How to Fine Tune Your Office Chair to Avoid Back and Neck Pain

How to Fine Tune Your Office Chair to Avoid Back and Neck Pain My patient Steve just brought a nice new ergonomic chair that has all the bells and whistles and a lot of different adjusting levels. I get asked this question quite a lot and will talk about little bit about how you want to set up your desk and especially chair at your office or at home. So let's start from the ground up. You want your feet planted firmly right on the ground. If you have a chair or desk that's really high and you can't lower the chair, then you will want to get something underneath your feet to account for that gap because you don't want the chair digging into the back of your of your legs. If there's an adjustable component of the seat or just when you'repicking out a chairyou want to make sure that it's QRW VR ORQJ IRU \RXU OHJV WKDW LW¶s pushing into the back of your leg. You will want to go two or three inches between the end of the chair and the back of the calf. In terms of the level of the height itself as well as if there's a tilt component to it you want to set it such that your hips are level with or preferably a little bit higher than your knees. So we have the up-and-down height adjusted such that your hips are just a little bit higher than your knees and what that does is it pulls the pelvis and hips a little bit forward so that your low back muscles don't have to work as hard to maintain a nice upright posture.