Lumbar “Support” Is a Terrible Workaround

Lumbar support.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? A little scientific, even medical (“lumbar” from the Latin lumbus, meaning loin). And at the same time gently comforting; who doesn’t love “support”?

If you’re going to sit at your desk all day, answering email or slaving over some code or a spreadsheet, aren’t you going to need some support? Heck, don’t you deserve some support? Makes perfect sense.

But while this story line has been widely circulated, it’s just wrong.

Three million years, and now we suddenly need support?

First of all, why would you need lumbar support? We humans have pretty much had our current spine design for about 3 million years, so doesn’t it seem odd that we suddenly need lumbar support? And strangely, we only need lumbar support when sitting; somehow we don’t need lumbar support when standing, walking, or lying down.

What’s going on here? Well, it turns out that sitting in a conventional chair distorts the spine to the point that it requires support.

90/90/90 = bad posture

Here’s the scoop: when you’re sitting in a conventional chair (like a typical “ergonomic” office chair), you likely have your thighs parallel to the floor… ankles at 90 degrees, knees at 90 degrees, and hips at 90 degrees, just like in the books and promulgated by ergonomics experts for decades. Like this:

90/90/90, as shown here and promoted by conventional ergonomics, is uncomfortable and unhealthy for your back.

Unfortunately, “90/90/90” is a terrible way to sit. Your hip can’t flex past about 60 degrees without causing the lower spine to lose its normal curve (lordosis), which produces the “hollow” of your low back when you’re standing comfortably.

Standing allows your lower back to curve inward, naturally. This curve flattens out as you raise your knees. When your knees are at 90 degrees to your hips, it is impossible for your spine to produce this curve naturally. “Lumbar support” in conventional chairs, is an attempt to force this curve.

Because this “90/90/90” position forces you to hunch your lower back, the standard office chair adds “lumbar support” that shoves your lumbar spine forward — a vain attempt to recreate the spine’s normal posture.

Lumbar support: a bad fix to an unnecessary problem

To sum up: the standard office chair first distorts your posture, and then tries to “fix” the problem by further distorting your posture with lumbar support. The fix is the problem! No wonder people hate their office chairs, and no wonder 80% of Americans have low back pain.

Trying to impose posture on the spine by pushing on it is utterly misguided. Really, your spine wants to adopt its naturally perfect posture — there’s no need to force it. And in fact, simply lowering one’s knees below one’s hips restores the normal lumbar lordosis automatically.

The mechanism is a little technical, but surprisingly simple: the psoas muscle originates on the five lumbar vertebrae, travels over the inside of the pelvis, and then attaches to the femur. This arrangement ensures that when one lowers the knees, the femur gently stretches the psoas muscles and thus restores the normal low back curve, it’s lumbar lordosis.

A simple fix

Raising your chair high enough so that your knees are lower than your hips will improve your posture enough that you won’t require any artificial “lumbar support”. It’s why we designed the QOR360 chairs in a variety of heights, and why the chair is more comfortable without a back.

Raising the seat of your chair so it is above your knees allows your hips to open, and the curve of your spine to return, naturally.

We sit on average for 10 hours a day, so it’s important that we have chairs that are comfortable, and which don’t damage us. Dispensing with conventional “lumbar support” paradoxically better supports your lower back by allowing it to support itself from within.

But suppose you’re stuck with an “ergonomic” chair that came with your job?

Remarkably, the key to sitting well in an “ergonomic” office chair is
to ignore or defeat most of the chair’s design features. This seems
counterintuitive: after all, someone paid good money to design and
manufacture all those features, doodads, and adjustments. But your
body actually has its own perfectly evolved internal ergonomics: your
skeleton. Unfortunately, the various “supports” provided by ergonomic
chairs (back rest, foot rest, head rest, arm rests, and the coup de
grace: lumbar support) serve only to distort one’s naturally perfect,
internally generated, posture. So, what is required is a full-on hack of
your chair that will allow you go get back to a more normal, organic,
balanced, posture. Like this:

Once situated you should have the feeling of “perching” on your chair,
rather than collapsing into it. Your head should float on the top of your
neck. If you feel the need to extend your head or allow it to slump
forward, adjust your monitor to be higher or closer, or both. Your arms
should hang comfortably from your shoulders.

Although most office chairs create postural mischief, a few companies offer chairs that are designed to encourage natural posture by dispensing with chair backs altogether, and instead provide a slightly tippy seat that encourages subtle, continuous, postural readjustment while sitting. CoreChair in Canada, MiShu and Swopper in Germany, and QOR360 all sell chairs that encourage muscular engagement and excellent posture from the inside out. One note of caution: because these designs require the continuous use of core muscles many people require a few days or weeks of adjustment before they can sit actively all day; but once they make the transition to active sitting they never look back.