2018: Day 204 the one where I got a Gaiam ball chair

Dear Reader,

Sure a lot of options exist for office chairs. Getting a new Gaiam ball chair directly from Gaiam online seemed like a good idea. Certainly the first few minutes were exciting. About 10 minutes into using the new chair I remember just how out of shape my core muscles must be. Given my attempts to avoid using the Amazon marketplace for goods it seemed like a good idea to just go out to the Gaiam website directly and buy a ball chair. Thanks in part to a coupon at the top of the page it seemed liked like a good idea to buy one of the classic balance ball chairs. Seven color choices existed. At the time getting the blue one seemed like a good idea. Strangely enough the new chair arrived in the original box with a shipping label stuck on it.

Setting up the chair took a few minutes. Probably the hardest part of the entire process was trying to inflate the ball to the right level of fullness. It took two separate attempts to get the ball inflated to the right level. After completing the assembly and setup process I started using the chair. Today my total usage equaled about an hour of time and it was enough to begin to test my stamina and balance. We will see how I end up feeling about the chair tomorrow morning. For the rest of the month I plan on using the chair for two to three hours per week. It might be easier to just walk downstairs and walk on the treadmill. Either path is better than sitting in the same place all day. That pattern is not good for a lot of reasons.

Really my only reservations about the new chair are related to a general fear of falling. At some point either in the distant future or potentially sooner the ball is probably going to fail and the distance between sitting and the floor will quickly vanish. That fear might be a little bit exaggerated, but at the same time it is entirely possible.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado