Galen Cranz hasn't had conventional chairs in her house for some 20 years. She prefers stools, including ones that wobble. She doesn't want us to keep still.
The professor of social architecture at the University of California, says right-angled chairs force a C-slumped spine, causing the chest to cave in, the pelvis to crunch, the lower back to collapse, our head to jut forward putting pressure on our neck.
Photo: Galen Cranz
Many of us are left with all sorts of aches and pains, especially as we spend long hours in front of a computer.
Professor Cranz is a designer, a consultant specialising in chairs and body conscious design, author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design and a certified Alexander Technique teacher.
The more research she did the more it became apparent just how damaging sitting is, she told Kathryn Ryan.
“I went back to the medical rehabilitation literature and started keeping a list of all the problems that were associated with chair sitting and the list got longer and longer.”
It all comes down to angles, she says. The right angle formed between the thigh and the trunk when we sit in a chair is bad for us.
“It pulls the pelvis backwards, instead of it being forward, you want the pelvis, or the lumbar curve, to be a bit forward.
“When it's rounded backwards, the whole spine goes into a C shaped slump. And instead our spine should be in the kind of elongated ‘S’ a very shallow ‘S’ but nevertheless an elongated ‘S’ because if you think about it, you put a heavy weight on the letter C and you put a heavy weight on the letter S which one is going to be stronger? The ‘S’”
Improvements can and are made to chair design, but the fact of the matter is chair posture is intrinsically stressful, she says.
A better position is for us to perch with our knees considerably lower than our hips, Cranz says.
“You can do a little test for yourself, you can sit at an 18-inch height chair or stool, and then have a bar stool right beside you. And just tune into the amount of muscular effort that you're having to use to sit at right angles, and then get up onto the barstool where you're in this more open, oblique relationship between thigh and trunk and voila, you will notice that the amount of muscular effort that you're having to use is remarkably reduced. It's just an instant test, anybody can do it.”
