How to sit properly in your chair

1.     When seated your hips should be higher than your knees, or at a right angle to your hip. 

2.     Your low back (think waist) should be supported (a small rolled towel can be placed here) if your chair does not provide back support

3.     You should be able to feel equal weight across your sitting bones when seated.

     Avoid 'bucket seats', here is why:

Buckets, position your knees higher than your hips. This throws all your upper body weight back onto your gluteus maximus and piriformis muscles through which--and this is the important part--the Sciatic nerve runs. Sit on that nerve often enough and long enough, and you will probably end up with shooting pains down one or both legs.

Human beings were designed to sit on their pelvic bones, or ischium, those hard bones you sometimes feel when you first sit down on a hard chair. Sitting on those bones automatically gives us a natural arch in the small of our backs. When we sit this way, the Sciatic nerve, Sacroilliac joints, lumbar vertebrae and hips are unencumbered and unstressed.

SITTING

We do a lot of it in modern living and mostly when we are sitting we aren’t paying much attention to how we are doing it.  We slouch, we cross knees, we splay, we slump.  Think of all the time we spend seated:  in cars, using computers, sitting at work, watching television, eating meals.  We sit and sit and then sit some more.

Since we are spending so many hours on this activity it seems it would be a good idea to figure out how to do it so that we get some health benefits from it.

First things first:  Your chair!

The chair you are sitting in will have a big effect on your posture, so it is a good idea to find a work chair that has some adjustment devices so that you can set up a close to ideal scenario for your body.  Our Posture Keeps bones and joints in the correct alignment so that muscles are being used properly, so sitting correctly is very important!