Stools, Ball & Sit/Stand Ergonomic Office Chairs - Seating For Special Situations

There is a wide range of alternative ergonomic office seating available to office workers today and a lot of these different types of office chair can be very beneficial for your body's posture and wellbeing.

Broadly speaking these alternative ergonomic seats fall into the following categories:

• Specialist Stools and Saddle Seats
• Ergonomic Ball Chairs and Stools
• Sit/Stand Seating

The above categories are fairly general as a number of these ergonomic seating products could be included in more than category.

So why might you consider one of these alternative forms of office seating?

Most of these ergonomic seating products are designed to help and encourage you to sit and work more comfortably and productively when performing your daily office tasks.

In the main they promote a healthy and correct postural seating position, due to the way they are designed.

Whilst it is all too easy to slouch in a conventional office chair this isn't the case with these types of ergonomic chairs.

The main reason for this is that they encourage dynamic movement of your body as well as making your back form into its natural healthy spinal curvature. By doing so this automatically reduces the stress and strain felt in your back and neck as well as avoiding disc compression in your lower back.

With a conventional office chair you can all too easily find yourself sitting in a closed angle posture, (i.e. less than 90°). Such a seating position simply isn't conducive to your body's health and wellbeing in the long term.

Prolonged use of a poor office chair may result in disc compression, poor head carriage and neck posture and even poor circulation in your legs.

Looking at each category, here is a brief summary of the advantages of these alternative forms of ergonomic office seat.

Ball Chairs

The ergonomic ball chair is a relatively new concept which is proving very popular and is designed to promote a healthy seating position. The user inflates the Ball to suit individual comfort requirements, seating height, body weight etc.

One of the advantages of this type of ergonomic office seating is the ability to support very heavily built users, if necessary.

You will find reviews of 4 ball chairs the Ergo Ball Chair, the Jobri Sit-A-Round, the Ball Dynamics Ball and the BalanceBall. These reviews will enable you to consider the advantages of the ergonomic ball chair idea in greater depth.

Ergonomic Stools & Saddle Seats

The majority of these types of ergonomic seat don't have a back to them and consequently don't allow you to lean back or slouch against a poorly positioned back support.

This is particularly true of the saddle seat, for example, the Humanscale Freedom Saddle Seat. As the saddle encourages you to lower your thighs and open up your hips resulting in an open seating position where your body angle is about 110°. This open angle places your spine into lordosis, which ensures the spine's natural curvature is adopted.

The other advantage of the saddle type of seat is the reduction in pressure points on your body, particularly the backs of your thighs.

Sit/Stand Chairs

The idea of the sit/stand chair is the ability to have a wide range of height adjustment for the user, this enables you to adopt a normal seating height position or a semi-standing position.

Probably the best known sit/stand chair is HÅG's Capisco which gives a very wide height adjustment enabling you to use the seat with a height adjustable desk. As you adopt the semi-standing position you will find you make much more use of your legs when moving in your sit/stand chair.

This encourages a dynamic seating position and allows body movement and variation and so promote a healthy seating position. This type of seating enables you to easily achieve the open body angle which is vital for good seating posture.

Reviews of Ball Chairs, Stools and Sit/Stand Chairs

In the next section we review some of the more popular models available in these specialist office seating products starting with the Ergo Ball Chair as well as a further 8 reviews.