Have you ever noticed what office chairs do to our health?

When you are reading this article, you might be just sitting in the chair in front of the computer, the common practice we do every day, which on average lasts 8.9 hours. Then stop and see how does your body feel? Is there any ache in your back or light numbness in the thigh? Such symptoms are normal yet bad. They are just caused by sitting.

Just think further about it. At 20s, we could sit on a sand bag all day long and that would not matter. Ten years later, we may feel a few pains in our back, shoulder or arm. We do not care much about it. But then another ten years later, we may start to think about changing the poor office chair. By that time, it might all become so late because those years of poor sitting has already taken its toll, and we may suffer from various health issues such as posture problems, weight problems, heart disease, etc. Sitting is a public health risk actually.

Sometimes we may think about taking more exercise in order to offset the risk caused by sitting. But sitting too much is different from exercising too little. Sitting does different things to our body. We may hardly associate obesity with sitting in the chair. But it is said that obese people tend to be attracted to the chair. Too much sitting just relaxes our muscles, which may cause a decrease of about 90% of enzyme activity. We know, enzyme grabs fat and cholesterol from the blood, burning the fat into energy while shifting the cholesterol to the healthy kind.

Besides, frequent sitting for online surfing or watching TV might solicit higher rate of high blood triglycerides, hypertension, etc. When we sit, our lower lumbar curve just collapses. Over time, that might make our natural S shaped spine into C shaped one, and eventually our body may easily slouch.

If we choose poor quality office chairs, problems may get even worse. Those poor chairs do not offer us movement we need to keep our body comfortable. Thus, we may get locked in a fixed position for too many hours. Over time, our core muscles may gradually seize up from lack of use. This requires us to get up frequently when we work in the office or try some simple exercise.

Chairs can do more things to our body than we might expect. Anyway, for less harm, we need to choose ergonomic chair with great movement. We need more movement when we sit in the chair and when we move in the chair, the chair needs to support us and avoid any discomfort of our muscles or even keep our blood circulation moving.