Reduce the Risks of Long-Term Sitting: Benefits of an Active Office Chair

You’ve probably heard it by now: sitting poses a lot more health risks than smoking does. And if you’re like most people, you probably start your day behind a steering wheel or kicked back in a bus seat, only to sit at an office chair and slump over a keyboard for 8 hours, and finally come back home to watch TV on your sofa. There’s not much you can do to combat this sitting epidemic. However, what we can do is make sitting as healthy as possible with the right ergonomic solutions.

As you can see, the biggest amount of sitting you do in a day happens at your work place. Because of this, having an office chair that not only helps you keep a proper posture but also activates key muscles can make a huge difference. Active office chairs are designed to slightly wobble or bounce and engage your muscles while you sit. The biggest benefit of an active office chair is that it has a higher seat that increases the hip angle. When the hip angle is more open, your core muscles activate and help support the natural curvature of the spine.

Due to years of sitting, most of us lack this core strength, and because of this we tend to slump even on those posture-correcting chairs. Since many of us don’t have time to workout as much, an active office chair can be a good way to build your core strength even while you’re sitting. At first, when you’re just beginning to build your muscle strength, you will find the need to swap the active chair with your old desk chair. However, in time you can get used to this type of sitting and actually adopt your active office chair as a permanent solution.

But besides helping you build essential muscle mass, active chairs also help keep your joints lubricated. Because they wobble so much, your bones are also experiencing micro-movements while you sit, keeping the cartilage moving and bone fluid circulating. And good bone health is incredibly important in a society where Arthritis affects one in four adults. Plus, those micro-movements that you experience while sitting on an active chair, together the a wider hip angle also promote better blood flow. The biggest reason why long term sitting is damaging to your cardiovascular health is because being inactive throughout the entire day impedes your circulation.

Like any new chair, you will first have to get used to it before it starts to feel comfortable. Make sure your seat is comfy and stable enough to support your weight so that you don’t go tumbling down.