Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Yes or no, we’ll begin… with the tale of a chair which relies on the skills of people across our counties including Wycombe furniture experts.

- Sue Bromley

SITTING, it’s said, is the new smoking. Too many of us now do jobs which see us plonked in front of a computer all day, with just the odd break to walk away from the screen, mostly considered a rest for our eyes.

Commuters hunch over devices on trains, drivers sit in queues, park and then take a short walk to work where they join colleagues similarly stuck on their rear ends for perhaps eight hours plus. Then we go home and unless a sporting activity, social event or a quick spot of gardening draws us out, there’s another chair to sink into. With dark evenings the temptation to be a couch potato is strong… particularly if the back’s ‘playing up’ (probably from all that sitting). As for the increasing number of homeworkers – including those producing this magazine – the temptation to sit in front of a screen for hours on end is always there.

This year Public Health England reported that physical inactivity has become one of the top causes of illness and disability, and responsible for as many deaths as that increasingly old fashioned killer-of-choice, cigarettes.