This article is totally missing the basics. Exercise. I promise it will make ALL the difference. Get yourself a pull-up bar, and if you're feeling extra fancy, a dip bar.
Push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and sit-ups. Every day. You'll be a coding machine. At the VERY least, push-ups. Every hour or two, take a break, knock off ten push-ups, walk around a bit, get some water, get back to work. I'll do this right at the office, often in the server room.
A good chair helps, but all of this other nonsense is unnecessary. Exercise, and nutrition is the key to basically everything in life.
You have to be more specific than 'exercise' for this type of injury. Biking (as sibling comment points out) does not put you in a very ergonomic position, and is primarily cardio. Biking is simply not going to improve things, and may make it worse.
What I've learned in the past two years of intense PT is the most important thing is to focus on fixing muscle imbalance through strengthening (specifically, avoiding upper crossed and lower crossed syndromes). These put the body in a better position and reduce the load on neck muscles, which in turn reduce referred pain and muscle tightness into the arms and wrists. Most RSI-like symptoms are actually problems starting in the neck.
Having a well-balanced body that is durable is an amazing protector against all sorts of poor physical environments. The article alludes to this by saying 'improve your posture', but that's not very specific - posture improves when you have better balance between muscle groups.
Of course, improving ergonomics, body mindfulness, getting adequate rest, temperature, etc are important as well, but those alone don't do it, nor does cardio.
FWIW I found biking terribly aggravating for RSI. It really is not an ergonomic position. I'd recommend nearly anything other than biking. Swimming, weight lifting, basketball, etc. Anything where you aren't still sitting.
I adore cycling but I've had to stop as I started to develop RSI, first in one wrist, and then in the other. I actually think it was cycling that was the proximate cause.
General gym workouts help, so long as I use weights and machines with care. But I have gone back biking after forgetting about the wrist pain, only for it all to come back and become chronic again.
Last year I got into lifting for the first time ever (I'm 35). I got on a program, just doing a couple of heavy compound lifts three days a week, and the change for me has been night and day.
It doesn't take much time to learn how to do it correctly, and it's a lot more fun than running. All those aches and pains have gone away. Seriously, I can't recommend enough getting into lifting.
Actually, I had a similar experience. For that reason, I decided to work on a side project precisely to encourage people to get started lifting weights and lose the fear of going to the gym: https://ezworkout.org
That is slick! I'll be using this next time I go to the gym. One of the big problems it solves for me is boredom - I lifted for a couple years but couldn't stand doing the same workouts week adter week. I do realize you're supposed to switch it up, but your app makes it easy :)
I bought a power cage and a barbell so I could lift in my basement. Wasn't a huge fan of the gym either. Never enough squat racks, and I felt bad locking one down for an hour.
Barbell: Rogue 2.0 bar (cheap at $250, perfectly fine for newbie)
Power cage [0]
Realistically, the most expensive part of the setup was...the weights. Shipping that shit costs a lot, and they're not cheap to begin with. I bought some bumper plates for deadlifting, and a bunch more as regular plates. Total weight is like 400 - 500 lbs, I forget exactly. All in all, it cost me like....$1400 or so. Worth it if you know you're gonna stick with it, but you should probably start in a gym and make sure it's gonna stick.
Oh, and if you want advice on getting started, let me know.
What worked for me was going to a good crossfit that focused on lifting. A power or olympic lifting gym would work too. Having someone who knows what they are doing help me was very valuable. Now I know enough to go out on my own.
Sounds like a poor use of a shared resource since the only one of those exercises that requires a squat rack is a squat. I guess it's fine if there's no one else at your gym.
Not necessarily. The safety pins on a squat rack (or power rack, not sure what the difference is) are handy if you're scared of dropping the weight on an OHP, or if you don't have anyone to spot you on the benchpress. If you move the rack's pins to the outside uprights, lower down near the floor, and put the bar there it makes it much easier to load/unload plates for the deadlift. For me, taking weights off of a bar on the floor is the absolute worst when you're exhausted after a heavy set.
But yes if you're using a squat rack for anything other than squatting, and the gym is busy, give others a turn. Or at least let them work in with you.
I'll second that. Push ups can make wrist problems worse if not done carefully. Do them on your fists or holding a bar instead of palms flat down to reduce unnatural bending of your wrist.
I would stress varied exercises. Push-ups are known to exert stress on wrists, you need to do a variety of heavy lifting exercises (if you already have RSI, start gradually and watch YouTube videos how to do it right)
Exercise has helped my back pain ( I exercise 3 times a week) and my wrist pain sometimes comes back but only if I have been playing video games in addition to coding for a full day. Even then its pretty rare now. I do use ergonomic mice and keyboard though.
Yes, no doubt the ergo stuff is good preventive measures. I don't skimp on cheap chairs, keyboard, mice or mattresses. Exercising for sure is helping you in every aspect of your life, not just sitting at the computer.
I generally agree that exercise is the key, but pushups can be terrible for tendonitis in the shoulder/upper-arm area. Just wanted to warn people from my experience.
It took me way too long to realize that coding all day and games all night is a recipe for pain. Working out is not fun, but it's absolutely necessary for serious software work.
I got over some bad RSI pain and then decided to start doing pushups again. It came back for several weeks. I probably over did it. I have some trouble with going all-out on workouts. I want to get back into strength training, but I am worried that upper body exercise will just re-aggravate my RSI.
Working on large, compound muscles, like that I wouldn't recommend every day. I would spread it out to no more than 3 times per week where you can exercise without any muscle stiffness and pain.
If you have the stiffness and pain in your muscles, hydrate yourself well, take the day off from these exercises and substitute light stretching to work on your flexibility, but always always drink plenty of water.
Used to have serious wrist/arm pain. Used to spend a lot of keyboard time, but also used to exercise a lot.
Anecdotal, but what worked for me was stopping walking around with my hands in my pockets. Seriously! Must've been something to do with body tension - once I figured out that letting my arms swing freely when I walked places, instead of keeping them rigidly in my pockets, the pain went away and hasn't come back.
This. What I discovered from my own RSI pain was that RSI is not caused by bad computer posture or doing any thing too much. It's caused by not doing other things enough.
For me, it was not exercising my wrists in any way. When I'd code, my wrists would be in one position which would eventually start to hurt. But then I took up rock climbing. In climbing, my wrists were forced to strengthen and be put in many other positions. And my RSI pain just went away. I wasn't coding any less than before. But in the time I wasn't coding, I was doing the exercises necessary to keep my wrists healthy.
Also, as an aside, most people's pain tolerance is also terrible. They let their mind take minimal pain signals from their bodies and magnify it tenfold until its excruciating. Some basic meditation training will teach people to minimize what little actual pain they have, which could also allow most to continue working through the pain.
You sound like someone who has never been badly injured, nor lived long enough to deal with an aging body.
Exercise does work wonders. And will solve SOME problems. But some problems really do need their own solutions. And sometimes it does take time and effort to figure out exactly what that solution is.
I have a regime of dumbbell exercises plus at least 5x25 pressups spread through the day.
In this I'm lucky to work from home - not everyone has the freedom to knock out a set in their office environment.
Maintaining condition goes far in mitigating the stress of the particular motor repetitions required by our profession, but I also find that periodically firing up the physical engine calalyses problem solving too.
I used to have a lot of wrist trouble (carpal tunnel I assume) from drumming and computing incessantly, but as long as I stick to the regime, I have no issues.
I get cold hands - more appropriately, a cold right hand - if I'm using a wired mouse. A wireless mouse keeps my hand warm.
That said, the suggestion about fingerless gloves is spot-on. Some folks just get cold easier: For me, cold hands could just be related to hormones (female here). Chronic due to the recurring nature of it all, but seriously not a big deal.
Just a thought in case it helps someone: a family member of mine always had cold hands, and a doctor prescribed a special prescription antiperspirant. Making his hands dry also made them warmer.
Same for me. I am very thin, slim hands. My first smartphone nearly destryoed my hands.
1. Stopped using phone in subway. I used to look down - strain my neck.
2. 30 Pushups everyday
3. Once a week walk/run 5 km
Fixed it.
The best exercise, for myself, for the "RSI" (tendinosis most likely) in my right forearm is archery with recurve and longbow in particular, not so much with compound.
Any pain I have in it is halved, and it feels much looser and stretched out. And as a bonus my medium distance vision also gets a workout.
I bought a power tower for chinups and pullups earlier this year but unfortunately it contributed to aggravating both my elbows and forearm.
One note - you can't just do pushups and call it a day. You need to work your back muscles to keep balance between those muscle groups. Pushups alone will cause your shoulders to roll forward, exacerbate forward head posture, and lead to upper crossed syndrome, which is already a major cause of many computer related RSI issues. Personal experience speaking here.
I used to get mild wrist pain until I started going to the gym 3 times a week.
Last year I broke my arm, metal plates put in, then taken out, ended up with nerve damage and no feeling in half my hand, 3rd surgery to fix the nerve.
About 3 months ago pain started to come back. Doctor gave me the all clear to go back to the gym. Started 2 weeks ago. Pain gone completely.
Hanging from a bar, is actually the start of your path to doing a pullup. Next you jump up, and slowly lower yourself, over and over. Pretty soon you will be doing your first real pull-up.
TL;DR: Similar problems, fixed diet, lost a bunch of weight, started exercising daily after achieving normal weight, all problems thing of the past. True for > 5 years now.
Both of my wrists were broken in my youth, in separate incidents. To make matters worse, one didn't heal correctly and needed to be re-broken.
Until my late 20s I obsessively spent long sleepless days at the computer, all classic qwerty keyboards, either model M or classic thinkpads later. My wrists would bother me at the computer, but they also would hurt when it rained, or other random moments. When I would try do some push-ups, my wrists would hurt like hell before I got anywhere near the expected muscle fatigue. This was generally accepted as expected and how things would be forever (or worse) thanks to the broken bones, according to those I consulted (doctors and family).
Except I wasn't minding nutrition, physical activity, or sleep at all, and lived in an environment (fly-over state) with an unhealthy food culture and awful climate. Without making a conscious deliberate effort, the default outcome was to slowly become fat and sick.
Fortunately a startup relocated me to the bay area, where I discovered even walking up a mild hill had become a strenuous, exhausting activity. Having a great climate, accessible local produce that actually tasted good, and a newfound interest in enjoying a life beyond the keyboard with the abundant outdoor beauty and activities, improving these facets of life came easily and I dare say I played little role beyond cooperating.
For ~5 years now I've been doing 300-600 push-ups daily, two sets in the morning and two in the evening. My wrists never bother me, not during push-ups, not at the computer, my injuries are a forgotten memory that I'm only reminded of in threads like these. There's usually also some sets of ~12 hand-stand push-ups, and holding a hand-stand for a minute while doing leg-spreads against a wall.
The only reason I'm able to sustain this daily routine is my weight got down to ~165 (5'8") from ~225. This didn't result from exercise, just vastly improved nutrition fixed my weight. After my weight was normal, the activity started because it was easy, fun, and painless. Words can't describe the pleasure of doing calisthenics with a body 25% lighter than it used to be. My experience exercising now is a daily celebration of being alive and well, and the feedback these activities provide keep my life in check.
I've also noticed that as I became stronger and more adept at push-ups, I was less abusive to my wrist joints and instead distributed the weight across my fingers and even slightly elevated the heel of my palm rather than leaving the area inactive (letting the wrist joint just take up all the abuse as I repeatedly drove my weight into the floor through it.) This wasn't possible for a long time because all the other muscles had to develop and catch up to the chest which was always capable of doing 20-30.
For those of you saying your wrists are ruined from daily push-ups, I'm dubious of your claims. My wrists seem to only become more resilient as I do more push-ups. If you're overweight, have gout, or something else caused by poor nutrition then you should probably address that instead of ceasing the activities altogether. There are more or less abusive techniques to push-ups, and if you're doing them daily in large quantities, you should be able to develop a painless technique, be nicer to your joints by activating the muscles in the area.
Push-ups, pull-ups, dips, and sit-ups. Every day. You'll be a coding machine. At the VERY least, push-ups. Every hour or two, take a break, knock off ten push-ups, walk around a bit, get some water, get back to work. I'll do this right at the office, often in the server room.
A good chair helps, but all of this other nonsense is unnecessary. Exercise, and nutrition is the key to basically everything in life.
As mentioned below. SLEEP.