Office chair advice

I have back pain. I am going to take a multi-pronged and many-faceted approach by getting a new office chair and also seeing whether I can think of any other ways to improve matters.

At the moment I sit on a wooden chair all day as it hurts my back less than the more conventional office chair that we have. The office chair now lives in the second bedroom. A lot of things live in the second bedroom.

I have done some looking in the Viking and Staples catalogues and have decided that an ‘operators chair’ is what I need. There is something called a ‘typists chair’ which does not look advanced enough. Then there is something called an ‘executive chair’ which sounds very important and executive and looks very comfortable but actually cannot be adjusted in many of the directions one might want to adjust things.

The problem comes when one wants to buy one. I went to Staples and tried sitting in a few of the chairs but they all seemed either too basic or too expensive and there were no sales people there to advise on the ins and outs of the ups and downs etc. I am also confused by some of the jargon. Some chairs offer ‘lumbar support’ as a feature. Is an unsupported lumbar my problem? Probably, but I don’t know. There are some that can be adjusted in any direction, but do I really need the seat to be able to go forwards and backwards as well as up and down? I don’t know. The other problem with Staples is that they do not advise on which chairs are suitable for ‘intensive use’, which is something the Viking catalogue does do. But the problem with Viking is that you cannot try before you buy which I think is probably important.

If anyone can advise I would be grateful. I do not mind spending some money on a good chair, but I do not want to waste money on features that are not essential to the wellbeing of my lumbar. What do you sit on all day anyway? Feel free to send make and model numbers, photographs, tales of chairs of yesteryear… Anything really.