Our lifestyles have changed drastically and have taken a turn away from physical activities. Sedentary jobs are on the rise and so is the number of hours people are spending in them. An average office goer spends most of his working time slouching in front of the computer. A walk to the nearby department store has been replaced by a drive to the shopping mall and social networking has taken over meeting up at the cinemas or at the park. The result - physical fitness is on the wane and back pain is back with a vengeance!



The wheels of progress will not turn backwards. So you will spend most of your professional lives sitting in front of the computer or spend most of your commuting time sitting in your automobile waiting for the signal to turn green. When sitting, your spinal cord discs have to work more than while standing to maintain your body's balance. There is more pressure on your back, neck, shoulder, arms, and legs and also to the back muscles and cervical areas. Your chair or car seat should have the right support for your back and also provide the necessary comfort. It should be able to relieve your back muscles of all the stress, tension, and pain that they have to undergo everyday.



To know what chair works best for you and your back, you will need to know the correct sitting posture. You should sit squarely on your pelvic bones. You weight should be equally distributed on the two sides and both at the front and the back. When you are sitting in the correct posture, your spine will be curved like an S, which is the natural lumbar curve. So your seat should support your lumbar region adequately so that you can maintain the correct skeletal alignment when sitting.

The chair with the right seat lumbar support is the key to the correct sitting position and the antidote to all those niggling back pains, stiff necks, shoulder aches, and sitting fatigues. A seat fitted with some sort of support mechanism for the lumbar region will fill the gap between the seat and your lumbar spinal area, so that you do not need to work to maintain the correct posture and the right curvature of the lower back muscles. Without this support, you will naturally tend to slouch, or if you are in a car, to lean forward.