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Comment by ceautery | Hacker News Reader

This style of writing feels a lot like the sections of Gödel Escher Bach that had the tortoise and Achilles dialogues.

Anyway, I’m 52 and have been typing daily at tech jobs since 1995. I had a run-in with RSI around 2000, and tried ergonomic aids like a squishy pad in front of my keyboard to rest my wrists on, this sliding thing that I rested my elbows on. None of it made a lick of difference.

I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.

I still type a lot every day, and I’ve been pain free for 20 years. YMMV, obviously, but changing how you use your arms and hands might be a huge boon.

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> I changed the way I typed. I made sure to keep my hands and wrists relaxed, and swapped out stretching my fingers for keys with sliding my arms around… and it worked.

That's one of the biggest takeaways I had from playing bass guitar in high school, actually. If you can delegate the movement to a bigger muscle group, it's generally a good idea do so. Shoulder/back instead of arm, arm instead of hand, hand instead of finger...

Similar things in martial arts. A strong punch comes from the hips and the shoulder. The elbow and wrist just come along for the ride and need to stabilize to survive.

Same here, I got a bout of severe RSI almost 15 years ago, for a few months

I changed many habits and it's been gone since then ... It's obviously different for everyone but I found that using a trackball helped a lot. For awhile I had a mouse on the left and trackball on the right, switching back and forth. But I don't need that anymore.

Taking breaks and minding posture is important. Wrist posture in particular -- I don't rest my wrists or arms on anything -- only my fingers make contact with the keyboard.

Much later, I started weight training with kettle bells, and I noticed a pretty nice improvement in strength / circulation.

The author intentionally does that, if you go to the character page you can see they’re supposed to reflect a Socrates and student dialogue. Pretty clever imo.

> I changed the way I typed.

This. I had problems with back pain, neck pain and RSI about 10 years ago. I learned to sit up straight, corrected my desk height and rearranged stuff on my desk so I'm not typing like a shrimp. I also realized I really don't need to type as much as I did.

No pain ever since.

Also the rest of your body: especially head and shoulders, but core, hips, even feet are well worth attending to.

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