I use a crummy 6 wheel chair, but my dream chair is available at corvettecentral.com for a paultry $1200.00. It is actually a Corvette 1999
car seat with all the adjustable stuff. Really kool.

JJK

Affordable:
Office Master chairs, available at office furniture stores (not office supply stores like Staples etc.). I bought a whole bunch of these really excellent chairs for $284 each. The foam doesn't go flat, it seems to be latex which is at least 20 times more durable than plastic foam. Everything adjustable, including armrest height which I find to be important.

More expensive but not necessarily better for everyone:
Herman Miller Aeron chairs, $600 ballpark depending on model. You have to try it to see if it works for your body. Many people swear by this chair, it didn't work for me.

What not to get:
$50-100 chairs from Office Depot etc. The padded seats go flat in a few months.

Do you have a model name or number for the Office Master chair?

Hey, Jay

I had this problem, too. I bought a used, heavy duty, corporate office chair with a spring loaded back (the kind that gives when you lean back) at a liquidation sale.

At my day job, we had some folks from our risk management office come in and give all us computer desk jockeys some pointers about ergonomics. Here's what they recommended:

1. Place your monitor so you can look at it with your eyes slightly downward and your neck straight. In my case, this means on the surface of my desk and about 2.5 feet away.

2. Place your keyboard and mouse so that your forearms are parallel to the floor, and your upper arms hang straight down. (Your elbows should be bent at at a 90-degree angle.) Use gel-filled wrist rests to keep your wrists straight.

3. Get a footrest to raise your feet up and stretch your lower back.

4. Turn off overhead lights and use a desk lamp to minimize glare on the screen.

5. If you're using a CRT, adjust the refresh rate to 75hz or above. This really eased the eye strain and headaches for me.

6. Take frequent stretch breaks.

Sorry if this is repeating the obvious.

I have a bad back due to an old parachuting injury from 20 years ago, so I am used to lower back pain, sciatica and the selection of orthopaedic chairs. The latest advice from my Osteopath, who is quite highly placed in the British Osteopath heirarchy, is that your chair and how you sit has far less an effect on you than the amount of time you spend sitting in one position.

The temptation when editing is to sit down at the desk for hours on end, hunched over your keyboard. However, that is the worst thing for your back. What you should do is ensure you have a chair which is adjustable for height, has arm rests and an adjustable back rest, but most of all, you must get up and walk around every 20 minutes. You only need to get up and walk around your room a couple of times, then site down again. I used to use a kitchen timer set to go off every twenty minutes, but nowadays, I'm sure there's a windows tool you can use to pop up a reminder.

Brian, excellent information! That helps a lot. I think, too, based on your comment about how far away the work surface is, I need to have my tired ol' eyes examined... again! That's part of my problem, I'm sure.

Office Master Model 7777-#50.

If you're in L.A., I recommend Trader Boys in West L.A., they have very good prices.

The temptation when editing is to sit down at the desk for hours on end, hunched over your keyboard.

Richard, I am guilty as charged! As Brian said, getting up often helps, but dang, when I'm on a roll and things are flowing, getting up is the last thing I'm thinking about... or want to do. Guess I need to adjust my thinking!

I find posture is really important when sitting for longer periods (breaks of course), and a well-designed chair helps with this.

I also found adjustable arm rests to be very important.

Next was the Microsoft Natural Keyboard, which I actually got by prescription, my doctor said I had to stop using a regular keyboard immediately, not even use it one more time. That was for carpal tunnel syndrome, but I found after getting used to the weird contraption that it also opened up my upper back.

Or you can make like Walter Murch. Edit standing up!

(but this needs to be on a padded floor, ask OSHA)

If I hadn't just recently redesigned my editing room, I would seriously consider that! Of course, I read Murch's book about a month after the overhaul.

I can't find the model you gave. Perhaps it's been discontinued. I'm looking at the Office Master 24-seven, IU54.

I also have a bad back, and also due to an old parachuting injury! The older I get, the more people I know with back problems, and the one thing I've learned from discussing different types of chairs is that what may be very comfortable for one person, may be a pain, literally, for someone else.

I had an expensive chair with all the adjustments you could think of and it was not one bit better for my back than the chair I currently use for editing - bought at a garage sale for $10 last summer. It is nothing fancy, but it seems to fit my back perfectly and that's good because the only adjustable thing on it is the height.
Agree that getting up to walk around every so often is good, and some light stretching. I make it a point to go for a walk every day, no matter how bad the weather, to rest my eyes, get some excercise and feel refreshed when I get back to editing.
In any case, would recommend that you just go out and try out a lot of different chairs. I do think that you can't go by price, looks or what works for others.

I hate to admit it but I use a solid wooden dining room chair - no pad, no reclining, no arms - just a basic solid chair.

I also have back problems and this is the best means I have found to edit for extended timeframs and not aggravate the problem.

Best of luck finding your perfect fit.

Agree that getting up to walk around every so often is good, and some light stretching.

You guys must be talking wiht my wife!

"You guys must be talking with my wife! "

If you find a receipt for 10 toasters among her papers, you'll know why.

:O)

Office Master's 24-Seven IU58 chair looks identical, they may have new designations.

For back pain I recommend looking into the some of following

Yoga
Pilates
Gyrotonics
The Alexander Method
Feldenkrais

They all embrace the idea that to have a healthy back you need an enlongated flexible back. As we have evolved from employing a lot of physical work to survive to employing a lot of mental work to survive, we have started to do things that our bodies were not meant to do such as sitting for many hours at a time. This tends to compress the spine. Especially if you are not sitting properly, it puts too much pressure on your lower back and makes you scrunch your shoulders. Either sitting or standing you want your distance between your neck and shoulders to be long.

An excercise to help focus on this is to stand up with your feet shoulders width apart. Take a deep breath and raise your shoulders on the inhale. On the exhale let your shoulders arms completely drop down. Let them hang loose. Then with your shoulders loose, breath in without raising your shoulders and when you exhale think of your shoulder blades pulling down and towards each other. Then notice your posture when you do this. Most likely this feels wierd because you normallly don't stand or sit like this. You may notice that it lifts your chest a bit and pulls your stomach in.
To reinforce that posture an excercise you can do is to stand up and try to lift your chest, while keeping your shoulders down. Take a breathe, send your fingers reaching for the floor while lifting your chest and pulling your stomach in as tight as your can. Try not to make your neck tight when you do this. Try to hold this position for a minute at a time. Breathing as you do so.

I have had severe back problems and have had to look into a lot these methods. Possibly the single best thing I did was to get a gymball. I use it stretch my back and my hips and even use as a chair sometimes. The idea is that your body has to force itself to stabilize so it uses your muscles on the back and front of your trunk to do so. A cause of a lot of bad backs is weak abs and not a weak back. Also your body moves through the day, a little correction here and there, so you stay flexible.

I'm at looking at trying out this chair which is based on the same prinicples but looks like a chair. It's made in Germany and they just started selling it here. I never used this chair, but there is a store about an hour away from me and the next time I get some money, I may check it out.

We all sit on our butts for extending times... so a good quality chair is a nice asset. No pun intented. Back support is mantatory, so some "executive" type office chair is worth the investment, or pick one up used. More important, get up and walk around on a regular basis for a few minutes every hour. Sitting in your chair hardly moving or not getting up is what contributes to giving you back and neck pain. Get up and smell the roses or whatever at least a couple times a hour. You actually will get more done in the long run than sitting without moving for hours on end.

I found that all the office max type chairs start to squeak a lot after 6 months of fulltime use too, that's a pain... you can oil em, that helps.. but still.

agree coursedesign re msft natural keyboards are great, been using them for years, I'd NEVER use a regular keyboard again... the natural one is far superior... like getting a shuttlepro for vegas.. a must have once you've tried it...

I'll look up those other chairs .. thx..

ken

I'm one of those with an aeron chair and I love it. That doesn't mean you couldn't get a similar effect for less.

I leave my chair fairly loose and it's a lot like a rocker. This keeps me moving a bit more as I and swivel around, lean back, rock forward.

The other thing that's important, especially if you're prone to sciatica, is that the chair give when you sit down. There should be some bounce in the thing. As for the aeration you get from a mesh back...it's nice but I don't know that it's essential.

There are other threads on this topic. Spot said that he keeps a smaller ball under his feet and that by letting him move his feet and legs more.

A standing height workstation has the advantage that you can shoose to stand or sit in a high chair. It'd make it easier to get that ball under your feet as well.

Rob Mack

Back support is mantatory

Actually according to the methods I mentioned, back support is actually part of the problem. If you get a chair with sturdy back support, over time you will come to rely on it and you will "sink" into your chair instead of sitting upright. This weakens your core stabilizing muscles.

A stool may be a better method that an executive chair. The rub is that, if your back is in bad shape or you are used to an executive type chair, you may not be able to use a backless chair or sit up straight for extended periods of time. If that's the case you may want to ease into the new methods.


Another thing for me is the height of the seat itself. I need the seat high enough that some of my weight is supported by my legs and not just by my butt/back.

Heck, sit on some orange crate if you want. A chair with a built up back isn't better or worse than a chair without a back. Its all to do with personal preference, body weight, age, how long you sit, how much you move or don't, if or not you are twisting around looking at different monitors or not, etc., etc.. It isn't the chair or stool or crate...its how you sit on it. You can sit "wrong" in any chair.

In my bygone auditing days during the 70-'s 80's I could sit in anything from the boss's $1,000+ chair to some typist's chair that was broken and nobody else would sit in to finding a couple file storage boxes to sit on or in some rare cases standing. Hint: Auditors aren't the most welcome guys to come calling.

For those that are interested, there is a device out there called a powerball, that is supposed to help reduce RMI's (Repetative Motion Injuries) in the wrist. Anyway, they're maybe 30-40 bucks, but they're great fun. They make all kinds, but I suggest the fastest ones with RPM indicators, and lights - I've had them spinning just a little over 12,000 rpm in my hand (it works just by rotating them).

Dave