Why a chiropractor tells you one size doesn’t fit all for your office seating.

Often when we think of a good night’s sleep, we begin with what we are sleeping on. Once you go pass the age of about 25, you start to find crashing on the floor or even going more premium with an inflatable mattress becomes less appealing. You start to look at hotel prices nearby to a friend’s house or even just making it a day trip. You’ve begun to enjoy some of life’s creature comforts. Your bones don’t appreciate the lack of support from not spending the night on a comfy mattress.

Premier Inn realised this a long time ago, with their genius collaboration with Silentnight. Customers typically at the lower end of the hotel price market, still wanted a good night’s sleep and a good price per night to match it. Silentnight got to get lots of bodies on their product and Premier Inn could inch ahead of the competition in their segment and in some cases lure customers from mid to higher end hotels. But where it gets clever is when the hotel guest realised how blissfully they slept, they could then purchase the mattress for their home and know with confidence they’d found their perfect match.

What the collaboration proved is, even though the customer had only paid £29.00 for a night’s stay, they didn’t mind parting with £800.00 for something they had experienced as a worthy investment. So, they wanted value for money and didn’t mind paying for it.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for generic office seating. The wild west of plastic, mesh and foam. If you want one nowadays, cheap and cheerful or high-end top of the range, the majority of us are left with, add to basket and hope. If you’ve never tried anything decent to sit on then you probably didn’t feel like you’d missed out. This was the benchmark. But I don’t think this has been total failure by the employer.

If we were to, on mass fit and supply every employee, contractor, temp with the perfect fit chair for them then we’d be angels but it’s not probable. So, where the answer lays are in the adjustment options of the chair, the set up and DSE assessment and the education to the user of the chair about how to get the best from it.

It can be a sea of levers, buttons, rotary dials, gas struts and even sphygmomanometry. Learn what all these do and you can adjust your throne to work for you. You’ll sit there supported with better circulation, a better centre of gravity and your productivity and performance are certain to improve. You’ll feel better when you leave at the end of the day, joints less compressed and muscles less fatigued.

The answer is education. So, reach out for this from your DSE assessor, this can be a designated internal member of staff or an external service. More importantly learn yourself how to get more than the minimum requirement from your workstation.

Follow us as at WellAdjusted for tips and tricks to get the most from your own chair or learn what you need to replace it with when all else fails.