Weirdly Shaped Office Chairs Are Popular on TikTok. Are They Actually Good for You?

livemint.com:

SIMPLY SITTING down seems like it should require no expertise or deep consideration. But just as working has become synonymous with being chained to a desk (or kitchen table), sitting has been deemed “unhealthy." While some designers, disrupting convention, are creating standing and treadmill desks that dispense with sitting altogether, there’s a middle ground: so-called “active chairs," that employ a range of strategies to make the act of sitting not so sedentary.

The biggest rule in good sitting, according to Anne-Kristina Arnold, a professor of biomedical physiology and kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, is that your knees should never be higher than your hips, which causes you to lose your lumbar curve. “Ideally, you want to have your knees a bit lower than your hips," she said, “because that fits the biomechanics and anatomy of your spine, by which your hips allow for your lumbar curve to align naturally." But talk of active sitting doesn’t end with spinal alignment.

To some, the origin stories and purported medical benefits behind these chairs draw a fascinating (if dubious) line from ancient halls of power to pelvic and sexual health. Spend enough time talking with active-seating evangelists (or watching their TikToks), and you might be convinced that a kneeling chair, saddle, or a deliberately topsy-turvy stool could not only serve as a superior work-from-home setup, but potentially solve…all of your problems? The reality is more complicated.

What these active chairs purport to do, said Arnold, is help you move by keeping you slightly off-balance, so that you have to adjust throughout the day. It remains an open question, she says, how much this actually helps improve posture,