The Best Chair Is No Chair At All

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Like most passionate crusades, hers is highly personal. Stricken with severe rotatory scoliosis, she was told 20 years ago to expect the curvature of her spine to worsen. Chairs exacerbated her problem. Remarkably, she improved her spine through the Alexander technique, a holistic therapy that aligns the head-neck joint correctly. Her success, and a chance perusal of snapshots a friend took in Upper Volta, inspired her to write her book. In the photos Cranz noticed two men with fabulous posture: spines erect, heads balanced, necks relaxed. Not coincidentally, they were the only people in the village who had not attended missionary school. For Cranz, this was an epiphany: The problem wasn't poorly designed chairs; the problem was chairs, period. The body is designed to move. As she put it: “What's the best posture? The next one.”

Looking at these pictures, I felt self-conscious; my own posture, in profile, conjures a banana more than it does Homo erectus. Cranz pulled out a stool. I sat down.

“Well,” she said, assessing me from all sides, “you may be sitting wrong in the sense that you might not really be up on your sit bones, those two little bones in your butt. Then of course your muscles have become weak from years of leaning on chair backs. When we use the chair back, our backs become weaker, so we need the chair back more. There's the vicious cycle.” Dramatic pause. “But there's a third thing, and that is that you, a tall man, are probably sitting on a stool that's too short for you.” Before I could protest, she was stacking books on my stool and sitting me back down. “See, already, to me, it looks like that's better for you . . . you're getting more 135-ish.”

For Cranz, 135 is a magic number. With our knees bent at 135 degrees rather than the conventional 90, we distribute our weight in a way that takes stress off the neck and lower back, and keeps our torso from collapsing in on itself. To get there, we need a recliner or a tall chair with a forward-sloping seat. Nicknamed a “perch,” the latter has been adopted by the Danish elementary school system, along with a taller, sloped desk. It keeps the knees open and balances the pelvic muscles.

While Cranz would love to see just such a postural awakening in the United States, she knows it won't be easy. One study showed that kindergartners always chose the biggest chair, no matter how uncomfortable, because they pictured God sitting on a throne. To encourage turnover, restaurants buy “15-minute chairs,” deliberately designed to grow uncomfortable in that time. Car seat manufacturers evaluate prototypes by test-sitting them for precisely 8.5 minutes—the average time a potential buyer sits in a car in the showroom.

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