of the Aeron chair is still not able to provide therapeutic length to the spine through traction, as the Gokhale chair does, or space for posterior shoulder placement. Nor does the backrest easily accommodate our trusty Stretchsit® Cushion. 

A contemporary Aeron chair features support for the base of the spine (sacrum) and lumbar area.  hermanmiller.com

The Gokhale chair backrest provides therapeutic length to the lumbar spine with soft, built-in nubs for traction.

Beyond supporting a healthy J-shape in your spine, ideally a backrest would also help tease out any tension in the lumbar area. The Stretchsit Cushion success in improving back shape and reducing back tension has inspired the same successful features in our Pain-Free chair. With a little know-how, these soft textured nubs in the backrest can give you hours of therapeutic traction at your desk, reducing pressure on your spinal discs and nerves, and improving circulation in the surrounding tissues. We call this stretchsitting. 

Are adjustable chairs better?

As consumers we have become increasingly familiar with hi-tech products that we can adjust and customize to meet our individual needs and preferences, and the Aeron chair reflects this throughout its design. 

The Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair requires just one adjustment, and that is the gas lift height adjuster. This is key to the use of the chair, which is designed to be raised for stacksitting so the thighs and pelvis can angle downward, and lowered a little for stretchsitting against the backrest so that the feet can still meet the floor well. The lifting mechanism comes in three different heights, and there is also our Petite Gokhale Method Pain-Free™ Chair, ideal for both smaller people and smaller spaces. 

The Petite Gokhale Method Pain-Free chair gives a range of working heights, and a foot ring. 

Foot rings

One additional feature on our Petite Gokhale chair is a foot ring, which gives more options for foot and leg placement, and prevents legs from dangling and pulling the pelvis into a tuck. It also avoids the constriction to circulation which may occur if the thighs hang over a seat edge.

A foot ring helps take care of the lower body—an area often overlooked in conventional office chairs. 

From a Gokhale Method perspective, adjustments for spinal curves or arm rests are simply not required once the basics of healthy posture are understood. Better to address these fundamentals before going all out on the bells and whistles. This means there’s less to go wrong—with your chair, and your body!

Sitting well is a partnership 

Almost every employer who wants to demonstrate care for their executives finds themselves purchasing a Herman Miller chair. Yet within the budget of an Aeron chair they can buy a Gokhale chair and treat their employee to a one day Pop-up Course or six-lesson Group Foundations Course in the Gokhale Method where they will learn postural skills that last a lifetime.

Healthy sitting is a partnership. It takes a good chair on the one hand, and good posture on the other. With the Gokhale Method Pain-Free™ chair and the Gokhale Method you have the perfect combination.

References:

¹Janet K. Freburger et al., “The Rising Prevalence of Chronic Low Back Pain,” Archives of Internal Medicine 169, no. 3 (Feb. 2009), 251–58, doi: 10.1001/archinternmed.2008.543

If you would like to find out more about how the Gokhale Method can help support you, sign up to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…

Thoreau had three chairs

American philosopher-poet Henry David Thoreau wrote in the "Visitors" chapter of Walden, his 1854 account of his life in a cabin he built on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord Massachusetts:

"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."

I'm a fan of Thoreau, and I favor simplicity. And although I have more than three chairs in my house, I have just one type of chair that has become "go-to seating" for most solitary and social activities--not just for me, but for family members, friends, and co-workers. The chair is the Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair, and I designed it myself.

Pain-free sitting, at home and at work

If you were to stop by my house today you would find five Pain-Free™ Chairs arranged around our dining room table--a table that has served my family well, not just at mealtimes, but throughout days and nights as a communal work station/library/coffee shop. To some extent I credit this comfortable arrangement for regularly enticing my two daughters home from nearby college and grad school; they continue to be drawn to this familiar setting, in part because it's such a comfortable place to sit. And if you were to pop into our nearby Gokhale Method Institute office you would see that every member of my staff sits in this very same type of chair, not because it's required or because they feel obliged, but because this is their preference. Before the Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair came to market, our office was furnished with relatively high-end task chairs (Herman Miller and Soma Ergonomics, among others). But when given the option to stay with the chair they had or to switch, everyone opted for the Pain-Free™ Chair.

Keeping it simple

"Simplicity is the law of nature for men as well as for flowers" is something else Thoreau wrote, and I subscribe to this philosophy. Tipping my hat to Thoreau, I would add that simplicity is also the law for chairs--or at least one of the laws. Too many chairs feature gratuitous, even counter-productive, features. It's not so much that--as Goldilocks observed--the chairs are "too hard" or "too soft," it's that many oblige sitters to tuck the pelvis into a retroverted position, a position that leads to tense low-back muscles, slumping, and--over time--problems with spinal discs, hamstrings, and even the pelvic organs. Such repercussions can of course cause discomfort or pain.

Like Goldilocks, I sought a chair that was "just right."

Simplicity was also a guiding principle when I set out to design my chair, in part because when the Pain-Free™ Chair was just a gleam in my eye I interviewed a chair repairman who came to our office to repair the same chair twice; it was one of the relatively high-end task chairs with perhaps one too many features.

Steering clear of bells and whistles

In search of a "just right" chair

One valuable insight shared by the repairman was that he saw a direct link between chairs with a lot of features and chairs with a lot of dysfunction. This was especially true of chairs that recline via levers and were owned and operated by men. Men like to recline more than women, he observed, and while men apparently like to employ all available bells and whistles, they don't necessarily read operational instructions first! Reclining is of course a legitimate position (and in fact I'm beginning to think about designing a high-backed chair with headrest that reclines), but the desire to lean back becomes more urgent when a person is uncomfortable. If a task chair is designed to enable upright sitting and really support a person, then there's no need to recline.

The rationale for my chair

Even among high-priced chairs design flaws are common. The challenge, as I saw it, was to design a simple chair that transforms sitting into a healthful activity that actually feels good.

Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair

Above all, I wanted to create a chair that promotes the natural stacking of the vertebrae without muscle strain, a chair that would enable two healthy ways of sitting--stretchsitting and stacksitting, techniques demonstrated in the video, below, and more thoroughly explored in the Gokhale Method Foundations course, my book 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, and the DVD Back Pain: The Primal Posture Solution. Again, the goal was to keep it simple and incorporate only those elements that absolutely matter:

• Traction on the seatback
• Seatpan with a downward slope
• Adjustable seat height
• Elimination of armrests
• Highest quality materials

The Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair

My chair, with its respectful-of-the-human-skeleton design, offers a healthful–even therapeutic–alternative for people committed to good posture who want to simply sit without pain. And these are the features that make a difference:

Traction on the seatback

Stretchsit® nubs

Whether people have an upright and tense “S” spine (swayed), a relaxed and slumped “C” spine (rounded), or a compressed “I” spine (collapsed), stretchsitting is an easy way to regain some natural length. For this technique to work, people need a “grippy” support to meet the midback. Located higher than a lumbar support, but lower than the shoulder blades, soft Stretchsit® nubs built into the backrest of the Pain-Free™ Chair enables sitters to "hitch up" the spine and gently stretch the back. This, in turn, decompresses spinal nerves and discs, which not only feels good, but allows stressed-out discs to rehydrate and absorb nutrients from surrounding tissues and renew the process of self-repair. Also, because the seatback stops short of the shoulder blades, it's easy to roll open the shoulders for a relaxed position that promotes healthy circulation in the arms and better breathing.

Seatpan with a downward slope

It's not good to sit the same way all day. Whereas stretchsitting allows for a sustained stretch and is well-suited to relatively passive tasks, stacksitting is generally more versatile because it enables us to reach for what we need and move around. Because we derive different benefits from stretchsitting and stacksitting, and because each lends itself to different tasks, I designed the seatpan of the Pain-Free™ Chair to enable both types of  sitting and make it easy for people to move back and forth.

The seatpan promotes healthy stacking

While the back of the seatpan is flat, the front half, which features "grippy" rubberized patches, slopes downward. This design anteverts the pelvis, tipping it slightly forward to allow the vertebrae to stack easily and naturally and enable the back muscles to completely relax. Again, healthy stacking promotes healthy breathing, which in turn provides a gentle and revitalizing spinal massage. The flat half of the seatpan, which allows for sitting back in the chair and stretchsitting, prevents the combination of anteversion and stretchsitting, which together would introduce sway in the lower back. The seat cushion made of top-quality memory foam is reallycomfy. I designed this so that when people with underdeveloped glutes (something quite common in our culture) take a seat, they will not be the least bit aware of the hard board beneath the cushion--even if they stay seated all day.

Adjustable seat height

In Thoreau’s time people had sufficiently flexible hamstrings to sit comfortably and with naturally stacked spine on chairs of any height. Because people today tend to have less flexible hamstrings, a hydraulic lift helps. My own preferences is to raise the seat a little higher when I'm stacksitting, because this facilitates the downward sloping of my thighs and healthy anteversion of my pelvis. I lower the height of the seat when I stretchsit. Take a look. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mJWP8fWbyg

Elimination of armrests

Why did I opt not to include armrests when I designed the Pain-Free™ Chair? Too often, armrests prevent people from moving in close to their work surface. When we sit upright and relaxed with our shoulders rolled back and well hung, we can move our arms freely, without straining.

Highest quality materials

Thoreau's Cabin

It's no exaggeration to say that chair is as well constructed as it is designed. I chose each part--steel, wheels, hydraulic lift, memory foam, and GREENGUARD-certified fabric--for its top-notch quality and durability...which brings me back to the spirit of Walden and the philosophy of Thoreau: “There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest."When I sit in the chair I'm proud to have designed and now share with others, I think I know what Thoreau meant.

Photo Credits: Henry David Thoreau, 1861: Wikimedia Commons The Three Bears: Arthur Rackham, Wikimedia Commons Goldilocks: Swift's Premium Soap Products, 1916, Public Domain Gokhale Pain-Free™ Chair (and details of the chair): © Gokhale Method Pain-Free™ Chair Tutorial: © Gokhale Method Drawing of Thoreau's cabin from the title page of the first edition of Walden: Sophia Thoreau, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons