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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I am curious how/if you were formally taught how to type, and whether you hit the keys with sharp and abrupt movements. Of those whom I've seen develop RSI, a common trend I've noticed is they type very "discretely", with a very noticeable pause between each keypress, and use a lot more force than necessary. They were also taught that that was the "correct" way to type, adhere strictly to a sub-optimal fingering pattern, and type relatively slowly too. RSI seems to be caused by the sort of excessively rigid and intense finger movements that I've seen from these formally-taught typists.

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The more generic trend could be people who perfectly hit the same keys the same way again and again.

I've seen it with people religiously sticking to an optimal typing method which limits their hand movement to an extreme. They were crazy fast but RSI was a common subject of discussion, regardless of posture or hardware quality.

We had the same issue with gaming controllers, some with guitar learning etc. There's a limit on how much we're able to repeat the same movement again and again, it depended on what movement and who did it, but the only ones who didn't get any RSI simply avoided extreme repetitions.

And buffs. Sometimes building more and more muscles solve the issues entirely, if that's what you're into.

Agreed. I had wrist pain when I played a lot of WoW - rogue, especially outlaw, is not kind to the hands.

I solved it in a couple of ways:

1. Quit wow

2. Rock climbing. Get stronger, especially forearm and finger strength. I can't emphasize enough how much this helps over even carpal tunnel braces or whatever. The biggest single thing that stopped wrist pain.

Not op, but had a very similar story. Got crippling RSI to welcome me into my 30s. Couldn’t work for several months and ended up getting a Glove80 because I needed to make a living.

This definitely does not describe me. I typed around 100wpm, sometimes quite loud, often times quite a button mash, and frequently not lifting my fingers quickly after each press. Didn’t have any notion of “correct” typing

I was not taught to formally type and learned pretty much exclusively from playing PC games. Primarily wold of Warcraft.

I did not "touch type" in the traditional sense of correct form and using the home row, but I didn't need to look at the keyboard. I typed around 120wpm like this though at the time. I have not and probably never will get back to this speed typing on the Kinesis. I'm closer to just 90-100wpm with stricter typing technique. But usually try not to type as fast as I can anymore anyway. I still to this day type faster with my crap form on a laptop keyboard if I swap to it for a bit even though I rarely do anymore.

My typing form was honestly atrocious. If I were to describe it I covered over wasd with my left hand as if I was gaming, and pinky was only ever really used for modifier keys and shifting. I only used left shift, never right. My right hand I used index finger for spacebar and moved my entire hand to the spacebar between every word. I didn't even realize I did this until I sat and analyzed my typing form maybe a year ago to compare to correct touch typing.

It actually took me quite a while to learn to type on a split keyboard since I basically had to learn to type correctly from scratch.

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