How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career • Hacker News Board

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#211

Post by zwegner » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 7:05 AM UTC

niels_olson wrote: post #168

Someone wrote: post #81

RSI is one of those things (ADHD, autism and dyslexia are other examples) that start as a label some scientist puts on a specific set of symptoms that cannot (currently) be linked to a specific condition [1], becomes popular and then get used for a zillion things with more or less the same symptoms (Wikipedia lists edema, tendinosis, tendinitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, De Quervain syndrome, t…

Reddit has arrived: a plausibly researched answer that's so far off base it pains me. Physician here, and my wife is an occupational therapist. RSI is like saying you have a cold. Yes, there is a problem, no it's not specific, but it gets us to the right chapter of the book. Some of the things you list have very specific causes and treatments that have nothing to do with RSI. The article would be more like a case rep…

Where, exactly, is your disagreement with the parent post? Nothing you said seems to contradict it, from what I can tell.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#212

Post by whyagaindavid » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 7:08 AM UTC

overcast wrote: post #62

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…

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.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#213

Post by sethammons » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 7:23 AM UTC

xenihn wrote: post #176

r_smart wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd definitely appreciate any advice you might have :)

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.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#214

Post by ijidak » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 7:58 AM UTC

I've had similar problems. And the same thing worked for me. Seeing that it worked for this person as well, reaffirms that this might be a permanent solution. Whenever I code without long sleeves, I start to feel pain again. I haven't tried hand warmers; I might have to try that too. It makes sense though. Carpal tunnel and other repetitive stress syndromes come down to low blood flow. I've also used aspirin to beneficial effect, when the carpal tunnel starts flaring up. And the aspirin helped as well. At the end of the day it seems like it's all about blood flow. Doctors wanted to do surgery and I turned it down, and just keeping the blood flowing, by staying warm has helped quite a bit. (Of course, along with regular breaks too.)

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#215

Post by elcct » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 8:38 AM UTC

It looks like it is pretty common for companies to neglect air conditioning. What's the point in having fancy office if the air makes you dizzy after an hour and no amount of coffee can make a difference or the temperature. One days cold as f, another day let's all go naked and drink ice tea...

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#216

Post by quickpost » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 8:57 AM UTC

tom_wilde wrote: post #2

This may help someone out there. I had chronic tennis elbow for years, tried a huge array of options to fix it and failed... until: I found a _vertical_ mouse. Turns out it was a micro-injury thing...

Try out the Tyler Twist exercise - relatively new, but with actual scientific backing:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2971639/

I do it once a week after I lift weights and it has cleared up my tennis elbow nicely (and helped programmer RSI, I think too!).

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#217

Post by mindcrime » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 9:11 AM UTC

I've had a little on-again, off-again RSI trouble over the years. A couple of years ago, this topic came up on HN, and I picked up a very useful tip. Somebody shared that they had (heard|learned|observed|whatever) that most of the damage resulting in RSI happens while you sleep, not while you type. So they started wearing a wrist brace to bed and it fixed their problem. In my case, it turned out that wearing the wrist brace to bed also helped tremendously. Usually if I have an RSI flareup, I make it a point to wear the brace to bed (and possibly also during the day a bit, but not all the time) for a few days, and the pain goes away.

All of that said, knock on wood I guess, as I haven't had a serious flareup of wrist pain in quite some time now. Not sure why, but I'll take it.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#218

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 9:35 AM UTC

(warning, anecdotal) I have been behind a computer full time (>= 8 hrs/day) (usually including weekend) for over 30 years now, I take breaks for exercise, cooking & parties and have done for most of that 30 years. I have found, for myself anyway, that RSI has zippo to do with the amount of typing, mousing or work I do. I have done years of 12 hr days full on typing and I have gotten beginning RSI symptoms from a few weeks of stressful meetings with very little typing in between.

As I was young then and did not want to waste time not being able to lift my arms or move my wrists, I experimented and found that, again for me, it's just 100% stress. Any exercise (none, too little or too much), working 20 hours or 2 hours are completely unrelated for the onset; if there is a stress factor (like; our new product is not selling!! back then) I would get symptoms immediately and they would get worse once started when typing/mousing more if the stress factor stayed constant.

After that and other health events triggered by (much heavier) stresses, I got my brain to not stress (took me a lot of years) and that worked. I can just work forever behind a computer (which I usually don't need anymore, as I found also that it's completely useless to work many hours / day) without any effects for the past 13-something years.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#219

Post by Symbiote » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #187

Symbiote wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, and I've used Dvorak for 12 years. Just using Qwerty for a few sentences feels awful. It doesn't hurt, of course, it's just a few sentences, usually on someone else's computer. But it's like using chopsticks to eat oily rice, when you're used to eating potatoes with a fork. To everyone: - Print this PDF: http://www.dvzine.org/type/OneSheetDVmap.pdf - Change your keyboard layout to Dvorak - Don't look at t…

The longest one-handed QWERTY words are "sweaterdresses" and "stewardesses" as far as I know. But anyway, as a programmer, you spend more time hitting key chords and special characters, which aren't much better in Dvorak and are probably part of why programmers are so prone to RSI despite in absolute terms not typing that much compared to, say, a secretary.

I spend lots of time typing emails, documentation, HN comments, comments within code, and so on -- this mostly fits the secretary distribution of keypresses.

Even when I'm writing code, alphabetic characters and normal punctuation are still by far the most commonly used. It's only the rare punctuation []{};: that's worse off, and even within code I still type for more S characters than semicolons.

If this concerns you, there's Programmer Dvorak layout, but I prefer to keep compatibility with a wider range of computers and use standard Dvorak.

Re: How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career

#220

Post by codingdave » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #62

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…

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.