Full-time Geeks Shouldn't Ignore Physical Impact of the Craft
blog.louisgray.com
blog.louisgray.com
Buy yourself a set of climbing shoes, a chalk bag, and a membership to a climbing gym. Your wrists, not to mention your whole body, will get a lot stronger, and RSI will become a thing of the past.
Completely anecdotal, but I used to climb a lot, before moving to Tokyo, and since I've been here, haven't been out once... and you know what? Wrist pain.
Exercise. Your body needs it.
This is a great piece of marketing though, whether it is intended to be one or not. I wonder how many wrist braces were sold.
Climbing is ideal here, because you spend a lot of time grabbing and holding on from odd angles, giving your entire forearm a solid workout.
Far better to take that money spent on wrist braces and buy a decent keyboard instead (<insert Kenesis Ergo plug here>).
I would concede that there is a time for wrist braces - if you are developing RSI issues, wearing a wrist brace in bed can help you from accidentally sleeping with your wrists in an unnatural position and aggravating the situation.
I once suffered terribly from RSI, until I got a small collection of input devices and established the habit of changing them every now and then. For the last 10 years I've been swapping between an Apple wireless keyboard, a Vivanco generica, and a Logitech keyboard every few months, different mice too. It feels great..
And as an alternative to climbing: learn to play guitar or bass!
Having been through multiple versions of these (the kind he has, less restrictive ones, custom-molded ones), I found my body held up best when I kept it active and strong on its own. The term "crutch" has a double meaning in the English language for a reason: sometimes it's truly necessary, but when it's not truly necessary it's actually hurting you in the long run.
Some people have wrist pain, some (like me, despite living full time at a keyboard for most of the last 20 years) don't. If you do, take care of yourself. But don't do stuff like this prophylacticly, it's more likely to hurt than help.
It's much more comfortable sitting in a nice chair, with two big monitors, an external ergonomic keyboard (Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite), and the Razer DeathAdder mouse (Not as ergonomic as a trackball mouse, but very ergonomic for a regular mouse).
You could do this with a laptop too, but you'll be more prone to coding on the couch, which will dramatically increase your chances of getting carpal tunnel.
Though reading stories from people with syndrome makes me worrying :)
I have found I'm much more prone to discomfort in my wrists when I am typing on my 10" netbook half-lying down on the couch with my shoulders 30-45 degrees out-of-line with the monitor.
I'm wondering this because I might be using the keyboard and touchpad in a different way than others, but naturally for me, as in: the path of least resistance.
For scrolling, my right forearm points at the touchpad in a 45 degree angle, my middle finger touches the pad and I move my whole hand at the wrist to scroll. So all the middle finger does is touch the pad and raise again.
I use my right index finger for pointing. To move the cursor up & down I do the same as for scrolling, only with my index finger. For left & right I do what would look like pushing a marble to move the cursor left and the reverse to move it to the right. So my index finger really points (mostly) to the left side (depending on forearm position) and expands in it's natural path.
Regarding heavy keyboard use you often hear about the emacs pinky when somebody over years strenuously used their pinky to hold the control key down. Well, I've noticed that I press control with the finger nail of my pinky and alt with the nail of my thumb. I'm sure it's unusual and it looks a bit funny, but it's completely natural to me and not strenuous at all.
I wonder how you do those things differently.
Then for an unrelated reason I went back to the gym and started deadlifting. It hasn't returned.
However, in the last few years, I've had increasing difficulty with my neck and shoulders, one one side mostly. I am also an avid whitewater kayaker, and the first time my shoulder cried out in protest, I put it down to making some wrong moves while playboating. Physical therapy and a break from the water took care of it eventually. So naturally I stopped the exercises, and the shoulder pain came back with a vengeance the first time I was back on the water.
Now paying attention to my posture, and doing neck and shoulder stretches several times a day, is slowly improving my condition. So don't forget to not only support your wrists, but also to support your whole lower arm, either by sitting very close to the table or by having a decent ergonomic chair with adjustable arm rests. It prevents your shoulders from hunching up and developing all sorts of knots in your shoulder and back muscles. Your neck will thank you.
I'm already much more of a keyboard guy than a "mouser" (as I'm sure most HNer's are) -- but I'm switching to a standing desk next week and correcting my bad habits. I'm to young for this!...
1. Use a standup desk
2. Use a vertical keyboard (http://safetype.com/)
3. Stretch every 4 hours
If my mousing wrist does ever get sore, I have a Logitech Marble trackball that I use until any pain goes away. Motrin can also be your friend to reduce inflammation.
I've also recently switched from a somewhat mushy Apple clear keyboard to one of the aluminum and chiclet metal ones. Seems ok so far, and pretty close to a laptop feel.
1) Kinesis keyboard 2) trackball on left and right side of keyboard, to balance mousing 3) lift weights 3 times/week 4) fish oil supplements once a day (mild anti-inflammatory) 5) standing desk
Having trackballs on both sides of the keyboard while standing lets you CODE LIKE A BOSS.
It feels much more natural on my wrist than one in the normal orientation ... and its always amusing to see people try to use it for something.
Why not Colemak instead?
Don't rearrange the keys, just learn to type entirely blind.
Over a decade later, my wrists hardly ever bother me. Physical therapy taught me to regularly stretch my wrists, and how to strengthen them. I began pursuing other activities which further strengthened my wrists (rock climbing is particularly great, so long as you avoid overdoing it and injuring yourself worse).
My basic advice to people now is:
1) Follow the Pomodoro technique, or whatever it takes to force yourself to get up, stretch, and move around for at least five minutes per hour. We all sort of hear that and nod, but think about how many times you've gotten really deep into a problem and sat there, twisted like a pretzel as you try to solve it, for hours on end. You have to condition yourself to take real, meaningful breaks.
2) Sit up straight, dammit. In every photo we ever see of new startups, how many people are sitting with good posture? None of them.
3) Get a keyboard with light-touch Cherry key switches. I'm partial to the Kinesis ergo line, but there are others.
4) Get active. Straighten your spine and go for a walk around the block a few times per day. Take up yoga, climbing, martial arts, or weight lifting. Focus on improving posture, flexibility, and balanced strength. Find some hobby that will get you away from the computer.
They hired a nurse just for RSI injuries. The first and most important rule was "Muscles don't rebuild if you don't use them, so if they are hurting, you have to use them, not protect them." Everyone had been putting their wrists into wrist supports (which is what you would do if it was a broken bone or broken skin), and the pain wouldn't go away because the wrists weren't active, and thus weren't healing.
Whenever I see someone wearing a wrist support, I bite my tongue and try not to tell them to get it off, as its making it worse. I think I just sound like a self-important jerk, so I try not to.
Going to the gym, exercising my shoulders and wrists, is the best RSI medicine I've ever found.
Do you have data that indicates that contributes to RSI? My personal experience is that trying to "sit up straight" and maintain "good" posture is the fastest, most direct route to wrist pain. Like, less than a half hour. By contrast, if I slouch my body, my wrists can maintain a graceful positive curve (not straight or bent back) and I can comfortably code or game for hours (though I try not to sit in one place that long, in general). As a side benefit, this also puts my eyes at a better angle when I'm using the laptop screen.
The thoracic region of the spine is supposedly very sturdy and resilient to injury. But sitting hunched over with head forward over many years can catch up to you.
Well, I have horrendous neck and shoulder problems from years of sitting improperly. I had no issues whatsoever for decades of uber-nerdy computing, then blammo, I went from, "my neck seems tense" to "my left index finger is numb and I can't sit at a computer for more than an hour" in a couple of months. An ex, who had previously been a massage therapist, even specifically warned me that I had problems in the upper back area, but since I felt no discomfort I ignored her.
Here's the really bothersome part: while this awful neck/back injury was developing, things that were terrible for me actually felt good. For example, having one leg crossed over the other, left arm on my knee, slouching forward with my chin resting on my hand. It felt like a great neck stretch but, wow, was it ever demolishing my neck!
As for RSI with regards to the wrist and hands, I don't see how proper posture could exacerbate wrist pain. If it does, I would suspect that you need to examine other factors, like keyboard height and hand placement width (e.g. my Kinesis puts my hands much further apart than a standard keyboard, which makes a huge difference in wrist pain).
By the way, did you know that modern shirts are actually cut differently than decades past, because the average person's shoulders have rotated significantly forward? If you try to maintain posture in a typical, modern shirt, you'll have bunching in weird places because it's not cut for that!
The solution was simple strength training. Not weight lifting (I think that was a major contributor early on.) Within a few weeks of starting the beginner program in the book "You Are Your Own Gym" the pain was gone. I fully expected to have severe wrist pain and nerve damage for the rest of my life.
I hope this helps someone. The solutions to this problem are overblown (granted I suspect a combination of wrist braces and pain killers could push some people far past a recoverable edge.)
Yoga works out all of the auxiliary, odd little muscles, and the stretches are great for my posture. And the girls in the class are beyond hot.
About 13 months in, the only kind of pain I get now is from sitting for _too long_ in a static position, which is already established as problematic in other ways.