by cryptonector | 2025-08-02 05:19:38+00:00
> Other than taking breaks, stretching, and not getting in the habit of working at night, can anyone give some practical advice that helped them?

> Do I need to stretch more?

No. In fact, I'd say almost certainly not, and you'll see why below.

> Strengthen?

Probably not. That would require more repetitive stress.

> Change my diet?

Don't see how that would help, unless you could use losing weight or improving your blood pressure, in which case yes, definitely.

Here's what's worked for me:

1) have my keyboard at my lap height or slightly above (think keyboard tray, or just put the keyboard on the lap),

2) monitor / laptop up high, so I don't have to look down (my neck also thanks me, not just my hands),

3) enable the accessibility feature known as "sticky keys", which I learned to use long ago,

4) never EVER rest my wrists while typing -- not ever, nor my forearms either.

The thing you have to understand is that the tendons that drive your fingers are anchored at your elbows and are quite long, and they move in tiny sheathes full of lubricant. If you press on the tendons moving through those sheathes, then that's going to cause serious harm. A related thing is that the nerves needed to drive your fingers also move, and some motions place great stress on them. For example, that motion you do to reach a key with your pinky, where you bend your wrist outward is called "ulnar deviation", and it can easily screw up the ulnar nerve that drives the pinky.

(4) helps me deal with all those deviations that hurt the nerves. Instead of turning/twisting my wrist to reach a key I let my hand float over the keyboard, moving the hand to enable the fingers to reach the desired keys with minimal tugging and pressure on the nerves. You don't need sticky keys for this if you learned to type correctly, which means pressing modifier keys with one hand and modified keys with the other, but I didn't learn that way back when, so I had to re-teach myself to type, and sticky keys helped with that.

Oh, and:

5) don't use emacs or anything that requires lots of modifier keys at once. Once again sticky keys helps with this, and to be honest I've never been an emacs user, so this is just me dunking on emacs. The point though is that emacs can really hurt you if you don't know how to type correctly.

Back to stretching: if stretching means putting your nerves through even more stretching and pressure, then it can only hurt you. Your problems aren't muscular, so stretching the muscles won't help. Your problems are with your nerves or your tendons, or both.

Oh, also, if you have anything like neuropathy you need to find a way to not have it. Idk how -- I'm not a medical doctor of any kind, and IIUC neuropathy is not a solved problem anyways.

And remember, IANAD, so take everything I say with salt. I had to figure out what to do about my hands mostly on my own, and I was inspired by a talk I saw where the speaker did pretty much that. The speaker's solutions did not work for me, but the speaker gave me the clues I needed, like the bit about ulnar deviation, and he gave me the impetus I needed: here was proof that one person could fix his hand pain problems, so maybe so could I. The above are roughly my solutions, but above all being conscious of these issues, these motions, and what they do to me -- that was the real solution. Same with posture problems and many other problems: being conscious of your problems, your bad habits, and so on, in real time is 90% of the battle, because then you can learn to correct the problems in real time, and soon it's all muscle memory and you no longer have to be constantly conscious of these details but you still become conscious of them as needed.

Best of luck to you.