HOME OFFICE : Sit Up Straight! In a Proper Chair : Desk work is torture for your back, and if you have bad posture, it’s worse. Here’s what to look for in a seat to support you.
If your home office posture brings to mind poor Bob Cratchit, hunched over and teetering on a stool as he works for the miserly Scrooge, it’s probably wise to rethink both how you’re sitting and what you’re sitting on.
To sit for long periods with bad posture--even if your office is in the comfort of your home--is to invite health problems. Even if you have no symptoms now, experts say persons doing sedentary work, such as sitting at a computer all day, are predisposed to back injury.
Aging compounds the problem.
“Middle-aged people who sit all day are going to experience increased pressure on spinal discs, and they will experience pain and discomfort,” said Dr. David Martyn, a Newport Beach orthopedic surgeon.
Your seated posture is more important than the seat itself, but the best aid to good posture is a good chair. A good chair is one that not only stabilizes the body but also permits movement. Changing position is the most common way of relieving the stress of sitting. Some chairs continue to support your body as you move around in them.
The basic features of a properly designed chair include firm padding so you don’t bottom out on the frame, good lumbar support and a “waterfall curve” at the front edge of the seat so circulation in your lower legs will not be cut off.
Depending on the model and price, good chairs have fully and easily adjustable seats (fore and aft, up and down, tilt and swivel), seat backs (height and angle) and arms (up and down, removable), and they should accommodate your physiology (high and low backs, foot rails, wide seats, suspended arms). You should be able to tilt the chair without lifting your feet off the floor.
Chuck Smoot, a certified athletic trainer at the Irvine Medical Center’s Physical Assessment and Reactivation Center, said that even a healthy back can sit up straight only 20 or 30 minutes at a time. “Any position that is prolonged tends to be bad for you,” Smoot said.
Smoot, who works at rehabilitating patients with injured and ailing spines by teaching them proper sitting and standing posture, said people are surprised at the dramatic effects of good posture.
“We had a woman with stabbing back pains, and when she sat with her feet properly supported, her back pains subsided immediately,” Smoot said.
Foot support is the most overlooked feature of good sitting posture, according to Smoot.
“People pay a lot of attention to their upper body, but don’t support their feet. Without foot support, you can’t sit properly, and there’s a big difference between sitting with your feet just touching the floor and them being fully supported,” Smoot said.
He recommends sitting with the knees level with the hips or as much as two inches above them. The weight of the feet should be on the floor or a foot rest. With the feet stable, adjust your chair for arm comfort at your keyboard or work surface.
Another key part of the body to stabilize is the head.
“A lot of people don’t realize your head weighs eight to 10 pounds, and sitting with your head forward is bad--it puts a strain on your neck,” Smoot said.
Keeping the head up and back will minimize neck strain. People most commonly lean forward to see their work, Smoot said, so he recommends adjusting the video display terminal so it is best viewed from an erect, head-up position. A copy stand should be placed at about the same height and eye distance as the display terminal. To prevent bending forward when reading at your desk, Smoot suggests placing reading material atop the inclined plane formed by an empty one- or two-inch three-ring binder to tilt reading matter up and toward you.
Smoot said you need to think of your body as links of a chain. If the head moves, the feet move and vice versa, and the leverage applied by either can strain your back. Good posture stabilizes the head and feet and eliminates back strain.
“Lumbar support is good and necessary, but it doesn’t solve the problem of your feet or head getting you into a bad position,” Smoot said.
Among those who testify to the importance of good posture is Kathryn Hunter, a secretary and medical transcriptionist who works out of her home in Corona del Mar.
“I spend 12 to 14 hours a day at the word processor, and I have relatively little pain,” she said. “We learned good posture from typing school, but people today go straight to a computer and never get any typing training.”
To protect your back around the office, Hunter offered two pieces of advice: “Pretend you’re wearing a miniskirt all the time because you wouldn’t dare bend over in a miniskirt,” she said.
“And always keep your feet pointed in the same direction your body’s going in (even when sitting) so you aren’t twisting from the waist.”
*
Some chair sources:
Sea Coast Design, Inc., at 1415 E. Edinger Ave. in Santa Ana, carries more than 100 orthopedically and ergonomically designed chairs for home and office.
“One chair doesn’t fit all,” said Sea Coast President Cy Oblouk. ‘We suggest you try before you buy, so we will lend chairs to prospective customers for a day or two.” Oblouk is emphatic that a correctly designed chair need cost no more than a badly designed one. Prices range from $100 to $1,000, and many are in the $300 to $700 range.
The Back Stop, 571 N. Poplar St., Unit G, in Orange, offers chairs ranging in price from $750 to $1,100 and a variety of footstools, back supports and lumbar supports. Customer service representative Carlos Gonzalez said the store offers a 10-day-free trial exchange.
Herman Miller Inc., which introduced the first ergonomically designed office chair in 1976, has a showroom at 2575 McCabe Way, Irvine. Miller manufactures an extensive line of high-quality office and commercial seating specifically designed for good posture and to solve seating problems. Office chair prices range from $600 to $3,500.
Service Office Products Inc.’s 1993 catalogue contains 52 pages of chairs and office seating products. The catalogue company’s Orange County telephone number is (714) 835-7856.
