Lumbar Support Chairs For PC Gamers

The chair you sit in makes a massive difference to your spine health, which makes a massive difference to your ability to walk around without being in pain. I dropped $300 on my desk chair and it was the best thing I ever did. Reaping the benefits of adjustable seat back and lumbar support, the lower regions of my spine are no longer painfully battling against the near constant slouching I used to do.

Older PC gamers (and when I say older, I mean anyone pushing 25) need to think about spine health. Poor posture isn't just unappealing to your Victorian governess, it can also make it hard to walk in later life by contributing to conditions like sciatica and causing general ungainliness.

TL,DR PRO TIP: It's worth upgrading your chair to make a significant difference to your posture stat, which in turn boosts your agility and speed stats.

Tips For Buying A Lumbar Support Chair

First of all, forget 'gaming chairs', they're mostly gimmicky and will cost you ridiculous amounts of money for relatively little return. A good office chair will do as well as any gaming chair, and pound for pound, be far more cost effective. Whilst you're at it, also forget 'ergonomic chairs', the ones that require you to kneel as if you're in a confessional the entire time you're at your desk. There's no evidence these do anything for your posture and there's certainly no lumbar support in them.

Adjustable Height

This is the bare minimum that should come standard on any chair. The right height for your chair is the height at which you can comfortably rest your forearms on the desk without hunching over, straining your shoulders or lifting your elbows too high. Your thighs should be parallel with the floor. If it's not possible to do this and still reach your desk properly, your desk is the wrong size and needs to be raised or lowered.

Adjustable Lumbar Support

This is a good thing. Some of us need more lumbar support than others. A chair that allows you to roll the lumbar support section around to suit you has advantages over a chair with static lumbar support.

Adjstable Back Height

Separate from chair height, adjustable back height sometimes takes the place of adjustable lumbar support in some chairs. The lumbar support section stays static, but the chair back can be moved up and down to get that support section in the right place.

Seat Tilt

Some chairs have a seat tilt option that allows you to tip the seat angle forward or back. This can releive excess pressure on the thighs during marathon gaming sessions and is certainly a useful feature, albeit one that is overlooked in many chairs.

Arms or no Arms?

This makes little difference to lumbar support and is really a matter of personal preference.

A Final Tip

Spend as much on your gaming/ office chair as you can comfortably afford. Even if you spend just ten hours a week gaming, (a conservative estimate for most of us) that's over five hundred hours a year and the chair you sit in will make a big difference to both your gaming experience and spine health.

Also, try before you buy. Brave the big sun ball, go to a store and sit in a chair before you get it. Unless it has super awesome Amazon reviews from people you would trust with your quality of life or something equally convincing.