After a year of sitting in nine top-rated chairs and talking to four ergonomics experts, we’ve concluded that the Steelcase Gesture is the best office chair for most posteriors. Thanks to its ball-and-socket armrests (which function like a human shoulder), it offers a wider range of adjustability than any other task chair, so you’re more likely to find a fit that works for you, however you like to sit.

If the Gesture isn’t available, we recommend our previous pick, the Steelcase Leap.

Our pick: Steelcase Gesture. This model has a wider range of more easily accessible adjustments than any other chair, so you feel fully supported in almost any position.

The Gesture is also attractively designed and more compact than any other full-featured task chair; Steelcase offers dozens of finishing options, too. This means it will look better in a wider variety of spaces than its competitors. And in addition to being more comfortable, its highly adjustable arms let you stow the chair almost anywhere since you can lower them and tuck them in as needed to fit under a smaller desk. Steelcase is also renowned for its build quality, and the Gesture is no exception, but should anything go wrong, the company’s chairs are backed by a 12-year warranty.

We like the Steelcase Gesture for most people because it is highly adjustable if you need that but still solid if you don’t. It’s designed to accommodate a modern workflow, where people aren’t expected to sit still in front of a keyboard and monitor all day. Lean back to check your phone, and the chair leans with you—keeping your body supported all the while. If you need to make room for a tablet on your lap, the armrests rotate outward to accommodate that, and downward to support your lowered elbows. While everybody knows not to cross one’s legs or slouch while sitting, the Gesture won’t punish you for doing so; flexible and padded edges keep the cushioning comfortable regardless of your body positioning. And if you do want to sit up straight all day, the Gesture is just as comfortable as the best task chairs currently available.

We may seem to be overstating the significance of adjustability, but once you understand the principles of healthy and comfortable seating, you’ll see why adjustability is so important.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The first rule for correct chair use is to sit the buttocks as far back in the seat as possible,” explained physiotherapist Dr. Jenny Pynt in an email interview. “That should place your low back against the lumbar support, and your upper spine against the backrest with neck in line with the spine.” The Gesture makes this position easy to find with a twist of a knob on the right side of the seat cushion, whereas other similar products don’t have this adjustment at all.

“Your feet should be supported on the floor or a footrest,” Pynt continued. To make this possible, you have to adjust the chair’s height until you find a comfortable position. The Gesture has a switch located on the back half of the seat-depth knob that lets you adjust the seat height as easily as the depth. Most other task chairs place these different adjustments in different locations using a combination of levers, dials, and switches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gesture’s arms offer an unprecedented range of motion to support your elbows in almost any position.

Pynt went on to say: “Shoulders should be relaxed with upper arm beside the body. Elbows at 90 degrees or a more open angle, with wrists in neutral if typing.” This is where the Gesture really shines: Its ball-and-socket armrests can rotate freely to support your elbows in almost any position and keep your wrists comfortable. To adjust the armrests, you hold down a tab under the rest to unlock the arm, which you can then smoothly pivot in any direction. Let go of the tab to lock the arm in place. It’s more like posing an action figure than adjusting a chair. The armrest pads slide forward and backward and rotate independently of the arms. While the Steelcase Leap can adjust in all of these directions as well, its range is much more limited in comparison because it relies on telescoping armrests for height adjustment (think adjusting the height on a pair of crutches) and on sliding armrest pads that can move outward by only a couple of inches.

According to Pynt, arm support is important for your back’s health as well, because your arms are heavy, and a lack of support leads to slouching: “Any posture where you are leaning forward from the vertical without arm support will require the back muscles to work overtime to maintain an erect posture, leading to muscle stress and resultant pain.” So it’s a good thing that the Gesture’s armrests can go lower, higher, wider, and narrower than those of any other chair.

The Gesture’s back panel (top) is designed to flex as it reclines.

Back support is just as important as arm support in preventing slouching, and the Gesture’s back panel was among the best we tested. Like the Leap that came before it, the Gesture is shaped to match the natural contour of your back. Most other chairs simply pivot, but the Gesture’s back panel is designed to flex as well, since your spine has a different shape when you’re reclining compared with when you’re sitting up straight. We can’t confirm without using an MRI, but we can say that our testers felt more supported by the Gesture than by other chairs when sitting in a reclined position.

Reclining support is about more than lazing around. Rani Lueder told us that reclining can actually be beneficial. “[When] leaning back,” she explained, “not only are you intermittently relieving the loads on your spine [but also] in the process, opening up your thigh-torso angle.” Shifting between these beneficial postures is good practice in and of itself: “When you move, you redistribute pressure [and] you help promote circulation,” she explained. In addition to supporting you while you recline, the Gesture lets you easily control how much you can recline, and how readily it leans back. Simply turn the front part of the knob behind the seat-depth knob to adjust resistance (clockwise for more resistance, counterclockwise for less) and click the switch on to adjust how far back you can lean. Again, you can use one hand to make all of the adjustments you need.

The seat cushion rises a bit as you recline, keeping your arms at the same height as your keyboard.

When it comes to actual sitting, the Gesture’s seat is initially cushy, which offers you short-term comfort, yet springy, which keeps you supported for long-term sitting sessions. That might seem like a “no duh” type of thing for a chair that costs so much, but lots of chairs take different approaches. The Gesture’s full-seat cushioning and flexible front edge give you some wiggle room in where you can sit while still feeling supported.

With the Gesture, you just choose your color and whether you need hardwood-compatible casters, and you’re all set.

Who else likes our pick?

John Brandon, writing for Inc., loves the Gesture’s emphasis on flexibility: “All of this movement is ideal for the work environment: you are not locked into one stiff position, and the chair encourages flexibility. The adjustment levers are easy to find on the right and intuitive.”

David Pogue at The New York Times likes that the extended seat-cushion padding increases the number of comfortable positions you can find in it: “You can hang a limb over any of the seat’s edges without worrying about getting gangrene.

One thing we dislike: The Gesture doesn’t have adjustable lumbar support like its predecessor, the Leap, does. However, all three of our testers were able to find a comfortable position without this adjustment, and besides the Leap, none of the other chairs we tested this time around had this feature either.

We loved the adjustability of the armrests, but unfortunately the locking mechanism applies only to the vertical adjustment and doesn’t lock the horizontal rotational adjustment. The adjustments are typically pretty sticky and not prone to moving by accident, but Wirecutter staff writer Kimber Streams found that they have a tendency to slip if you lean on one instead of both to get out of the chair.

Runner-up

The Steelcase Leap used to be our top pick, and we still like it a lot.

If you know that you won’t benefit from the adjustability of the Gesture, or if the Gesture is unavailable for whatever reason, keep in mind that we still love our former pick, the Steelcase Leap. It’s comparable to the Gesture in comfort, but it falls short in adjustability—although it does add adjustable lumbar support, which the Gesture lacks. The Leap has traditional telescoping armrests instead of the Live 360 pivoting ones on its newer sibling, but it offers the same reclining mechanism and customizability of the Gesture.

Overall, the two chair models are quite similar. David Pogue writes in his New York Times review: “You can adjust the Leap in most of the same ways as the Gesture, but it costs less.” That’s true, but you get about 20 percent more range of motion with the Gesture in any direction compared with the Leap. Considering how important proper arm support is to a comfortable posture and a healthy back, we think you can easily justify spending the extra amount for fancy armrests. The Gesture is also a bit more compact and better looking than the Leap.

How we picked

All of the experts and ergonomists we talked to stressed this simple fact: Every person’s body is different, and finding the perfect chair is a highly subjective endeavor. Rani Lueder, the founder of the California-based firm Humanics ErgoSystems, has been doing ergonomics consulting for chair manufacturers, offices, organizations like the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and others since 1982. She told us, “Good ergonomists don’t say something’s an ergonomic chair unless it works for that person in that specific system—the task they have and the equipment they have.”

Even so, we can say that certain features and behaviors in a chair are good or bad. In general, a more adjustable chair will ensure a better fit and a greater likelihood of promoting good postures. You can also find some less-conventional chair styles that might be better suited for certain users. People who suffer from back pain, Lueder explained, might benefit from a chair that gently rocks instead of reclines, or a stool-chair hybrid that allows for a more open thigh-torso angle.

On the other side of the coin are some specific things you should avoid. Dr. Jenny Pynt, a physiotherapist and the author of A History of Seating 3000 BC to 2000 AD: Function Versus Aesthetics and The Design and Use of Healthy Seating, told us to “avoid chairs that force your upper spine, that part between the shoulder blades, forward. So-called ‘executive’ chairs often do this.” Basically, you want something that’s supporting your back, not sculpting it. The same goes for the lower region. Another common mistake, Pynt warned, is “sitting with the low back maximally arched. This position compresses the joints in the spine, creating pain.”

Pynt pointed out a few other categories that often spell trouble, recommending against stools and other seats without backrests, at least as full-time accommodations, “because no matter how virtuous you are, you will slump.” And while exercise balls can improve the endurance of spinal muscles, Pynt told us, “research demonstrates that sitting for 30 minutes on an exercise ball or a seat without a backrest will result in slouching.”

So with that basic understanding of what to shoot for—and what to avoid—your next step is to narrow your options down to a certain price range.

Good ergonomics are not inherently expensive, and expensive does not necessarily guarantee good ergonomics. The basic principles that have guided chair design for the past several decades have to some extent trickled down to the lesser chairs of the world. You could find a chair that makes good ergonomic sense for you at the office-supply store down the street, but it is less likely, and many big-box-store chairs have limited adjustability. All of the experts we talked to at length agreed that, for people who can afford it, investing in a high-end office chair is a better bet. As Alan Hedge of Cornell told us, “There’s the old saying ‘You get what you pay for.’ That’s very true in chairs.”

Where the difference between a $200 chair from a no-name manufacturer and an $800 chair from a respected one is most pronounced is in the quality of the materials and the build of the product. Chairs endure a good deal of wear and tear—and thus occasionally require maintenance. Lower-quality materials mean that cheaper chairs are likely to wear out much more quickly than more expensive models. Seat cushions in particular can give out quickly, one expert explained to us, with cheaper foam leaving you with a chair that feels totally different on day 400 than it did on day one.

The other disadvantage of cheaper chairs is that they have limited warranties. Whereas the typical no-name chair might be covered for one or two years, most high-end chairs come with at least an eight-year warranty, meaning the manufacturer will happily replace broken casters or out-of-whack armrests. As Wirecutter founder Brian Lam outlined in 2012 in The New York Times, a handy equation for determining the true cost of a product is dividing its price by the number of hours you’re going to use it. With the certainty that it will last at least eight years, the true cost of a high-end task chair starts looking much more reasonable.

The idea that one high-end task chair’s incredible ergonomic design will lead you to a long, limber life while a competitor’s will turn you into a snarling hunchback is not really accurate. It’s important to find a chair that makes sense for your body, certainly, and the high-end chairs you’ll find out there represent a diversity of materials, mechanics, and philosophies about sitting. But in broader terms, you can expect the majority of the most popular options to be comparable in fundamental ergonomic principles and overall performance. “Once you’re in that price range” of several hundred dollars, Hedge explained, “it becomes more a matter of personal choice than a matter of one chair being orders of magnitude better than another chair.”

The idea that one high-end task chair’s incredible ergonomic design will lead you to a long, limber life while a competitor’s will turn you into a snarling hunchback is not really accurate. It’s important to find a chair that makes sense for your body, certainly, and the high-end chairs you’ll find out there represent a diversity of materials, mechanics, and philosophies about sitting. But in broader terms, you can expect the majority of the most popular options to be comparable in fundamental ergonomic principles and overall performance. “Once you’re in that price range” of several hundred dollars, Hedge explained, “it becomes more a matter of personal choice than a matter of one chair being orders of magnitude better than another chair.”

How do you figure out what fits you? The best way, everyone we talked to agreed, is simply to test a few chairs out. Your relationship with your task chair isn’t supposed to be a passionate affair; it’s a marriage. So rather than relying on your first impression, you have to look for long-term compatibility. “You can do a 30-second butt test on a bean bag chair and it feels great,” Hedge joked. But to really get a feel for a chair, a more thorough butt test is required.

Rani Lueder recommends testing out a new chair for at least 30 minutes, in the type of setting you’d be using it in at home or in the office. That last part is crucial. Ideally, you’ll want to bring your laptop to Design Within Reach or some other dealer, zero in on a few contenders, pull ’em up to a desk, and knock out a few emails. Yes, doing this requires a bit more of an effort than sorting Amazon search results or driving down the street to Office Max and settling on the first seat that seems like a decent fit, but when you’re talking about a product that could well be in your life longer than your current pet or significant other, an afternoon of butt testing seems prudent.

Source: The Wirecutter.com

Contact us and book your visit to the COS showrooms to test Gesture, Leap or both.