Anyway

Shoulder mech­an­ics seem to be one of those top­ics that people don’t talk about much, but any time I men­tion the issues I have with my shoulders (too much time at the com­puter each day) I’m by no means the only one affected. I’ve been doing Pil­ates for years, which has helped, but that’s only a couple of hours a week, which leaves lots of time dur­ing the rest of the week to undo the good work. 

I spent a bit of time sit­ting at my desk, fig­ur­ing out in which pos­i­tion my shoulders and wrists would be hap­pi­est. I talked to the people at ErgoCanada (they’re very help­ful and very know­ledge­able and I recom­mend talk­ing to them if you’re based in Canada) and ended up with a split key­board that can be placed in a num­ber of con­fig­ur­a­tions, the Kin­es­is Cor­por­a­tion Freestyle2 (Amazon US link). The first few days using it were a little weird, while I got used to hav­ing to use the recom­men­ded hand for each let­ter, and get­ting used to the place­ment of the back­space and delete keys. I played around with the con­fig­ur­a­tions, start­ing with the splayed con­fig­ur­a­tion, but at the moment I use the straight con­fig­ur­a­tion with some 10cm between the two halves. The spa­cing I use var­ies a little depend­ing on what I’m doing, if it’s mostly writ­ing or a lot of mouse work. The key­board is quiet, with a good feel; the keys are light but stable. There’s also a bunch of accessor­ies to tilt the key­board in vari­ous ways, or enable a wider gap between the halves, but I haven’t seen the need for those yet. One day I may get the Mac ver­sion to go with my laptop; since it splits into two pieces it does pack a lot smal­ler for travel than a reg­u­lar keyboard.

As well as using the key­board, I’ve tried to get into the habit of doing small simple shoulder rolls on a reg­u­lar basis, to keep the ball aligned bet­ter in the sock­et. There are lots of web sites that explain ver­sions of how to do these but most seem to be aimed at body­build­ers; this page from the Yoga journ­al is more gentle than most.

These two things, put togeth­er, seem to be help­ing. Either or both would be worth think­ing about if you have shoulder or arm issues and spend hours at a com­puter each day.