Hey! Welcome back to the first of a new series: Sit On It, where we’re gonna be looking at specific features on a massage chair, and trying to breakdown what they aim to do. In this post, we’re going to talk about Zero-Gravity.
Zero-Gravity?
When most people think of zero-gravity, they immediately relate it to space and astronauts. But a massage chair isn’t an expensive international station floating in space, and it’s probably not going to make you float in midair. So why is a feature on countless massage chairs called Zero-Gravity?
Well, it’s most likely referred to and called zero-gravity due to the position it will lay the user at. When astronauts get launched into space, they lie on their backs and get launched horizontally. This is due to the forces of acceleration. If an astronaut had been sitting vertically when getting launched, their spine would be susceptible to getting crushed due to all the forces acting upon it from the head down. Having a horizontal launch creates a larger surface area for the acceleration forces to act upon, allowing it to affect the body from the chest to the back.
So back to massage chairs. When a massage chair uses the zero-gravity function, it reclines to a horizontal position. In order to mimic the dispersion of forces on the body, the body lies horizontally. This, although not quite as many forces acting upon the body, lets the forces of gravity disperse across the body instead of having it all focused on the spine. Hence the name Zero-Gravity with its relation to astronauts and space, and why many massage chairs use that name for the function.
What Zero-Gravity does for you and your health
Now that we’ve covered what Zero-Gravity is, we’ll get to what Zero-Gravity does for you. Zero-Gravity does exactly what it does for astronauts; it disperses the forces of gravity on your body by increasing the surface area from your head downward to your front-to-back. This reduces the load your spine takes from being upright and parallel with the forces of gravity.
And now there’s this cascading effect from having zero-gravity function on a massage chair. From the reduction of the forces your spine is taking, it can loosen up and relax more, which can help alleviate the centralized strain on your back from supporting your upper body. With the spine being more relaxed, we can massage the back muscles along the spine, which can prevent further injuries on muscles and the spinal cord. In doing so, we can effectively massage the back due to a more relaxed group of muscles along the back, and help alleviate potential back pain. And all this can be expedited through having zero-gravity as a function in your massage chair.
Thus, a zero-gravity function can help deliver a more effective massage through a dispersion of gravity on the body and an alleviation of the pressure along the back and its muscles. And this is just the Zero-Gravity function, and how it can help your massage sessions; there’s tons more functions to talk about in future posts, and how they can, in conjunction with other functions, help you live life fuller thanks to an effective and amazing massage.
Just think about it, and Sit On It.
Thanks for reading! This is our new series, aiming to tackle massage chair features and the obscurity behind some of their most popular features. In doing so, we hope to give a little insight as to how a massage chair utilizes these to bring effective, powerful massages. We hope to see you again soon, and thanks again for reading!