Ergonomic office task chair comparison: Aeron vs Leap vs SwingChair

Posted by Unknown on 18th Jan 2012

Ergonomic office task chair comparison: Aeron vs Leap vs SwingChair

Bottom line: even in this rare atmosphere, the SwingChair is arguably as good as anything I've found.

Within reach of my home office chair are computers, TV, radio, music, bookshelves, work, play, and a mountain view. I spend 10 or more hours in it many days, and demand maximum long-term comfort. I also want to be able to sit bolt upright while typing, lean back a ways when mousing extensively, lean back more for extensive computer screen reading, and lean waaaaay back if I choose to actually watch a TV program or news story … all fully supported in full body relaxation without having to touch any chair adjustment, and always with that ever-loving user-selected consistent pressure on my aching sacro-iliac joints just below my waist. Toward that end, I researched ergonomic office chairs, picked three leaders designed around different concepts, bought them from dealers which allow free returns within 30 days, and tried them out. Their common objective is full-time excellent lower back support, because mine, like most of yours, aches (despite my spending the rest of my time in intensive sports).

Why ergonomic (read: expensive) chairs? Because the usual $200 chairs carried by the office supply chain stores neither coddle my back nor last more than a year of heavy use. My three choices were the venerable Herman Miller Aeron (http://tinyurl.com/22lsltf), the newer Steelcase Leap (http://tinyurl.com/26wymtq), and the still newer Smartmotion SwingChair (http://www.swingchair.com/). Their features, options, colors, fabrics, adjustment videos, etc. are available on their websites, and all three strike me as being of very high quality, so I’ll concentrate on how and how well they sit, for me and for my wife.

First, their basic operating premises. All three use extensive technology and features to coddle our butt, back, and arms for many hours at a time, but they approach the challenges so differently that the only way any individual can tell which one suits him best is to try them out. Maybe the following will help you narrow your choices.

The Aeron’s specialty is high tech open mesh seat and back which breathes fully while dispersing loads which need to be dispersed (butt, thighs, and back) and concentrates, under our control, support where it should be concentrated (the small of our back and/or our pelvis just below our waist) for maximum comfort. Beyond those functions and its high quality, it’s a chair. The back and arms, but not the seat, tilt as we lean back or rock. When free to move, the chair back’s angle is determined by its resistance setting rather than our desired relaxed position. For a given setting, if we want it to lean back farther, we must push harder with our legs or eat more. If we adjust the chair to hold us in an upright position yet allow motion, it takes sustained physical effort to lean back and stay there. Overall effect: if the chair back isn’t where we want it, we must either consciously push it farther back, sit up away from it, or adjust its tension setting.

Um, no thanks. The Aeron went back to the dealer just for that reason, despite its very comfortable, well-distributed seat support and its very thigh-comfortable waterfall front seat edge. I’m just 5’10” and have a 29” inseam, but my Size C Aeron is not at all too big. Only people who really tuck their feet beneath them would hit the seat front edge with their calves.

If I needed more reasons, as for a tiebreaker, the Aeron’s armrests are quite a hassle to adjust for height. You must reach behind you, release a lever, change the height, then reset the lever … on each side). Its armrests are also less adjustable for lateral position than the other two chairs. Overall, however, the world famous Aeron strikes me as not so much a breakthrough as a highly refined, high quality, sturdier version of the ubiquitous $200 chain store office chair. It does the usual stuff better and longer, but does nothing different or differently.

Before we move on, we need a little simple physics lesson comparing a spring with a brick. When you push on the end of a spring, two related things happen. It pushes back as it compresses, and how much it compresses depends on how hard you push. That’s how the Aeron’s back works. When you stop pushing with your legs, the chair determines the angle of the back in accordance with the spring resistance you dialed in. For the user who sits at one angle for a specific task all day, that’s just what you want. Buy it and enjoy the breeze on your back and fanny.

Now consider a brick or a grippy-soled sneaker on a flat surface. It stays where you put it until you push on it with enough pressure to overcome its friction, then it slides. When you stop pushing, it stops moving. That’s friction, as opposed to spring, resistance.

In contrast to the Aeron tilt action’s purely spring concept, the Leap adds the benefits of silky friction. It tilts smoothly when your muscles or weight shift gently tells it to tilt, then when you stop pushing (gently), it sticks at that position and supports your body right where YOU, not a spring, want to be until you choose to move it. To lean back further or sit up straighter, you just lean back further or sit up straighter, then relax, throughout its full and very generous range of motion. What a brilliant concept; it does what YOU want, not what a spring wants! The knob setting determines how firmly it supports your back, not where it sets your hip angle. Its back also flexes at your shoulder when you reach one hand behind you for something, unlike the Aeron which makes you pivot the chair to reach for something behind you. The Leap is certainly a big leap forward, but I might have called it the SmartChair instead of the Leap, because it knows what I want rather than telling me what it wants. My wife has often said I’m sitting on my brains; now she’s apparently right.

The Leap’s website opens with this spiel: “Its back moves as your back moves. Its arms move as your arms move. Its seat moves as your seat moves. It’s the first chair that actually changes shape to mimic and support the movement of your spine”.

I couldn’t put it better myself. It’s in a whole different class from the simple-minded Aeon in this regard. It really does seem to track my every deliberate move, then stop right when and where I want it to and cradle me right there, over a 45-degree range. I think you can tell the Leap’s my favorite among these three, significantly above the Aeron primarily due to the Leap’s far superior dynamic range and “smart” tracking. If I didn’t know better I’d think the Leap can read my mind.

But after all that success, its headrest is an afterthought. I must tilt my head way back to even reach it, and it telescopes fully down at the slightest excuse. I plan to duct tape a 2”-thick chunk of foam to it for kicking back to watch TV … that, or I’ll have to mount the TV up near the ceiling. You’ve got the major tasks solved, Steelcase; tweak the headrest and you’re there.

A caveat: At 190#, I can feel the Leap pressing on my sit bones. A little more padding would help. My 240# wife says it bottoms out. The next chair, the SwingChair, clearly cushes our tushes better.

Of these three chairs, the Smartmotion SwingChair is a close second for me and the winner for my wife. It’s a third concept, in that its seat and its backrest each independently operate like a swing, pivoting around a center fulcrum at our center of gravity near our waist. Each is free to give to yield to unwanted pressure points like our thighs or sit bones, automatically decreasing the max pressure we generate by distributing the load. These independent freedoms of motion let us move/adjust/flex/recline our upper and lower bodies to suit our task, posture, or comfort needs at the moment. Of course, the resistances to these motions and functions, as well as lumbar pressure, are adjustable over a fairly wide range of user size, weight, and preferences. Much like the Leap, the SwingChair tracks my back well as my recline angle moves between upright and reclined, though with a lesser total range than the leap. You might say the SwingChair is a bit more business-minded, because it lacks the kick-back-and-watch-a-ball-game tilt position. OTOH, then SwingChair’s headrest is right where it should be, so there’s a tradeoff. The Leap’s tilt position can be locked or limited if desired, but I see no need for that because it knows and stays and supports me wherever I want to be at any given moment.

With my short legs, I wish the SwingChair were lower. It feels best with a footrest, and its optional highly articulating armrests are just a bit high for my waist-level mouse/trackball shelf.
Notice that the Smartmotion SwingChair folks offer accessories or options including a footrest; we have zero complaints about their quality and design beyond the extra inch of minimum height with the fancier armrests. The armrest pads are supremely comfortable, and the fabric is drop-dead-gorgeous. Don’t get the black, folks; the colors are too vibrant to pass up.

Overall, the Leap is my favorite, followed closely by the SwingChair, with the Aeron a distant third. My wife reversed my top choices and agreed that the Aeron is not even in the hunt. We don’t like having to subjugate our seating position to a spring setting rather than our whim at any moment.

(With that priority and this review on the table, I asked a huge multibrand dealer about Miller's Embody vs Miller's Aeron. Their response instantly steered me toward the Leap or the SwingChair even over the iconic Embody.)