Sitting Practices to Improve Productivity
Vessi Jalkanen — The Leading Expert In The Knowledge @ Sitting Health Influencing General Health
Veli-Jussi ”Vessi” Jalkanen is a health innovator and preventive health expert besides his many other inventing areas. He is also an entrepreneur with 5 very different companies. The sitting health expert Salli co exports to over 60 countries. He is the leading sitting health expert and developer in ergonomics, sitting physiology and anatomy. He has made himself a test person to many of his and others preventive health and healthy lifestyle ideas and practices. His everyday life is very different compared to ordinary. Vessi is intensively in the process of making the world to understand that optimizing sitting and work environment is one of the key ways to improve preventive personal healthcare, comfort and productivity. Vessi is the creator of the optimum Sitting health concept which has 5 segments: awareness, optimum technology, optimum use, sitting friendly clothing, body activation by motion and steady blood sugar management. Vessi is an eager writer and active international speaker.
In the lecture, you’ll hear how good sitting and ergonomics can increase your productivity and wellbeing.
As far as I have learned to understand health in the world, it concentrates into one thing: it’s all about circulation. Sitting needs to be a support for you and not a drain.
Summary
- Traditional sitting tilts the pelvis back and destroys posture, increasing spinal disc pressure by 30% and blocking vital oxygen and nutrients to the lower back.
- A divided saddle chair promotes a neutral body position and eliminates harmful pressure on the tailbone, pelvic floor, and genitals to maintain long-term physical health.
- Maintaining active circulation of blood and the lymphatic system is critical, as these systems transport nutrients and protect the body from viruses and bacteria.
- Sitting at a 135-degree angle instead of 90 degrees prevents joint strain and osteoarthritis while allowing for optimal lung capacity and intestinal function.
- Active sitting with a swinging seat encourages micro-pelvic movements, while grounding accessories and proper ventilation further boost productivity and overall wellness.
Article
Sitting Practices To Improve Productivity And General Health
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Vessi Jalkanen Made A Radical Case Against The Modern Chair
On a Friday in Helsinki, amid the sharpened curiosity and self-optimization ethos of Biohacker Summit 2019, Vessi Jalkanen stepped onto the stage with a message that was at once mundane and incendiary. Sitting, he argued, was not merely a habit of modern life. Done badly, it was a slow, daily assault on posture, circulation, reproductive health and, ultimately, productivity itself.
Jalkanen, the speaker behind the presentation *Sitting Practices to Improve Productivity*, did not frame his talk as a marginal ergonomic tweak. He framed it as a civilizational correction. “If you take me seriously, you can improve forty to seventy percent of your living time by eliminating a bad thing,” he told the audience.
That “bad thing”, in his telling, was conventional sitting.
The Chair As A Hidden Source Of Physical Decline
Jalkanen’s central claim was stark: when humans stand, the pelvis sits in a healthy position; when they sit in the standard way, it tilts backward and begins to unravel posture from the base upward. The consequences, he suggested, do not stop at a sore back or stiff hips. They ripple through the body.
“When we are standing, the pelvis is in a healthy position, but when we are sitting, it can tilt back and destroy our posture,” he said.
From there, he drew a broader anatomy of damage. Traditional sitting, he argued, increases pressure on the lower spine, especially around the vulnerable L4-L5 disc, while also tightening tissues and weakening circulation. In this account, the office chair becomes less a neutral object than an instrument that quietly compresses the systems the body relies on to function.
His language was urgent, but his premise was straightforward: a body folded badly for hours each day cannot remain unaffected.
A Saddle Seat, A Neutral Body, And An Attempt To Relearn Sitting
Jalkanen’s proposed remedy rested on a concept he has spent years advancing through his work in ergonomics and preventive health: the divided saddle chair.
Drawing on his own experience as a competition rider, he described saddle sitting not as an eccentric niche but as a clue to a more natural human posture. He said his design work began with an effort to identify a “body neutral” and “joint neutral” position, one that mirrored the body’s alignment under reduced strain.
The divided saddle seat, he argued, preserved a gap through the pelvis and removed pressure from the tailbone, pelvic floor and genitals. Unlike flat chairs, which compress soft tissue and encourage collapse, the saddle form was presented as a way of maintaining alignment closer to that of standing.
This was not, in his view, only about comfort. It was about preserving function.
Why Circulation Sat At The Center Of His Argument
Again and again, Jalkanen returned to one word: circulation.
He spoke not only of blood flow but of the lymphatic system, which he described as essential to immunity, nutrient transport and general health. “The blood and lymph circulating system is part of a bigger system, and we need to treasure and cherish them both to be healthy and well,” he said.
In his framing, poor sitting does not merely fatigue muscles. It impedes the body’s capacity to nourish, defend and regulate itself. The buttocks flattened against a seat, the thighs bent at a right angle, the torso slumped forward, all became examples of how ordinary posture can interfere with the movement of blood and lymph through the body.
That argument gave his talk a wider ambition than the usual language of office wellness. He was not simply advocating better desks or more stretching breaks. He was describing sitting as an environmental determinant of health.
The 135-Degree Angle And The Rejection Of The Right Angle
If the modern office has long canonised 90-degree seating as ergonomic orthodoxy, Jalkanen sought to overturn it. He argued that a 135-degree sitting angle was far more compatible with healthy joint function, freer breathing and uncompressed intestinal movement.
“The knees are not so good if they are ninety degree angle,” he warned, linking right-angle sitting to tendon tension, cartilage strain and the beginnings of osteoarthritis. By contrast, he suggested, a more open angle allowed the body to operate with less resistance.
His formulation was practical as much as anatomical. “Choose a posture where both lungs and intestines work well to ensure your body functions as it should.”
That line captured the spirit of the session. Sitting, for Jalkanen, was never just about the back. It was about the integrated mechanics of the whole body.
Productivity, In His View, Began With Movement Rather Than Stillness
The paradox in Jalkanen’s talk was that better sitting did not mean more stillness. It meant more motion.
To protect the lower back, he said, people needed not just better posture but “enough activity”, even while seated. His answer was a swinging seat that encouraged what he called “micropelvic movement”, subtle shifts meant to keep tissues engaged and circulation active.
“To prevent back problems, we need to have good posture and enough activity, which a swinging seat will provide by encouraging micropelvic movement,” he said.
This idea challenged the old ideal of the disciplined, immobile worker fixed in place for hours. In Jalkanen’s model, productivity came not from suppressing bodily needs but from designing around them.
The Talk Extended Into Reproductive And Pelvic Health
Some of the most pointed sections of the presentation focused on areas often ignored in mainstream ergonomic discussion: genital health, pelvic pressure and temperature regulation.
Jalkanen argued that standard chairs place harmful pressure on the pelvic floor and genitals, and that clothing can make matters worse by reducing ventilation. For men, he tied this to blood flow, erectile function and testosterone production. For women, he warned against sustained pressure on the vulva and pelvic floor, linking better seating and airflow to reduced risk of irritation and infection.
His argument was both intimate and structural. The body, he suggested, had not evolved for compression in these areas, and a properly designed seat should respect that reality rather than deny it.
Beyond The Chair, An Entire Ergonomic Environment
Jalkanen’s vision extended beyond seat design. He described an “optimum” working environment as one that included an automatically adjusting table, proper ventilation, grounding tools, suitable clothing and even foot-stimulating design elements built into newer chair models.
In his telling, productivity was not a matter of willpower but of systems. A healthier environment could make concentration easier because it reduced the small frictions, restrictions and physiological compromises that accumulate across the day.
This was consistent with his broader biography as presented at the event. Jalkanen, a health innovator, entrepreneur and preventive health advocate, has spent years promoting a wider sitting health concept built around awareness, technology, use, clothing, movement and blood sugar stability. The Helsinki presentation was a distillation of that campaign.
A Future Imagined In Water
Perhaps the most striking glimpse of the future came at the close of the session, when Jalkanen described aquatic workstations designed to reduce the burden of gravity on the body. For people with serious joint or circulatory problems, he suggested, sitting or standing in a pool could become a meaningful productivity tool rather than a novelty.
It was an idea that sat somewhere between rehabilitation, workplace design and speculative wellness. Yet in the context of the talk, it made a kind of sense. If gravity, compression and stagnation are the enemies, then buoyancy becomes a potential ally.
A Talk That Recast Sitting As A Public Health Question
By the end of *Sitting Practices to Improve Productivity* at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Jalkanen had done more than market an ergonomic philosophy. He had attempted to recast sitting itself as a public health question hiding in plain sight.
His claims were sweeping, at times provocative, and rooted in a conviction that the body pays for modern work habits in ways most people barely register until pain, fatigue or dysfunction arrive. What made the talk resonate was not only its critique of the chair, but its insistence that productivity and health are not separate pursuits.
In Jalkanen’s view, they begin in the same place: the posture of everyday life.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki