How to Adjust Your Office Chair
Regardless of whether an office chair costs $200, $500, or $1,000, if it isn’t set up right, it’s not doing you any good.
Taking the time to adjust it for your body and the type of work you do is a necessity. A good chair lets you customize the height, seat depth, and armrests and reclines to your body so you’re comfortable no matter your task.
But it isn’t always obvious how to dial in those options for comfort and ergonomics.
Your first step should be pulling out the instruction manual for your chair or looking for an adjustment diagram online. Once you have that, here’s how to dial in all the adjustments for the best ergonomics.
This is one of the most adjustable chairs available—anyone can make it comfortable, regardless of their height or size. And it’s built to last.
Adjust the height
Sit down and adjust the height of the chair so your feet are flat on the ground and your legs form a 90-degree angle. Your knees should align with or rest slightly lower than your hips.
Over time, if you feel pressure near your butt, raise the chair a little. If you feel pressure at the front of your legs, lower the chair.
Ideally, in this position, your elbows are bent 90 degrees or more towards the desk, with the keyboard below your wrists. If this isn’t possible and you have a standing desk, lower the desk. Otherwise, raise your chair higher—and if you’re no longer able to keep your feet flat on the floor, get a footrest.
Adjust the seat depth
If a chair allows it, you may need to adjust the depth of the seat—meaning where you sit in relation to the backrest.
Sliding the seat works similarly to how it does in a car, usually with a button underneath the seat or a knob on the side. Sit on the chair and keep your feet flat on the floor, then check that the clearance between the seat and your calves fits a clenched fist.
If the front of the seat is digging into the back of your knees, slide the seat back a little.
If you have too much room and your knees are sticking out, slide the seat forward.
Adjust the arm rests
Adjust the height of the armrests so they’re at elbow height with your shoulders relaxed, and your arms are at a 90-degree angle.
If the armrests are too high, they force you to shrug; too low, and you slouch.
If the arms slide in or out, as on the Steelcase Gesture office chair pictured above, move them so they support whatever work you’re doing. For example, slide them in when you’re typing out a long email on a keyboard, then slide one out when you’re working more with the mouse. It’s good to get in the habit of adjusting your armrests as you change tasks.
Adjust the recline and tilt tension
According to Rani Lueder, founder of Humanics Ergonomics, reclining in a chair is an important way to relieve loads on your spine while opening up your thigh-torso angle, so you should do it throughout the day.
If the chair has a tilt-limiter setting, lean back as far as you want to go and lock it into place. Cornell University’s ergonomics department recommends around 110 degrees as a good place to keep your chair’s recline for keyboard and mouse tasks. Don’t be afraid to unlock the recline and lean farther back throughout the day. Shifting positions helps redistribute pressure and promote circulation.
Some chairs allow you to set the tension of the tilt, either in place of the recline angle or in tandem with it. Adjust the tension so you can lean back in the chair comfortably without using a lot of force, and make sure the chair doesn’t spring upright too strongly when you lean forward.
If you can’t lean back without forcibly pushing, loosen the tension. If you find yourself using your core to pull yourself out of the chair when it’s tilted back, tighten the tension.
Adjust the lumbar support
Not all chairs have lumbar support—it’s usually a small plastic piece attached to the backside of the chair—but if yours does, slide it so it fits into the natural curve of your spine.
If you can adjust the amount of pressure the lumbar support applies, dial it in until it’s comfortable: If you feel too much pressure in your lower back, let it out a little.
You might have to tweak some of these settings over time because your personal taste for what’s comfortable can change as you get used to a new chair. But these initial steps should at least get you started when it comes to ergonomics.
One of the benefits of owning a nice, adjustable, durable chair is that you can easily adjust it throughout the day. Don’t shy away from changing the settings as you shift tasks.
This article was edited by Erica Ogg.
Mentioned above
- The impressively supportive, adjustable, and durable Steelcase Gesture is still our pick for the best office chair for most people, as it has been since 2015.The Best Office Chairs
- After testing more than 25 standing desks over nearly a decade, we recommend the Uplift V2 due to its customizability, wide height range, and stability.The Best Standing Desks
- We put our feet up for weeks to find the best footrests to help you improve the ergonomics at your desk—and make work more comfortable.The Best Under-Desk Footrests
Further reading
How to Clean Your Office Chair
by Melanie Pinola
Your home-office chair is likely getting more use than ever before. Here are our most helpful tips on what you can do to keep it clean.
How to Buy an Office Chair Secondhand
by Melanie Pinola
You can save hundreds of dollars on a high-end office chair if you know where to look and what to look for.
How to Make Your Cheap Office Chair More Comfortable
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Great office chairs aren’t cheap, and not everyone can afford ergonomic perfection. But a few tweaks can make a $50 chair feel nearly as good as a $1,000 one.
The Home Office Gear Wirecutter Staffers Bought to Make It Through the Pandemic
by Ben Keough
Here’s a quick look at the home office gear Wirecutter staffers bought to make their work-from-home lives more bearable over the past year.
