Sit Better: A Doctor Explains How “Ergonomic” Chairs Undermine Posture and Health, Causing Back Pain and Shortened Lives

By Turner Osler

"Sit Better" is a groundbreaking guide to the complicated, counterintuitive world of sitting. Author Dr. Turner Osler is a retired surgeon and a lifelong academic researcher with interests in public health and epidemiology. Throughout this book, he carefully shows that our switch to a chair-centered life has been a catastrophe for our posture, our core strength, our back health, and especially to our overall wellbeing. Sitting shortens our lives by two years on average. Although the book intends to show the inherent dangers of sitting, it also offers hopeful guidance so readers can avoid the harms of sitting and optimize their health and longevity.

For the first three million years of human history our hunter/gatherer forebears lead lives filled with physical activity. Chairs were unimagined and squatting was the typical "resting" posture – a posture that required considerable muscular engagement. Over this long history, humans came to require daily activity to remain vital and healthy. So, it was unfortunate when chairs and sitting burst onto this scene just 100 years ago.

We instantly fell in love with chair sitting, and most of us now sit for over 8 hours a day. It's estimated that there are over 70 chairs for every person in America. Unfortunately, humans are not adapted for the long periods of muscular inactivity encouraged by "ergonomic" chairs, and the health consequences have been catastrophic.

Despite this grim news, Dr. Osler is optimistic. He believes that if we can change how much we sit, how long we sit for, and especially how we sit, the harms of sitting can be avoided. Indeed, he holds out the hope that sitting can be made healthful by switching to chairs that make sitting active, rather than passive. So, could sitting be harnessed to add more movement to our days? Dr. Osler shows how it's possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098392550

Book preview

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Disclaimer: Although I am an academic researcher, because I too suffered from back pain for quite some years, I am hardly a disinterested researcher. I went so far as to invent a mechanism to allow sitting to be active, and I am the CEO of a company (QOR360) created to popularize and sell chairs that encourage people to move while sitting. This conflict-of-interest disquiets me (Richard Feynman observed: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself —and you are the easiest to fool), but seems unavoidable.

Copyright © Turner Osler, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-09-839255-0

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Problem, Plus an Emergency Hack for Your Ergonomic Office Chair

Chapter 1: Why Chairs?

Chapter 2. Why Not Chairs?

Chapter 3. What Makes a Good Chair?

Chapter 4. Kids Sit, Too

Chapter 5. Alternative to Standard Chairs

Chapter 6. The Future of Sitting

Notes

Introduction. The Problem, Plus an Emergency Hack for Your Ergonomic Office Chair

Despite decades of innovation in ergonomics, 80 percent of Americans still suffer from back pain.

You are probably sitting as you read this. This was an easy guess because most of us spend most of our time sitting, over eight hours every day on average. Most of us sit more than we sleep.

Why so much sitting? Perhaps it is simply that sitting has become the default posture for most of our activities: reading, writing, emailing, driving, watching television, eating, eliminating, and the list goes on. Simply put, most of our work, our play, our amusements, even our vital functions, are done while sitting. Yes, we seem to be doing many different things, but as far as our bodies and our actual anatomy and physiology are concerned, well, we are just sitting.

None of this seems remarkable, of course, because chairs are so much a part of our built environment that they have become invisible to us, hiding in plain sight. We spend most of our lives in intimate contact with chairs, our bodies silently shaped by their malign design.

What is remarkable is that as a species we are not designed to sit. We spent the last three million years as hunter-gatherers, hunting and gathering, walking considerable distances, five or ten miles, every day. This long history shaped our bodies, and our biochemistry, in such a way that we now require daily doses of activity to stay healthy and vital. Interestingly, our requirement for daily exercise sets us apart from our primate cousins who, although biochemically very similar to us in most ways, require almost no exercise for health and longevity.1

It is really only in the last one hundred years that we humans left behind