Biohacking Sitting

Veli-Jussi Jalkanen — Sitting Health Development Pioneer

Veli-Jussi Jalkanen (FIN) Chair @ Salli Systems Mr. Veli-Jussi Jalkanen is a health inventor, CAM and sitting health specialist. He has logically spread out sitting optimization to comprehend the whole physical working environment and started to think ergonomics as optimization of micro and macro circulation of the lymph and blood. Salli Concept includes awareness, furniture, their optimal use, sitting friendly clothing and body activity in numerous ways including PDNF, hormones and the electromagnetic body.

Prolonged immobility triggers spinal degeneration, as the L5 vertebra lacks vertebral arteries and requires movement for nutrient delivery. Slouched postures increase disc pressure by thirty percent and compress cervical veins, potentially hindering brain circulation. Beyond musculoskeletal issues, sitting-induced abdominal pressure disrupts microbiome health and peristalsis. Conventional chairs further elevate pelvic bowl tension, contributing to high urogenital cancer rates and impaired testosterone production. Utilizing divided saddle chairs restores circulation and maintains optimal testicular temperatures, preventing systemic physiological decline.

We need to make smart choices along our way unless we want to end up as back patients. I encourage you all, wherever you are and whatever you are doing: don't just sit, but be mobile.

Summary

- Movement and walking are essential for spinal health because the L5 vertebra lacks its own arteries and relies on muscle activity to pump blood into the lower back. - Sitting with a rounded back increases disc pressure by 30% and stretches spinal ligaments, leading to permanent degeneration and posture issues even in children. - Slouching or leaning the head forward compresses neck muscles and veins, obstructing blood circulation to the brain and potentially increasing the risk of strokes and dementia. - Internal pressure from poor posture and tight belts slows digestion and peristaltic movement, negatively affecting the microbiome and overall gut health. - Conventional sitting creates excessive pressure and heat in the pelvic bowl, which is linked to reduced testosterone, prostate enlargement, and high rates of pelvic organ cancers.

Article

Biohacking Sitting

The Physiology Of Spine, Circulation, And Pelvic Health

At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Veli-Jussi Jalkanen took a subject so ordinary it often escapes scrutiny and made it feel urgent, intimate, even faintly alarming. Sitting, he argued, was not a passive convenience but a full-body physiological event, one with consequences for the spine, the brain, the gut, and the pelvic floor.

Jalkanen, Chair at Salli Systems and a Finnish health inventor and sitting health specialist, spoke with the intensity of a man who had spent years studying what modern life does to the body when it is folded into chairs for hours at a time. Before he truly began, he asked the audience to rise and move.

“Get up and start slowly walking around this place,” he told the room. “Everybody have blocked their circulation.”

That instruction was more than theatrical scene-setting. It was the thesis of the talk. Movement, in Jalkanen’s view, was not an optional supplement to health but one of its basic operating conditions.

Why The Lower Spine Depends On Movement

One of the sharpest claims in Jalkanen’s presentation, titled *Biohacking Sitting*, concerned the lower back, specifically the L5 vertebra. He said this lowest lumbar vertebra lacked its own vertebral arteries and therefore depended heavily on movement and muscular activity to help drive blood and nutrients into the region.

For that reason, he said, walking, stretching, swimming, and other forms of physical motion were essential, not merely beneficial. The lower back, in his telling, was not built for stillness. It was built for rhythmic loading and release, for muscles that pump and tissues that alternately compress and relax.

This, he suggested, helped explain why degeneration so often appeared first around the lower lumbar discs, particularly in lives dominated by static postures.

The 30 Percent Problem

If movement nourished the spine, posture determined how brutally sitting could punish it.

Jalkanen warned that sitting with a rounded back increased disc pressure by 30 percent. The image he painted was stark: not the dramatic injury of a weightlifter lifting too much, but the quiet damage of an office worker doing almost nothing at all. Discs, he noted, were remarkably strong under the right conditions. But they became vulnerable when the spine habitually collapsed forward and its supporting structures were forced into a bad geometry.

He also pointed to the ligaments that stabilize each vertebra, saying that poor posture stretched them over time. The result was not simply fatigue or stiffness, but a body that began to reorganize itself around dysfunction. In Jalkanen’s account, many people who appeared weak were not weak at all. They were overstretched.

Most troubling was his suggestion that this process now began early. Children, he said, were already showing signs of permanently slouched postures, with the implication that spinal decline was arriving long before old age.

When The Neck Becomes A Bottleneck

Jalkanen’s analysis moved upward from the lumbar spine to the neck, where he argued that slouching and forward head posture could interfere with circulation to and from the brain.

He drew a distinction between arteries and veins. The carotid artery, he said, remained relatively resistant because of its strong pressure, but the internal jugular vein was much more vulnerable to compression. Even a slight forward tilt of the head, he suggested, could squeeze the surrounding musculature enough to impair venous drainage.

His warning was grave. Restricting blood flow out of the brain, he said, could contribute to rising internal pressure and potentially elevate the risk of serious neurological consequences over time.

The point landed because it reframed a familiar bad habit. Forward head posture is often discussed as a cosmetic or musculoskeletal issue. Jalkanen presented it as something more consequential: a circulation problem with implications far beyond neck pain.

Sitting, Digestion, And The Pressurized Abdomen

The talk then widened again, this time into the abdomen. Jalkanen argued that slouched sitting increased internal pressure around the stomach and digestive tract, slowing the forward movement of food and disrupting peristalsis. In an era increasingly fascinated by the microbiome, this was a telling connection.

Gut health, he implied, did not depend only on what one ate, but on how one sat while digesting it.

Belts came in for particular criticism. Jalkanen urged the audience to avoid them, arguing that abdominal compression further impeded digestive flow. Pressure, in his framework, was the common enemy. Where circulation, motility, and physiological exchange should have remained dynamic, modern clothing and furniture too often created obstruction.

The Pelvic Cost Of Conventional Chairs

Yet it was in the pelvic region that Jalkanen’s argument became most distinctive and most provocative. Conventional chairs, he said, concentrated pressure in exactly the wrong places. They increased tension in the “pelvic bowl,” raised heat, and compromised circulation to the urogenital region.

By contrast, he advocated divided saddle chairs, like those used at the event, as a way of reducing pressure on soft tissues and preserving healthier blood flow. The design, he suggested, allowed the genitals and pelvic floor to remain less compressed and better ventilated.

For men, Jalkanen focused on circulation to the genital vessels, the effects of pressure on the pelvic floor, and the importance of temperature regulation in the testicles. He said the testicles relied on several cooling mechanisms to maintain an optimal temperature around 33C, lower than core body temperature. Tight underwear, restrictive trousers, and padded chairs, he argued, undermined that cooling system, potentially impairing sperm quality and testosterone production.

In a culture that often treats low energy, increasing body fat, and hormonal decline as inevitable features of male aging, Jalkanen suggested a more mechanical explanation: men were overheating and compressing a vital endocrine organ every day.

The Hidden Pressure Inside The Pelvic Bowl

For women, Jalkanen described a different but equally consequential mechanism. Sitting, he said, forced soft tissues upward through the pelvic opening, creating an internal pressure field that reduced circulation to organs such as the ovaries, bladder, and sections of the colon.

He linked that chronic pressure to a broad range of pelvic health problems, from discomfort and dysfunction to the extraordinary disease burden concentrated in that region. For men, he made a parallel case around the prostate, arguing that long-term conventional sitting contributed to enlargement and urinary difficulties later in life.

The underlying idea was simple, if unsettling: the body was not designed to bear prolonged weight through the pelvic floor in the manner conventional chairs demanded. What felt normal had become normal only through repetition.

A Quiet Call To Revolt Against Immobility

There was something almost subversive in the way Jalkanen framed his message at Biohacker Summit 2016 London. He was not offering a miracle supplement, a wearable sensor, or a fashionable optimization ritual. He was challenging the architecture of daily life: the office chair, the slumped desk posture, the belt, the long seminar, the padded seat, the social expectation of stillness.

His practical recommendations were disarmingly basic. Walk during long periods of sitting. Keep the head upright. Avoid abdominal compression. Choose loose clothing. Use seating that reduces pelvic pressure. Above all, do not remain immobile simply because a room has told you to stay seated.

In that sense, *Biohacking Sitting* was less about hacking than remembering. The body, Jalkanen made plain, required motion to preserve circulation, alignment, temperature, and internal flow. Sedentary modernity had turned those needs into afterthoughts.

By the end of the talk, sitting no longer seemed like the absence of action. It looked more like a slow physiological negotiation, one in which the body paid for every hour of stillness.

Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London