Your office chair may be killing you
Listen, I have bad news for you – I just hope you’re not sitting down. Because if you are, you are apparently putting yourself in grave danger. According to the latest issue of Bloom-berg Businessweek, your office chair is “killing you.”
While I’m not convinced as to your chair’s homicidal tendencies, the article (yes, it is subtly titled “Your Office Chair is Killing You”) lays out some common side effects of sitting: ache in the lower back, slight numbness “in your rear and lower thigh” and a general malaise. All familiar, all bad.
According to the piece, “New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk.” In other (much smaller) words, our bodies can’t stand sitting. (See what I did there?)
The bad thing is that we like to sit. A lot. You’re likely doing it right now – unless you make a habit of reading the newspaper (or newspaper websites) while on a casual stroll. (Personally, I’m not sitting but that’s just because I write all my columns while power walking or mini golfing.) For most of us, the seated position is the position our body is in most – for an average of 8.9 hours a day. And if you have a desk job or an Internet addiction, you don’t need me to tell you that number is laughably low.
And to make matters worse, research is saying you can’t make up for all that sitting by exercising. “Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little,” said University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. “They do completely different things to the body.” (Of course, when was the last time you listened to a microbiologist about exercise?)
Most Americans might think nothing of sitting for much of their day, but according to James A. Levine, an obesity specialist at the Mayo Clinic, it just isn’t something our bodies are made for. In a 2005 article in Science magazine, Levine points out that humans spent over 1.5 million years evolving to move about and in “a tiny speck of time” we switched to sitting still. In evolutionary terms, our body is still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
The problem with sitting goes beyond a sore back. At the risk of getting overly science-y (full disclosure: the only things I know about science I learned from AMC’s “Breaking Bad”), standing uses a ton of muscles that are full of really helpful enzymes that do good things with the fat and cholesterol in your blood. When you’re sitting – the muscles take a break – and “enzyme activity” drops 90 to 95 percent, according to the Businessweek article. The result? All that fat that would’ve been burned as energy and bad cholesterol that would’ve become good just, well, sit in your bloodstream.
And it doesn’t take long for that bad stuff to add up. Sit through a showing of “Avatar” and you’ll have lost about 20 percent of your healthy cholesterol (but be enlightened to the plight of the Na’vi people … so, a fair tradeoff).
Which means the reason you feel so crappy after a long road trip – hours and hours of sitting, in other words – isn’t solely due to the Taco Bell you had for lunch. (Though it plays a big role, trust me.)
And if sitting too much wasn’t bad enough, the place we do a lot of our sitting – the office chair – is a relative death trap for your spine, which wasn’t designed to spend a long time in the seated position, anyway.
“Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much worse than a standard office chair,” said Galen Cranz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and expert at a well-turned phrase.
So how did we get into this predicament? How did we get convinced, despite the fact that they’re bad for us, that every office should have the same general type of chairs? For one thing, we got most of what we consider to be “the right way to sit” from the people who just happened to be selling office chairs.
That lumbar support you think is so important? It’s marketing hogwash. Even though it is sold as a way to combat back pain (since the 1960s), lumbar support doesn’t actually help your spine. Not that it stops chair companies from still pushing the idea.
And why should they? The market for office chairs is more than $3 billion (with a “b” for back pain). A quick Google search will turn up office chairs that cost more than a fully loaded iPad. (Funny thing is, the iPad probably would do just about as much to help your back.)
But there is hope. To do the least amount of damage to your body while stationary, “perching” is the way to go. That essentially leaves your feet on the ground and you half-standing, half-sitting.
Problem is, almost no office chairs are tall enough to facilitate this healthy sitting position. So where can you find the right height? Your favorite neighborhood bar stool. Perched on a bar stool, your spine is in a much healthier position than at your desk.
So get out of that chair and get down to the bar – for the health benefits of course. Your back (and your bartender) will thank you.
If you find him to be a pain in your back, neck or behind, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.