Nobody has ever fixed this with a chair.

You have been told, by somebody, that you sit badly. Possibly with a diagram. Possibly with a red line drawn down a photograph of a stranger's spine.

In 2020 a group went through the whole literature on this, forty-one systematic reviews, more than four thousand papers screened, asking a simple question: does the evidence show that spinal posture causes back pain? Their answer was that there is no consensus that it does. Association, yes. Causation, no.

I want to be careful here, because this is where people hear something I don't mean. Your pain is real and it is coming from somewhere. What the evidence doesn't support is the idea that you have been sitting incorrectly and that assuming a better shape will fix it. That story has been sold hard for thirty years, with furniture attached, and it has left an enormous number of people believing they are one posture correction away from relief, and failing at it without anyone noticing.

Nobody set out to mislead you. The posture model is intuitive, it's easy to draw, and it was taught to every one of us. I taught it. Confidently, with a whiteboard, for years.

The thing that does hold up is duration and capacity. Not what shape, but how long, and how much your tissue can currently tolerate. Those are two things you can change. The angle of your monitor is not really one of them.

The practical version is in the desk posture guide, and the unglamorous half nobody mentions, what happens to hips that sit all day, is next door to it. And if the week has a shape to it, fine Tuesday, wrecked Thursday, why it is worse some weeks is the one to read next.

The studio is at 1800 Glenarm Place, basement level, downtown. If you work in the LoDo or Uptown core you're walking distance, which matters more than it sounds. The single biggest predictor of whether training works is whether you turn up to it, and a thing you can reach on foot at 12:15 gets turned up to.

Sessions are 60 minutes, or 30 when that's what the work needs, one-on-one, with me, in the studio or on Zoom. First visit is a 30-minute assessment, $57: your history, what's been tried, what your week looks like, and then testing what your neck, back and hips currently accept. Not a shared appointment, not a printed sheet, and no part of it happens on a machine that holds you still.

I've covered the desk-bound version of this on 9NEWS more than once, posture in the workplace, and returning to it, which is a polite way of saying I've been arguing about office chairs on regional television for some years now.

So it was never the chair. It was thirty hours a week in one shape, and a body that has lost the range it isn't being asked for. Which, read back, is not a complicated idea, and is a much more hopeful one than being told your spine is wrong.

So there you have it. You know it now. Enjoy the ergonomic assessment.