Posture Correction Blog

One of my favourite books on posture correction is “The seated man (Homo Sedans)” by Dr A.C. Mandel.

In this book Dr A.C. Mandel pointed out that common misconceptions about good posture and sitting. This title is a great reference, but unfortunately is a little tricky to find these days since it was first published around 1977.

However, I was looking for it on Google and stumbled across an interesting book:-

“Increasing Productivity and Profit in the Workplace”, By M. Glynn Shumake

I was reading this preview and found some interesting information halfway down on page 53.

Shumake says that designers have for over 100 years misunderstood how people sit in chairs. It has been assumed that the hip joint rotates 90 degrees in order to sit on a regular chair. Apparently, the trouble with this is that in reality the hamstring muscle makes this impossible for normal people to achieve.

This means that chair designs don’t take into consideration the way the body works. This would explain why everyone slumps and hunches when they sit down at their desks.

In my opinion posture correction for the masses can only happen once designers start to fully understand the way that people sit. An excellent example is the Bambach chair:-
http://www.bambach.co.uk/

These chairs have one problem; they are too expensive for the average person (around £500). This has everything to do with the scales of production. In order to get the price down the volumes must reach many tens of thousands.

I would say that the demand at present is nowhere near that kind of level, largely because the market is uneducated when it comes to posture correction.

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