Category: RSI

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Career commentary Ergonomics Lifestyle RSI

Are you at risk of developing RSI?

questionmedBelow, I provide a list of criteria that I would associate with a worker who will have an elevated risk of contracting an RSI condition. If you associate with a few of these activities, then you too may be at high risk of developing a RSI condition –

  • Computer operator professional or otherwise
  • Deep in concentration about your work, intolerant of interruptions
  • You slouch at your desk, peering at the computer screen, unaware of your posture
  • Working on a key project with tight deadline
  • Stressing about achieving that deadline
  • Working in a competitive environment in uncertain times
  • Spending your work time at a computer for 5-10 hours a day
  • Taking minimal breaks, and most of these are spent checking email /surfing the web
  • Lunch is frequently a sandwich eaten at your desk whilst working
  • You are a heavy coffee drinker
  • You spend a cumulative 30 min/day sending text messages on your mobile phone
  • You go home after a 10 hour day and relax by ripping some CDs to mp3, updating your iPod, catching up on personal email and unwinding by playing a ‘shoot ’em up’ on your computer/games system for 2-3 hours
  • You spends 6-8 hours sleeping before starting the cycle again

Lets break down each point and try to inject some solutions –

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commentary Lifestyle RSI

Video Games and RSI

Games ControllerAn interesting article appeared in the Times Online titled  “Doctors identify ‘PlayStation palm’ as a legitimate medical complaint” which takes a broad look at how more and more types of repetitive strain injuries originating from use of video gaming machines are being discovered. It should be noted that a ‘video gaming machine’ can encompass the set-top box variety, a full-sized PC or indeed a miniature hand held device, the only difference being the types of repetitive motion that the users engage in order to interact.

It should also be noted that video gaming is a highly addictive pastime (I speak from the experience of my youth). Video games are designed to be addictive; let’s face it, if they were not, players would rapidly lose interest and move onto something else, and the manufacturers would not sell many games.

There are usually very high levels of

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commentary Lifestyle Miscellaneous RSI

Addicted to Technology

needle1.jpgWe are a species that spends most of our lives battling addictions of one sort or another – ranging from what we consume to television to news, the list is endless. Our addiction to technology is no different. The cool technological gadgets that adorn our lives are just so addictive!

There are so many ways today to fritter away huge amounts of our time in our new virtual worlds. Have you ever played a video game and noticed how 3 hours of your life just disappeared?

Technology has brought us immense benefits as a society, but it has also made us slaves to a great extent, and we spend ever increasing amounts of time interacting with devices whether they be computers, mobile phones, PDAs, games consoles, MP3 players, GPS or TV remotes.

A substantial portion of employment now involves working on computers, whether it be the inputting/analysing of data, or the creation of the latest software that controls our lives. The trouble is that, the more high technology we introduce to our lives, the more time we spend interacting with it, often to the disadvantage of our health. It’s not too hard to imagine that, if current trends continue, there will be a technological gadget to interact with from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep (or more scarily from the moment we are born until the moment we die!).

The Web has expanded the information available at our fingertips by a staggering amount. It has also changed

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commentary Ergonomics RSI

RSI – Mouse use biting people

An excellent RSI article has appeared on BBC News technology section title “The mouse is biting some PC users“. The article quite concisely summarises the main issues at hand (no pun intended) with RSI.

The article indicates that RSI is part of an ever increasing phenomena affecting 115,000 workers last year a staggering 34% increase from the previous year. If ever we needed evidence that RSI is reaching epidemic levels, then this is it.

It also contains a quote from Pauline Cole (a spokesperson for the Association of Chartered Physiotherapists in Occupational Health and Ergonomics (ACPOHE))

“A lot of people are using computers more, even in jobs you wouldn’t traditionally expect it”.

This is the trouble with RSI conditions. Just about every job these days requires interaction with computers, and this can present major challenges when a worker is affected with RSI, there are few options out there to allow them to work whilst avoiding computer use and allowing their bodies to recover, except for perhaps manual labour.

In another revealing quote from the article, this time from Bunny Martin (who runs charity Body Action Campaign)

“schools tend to have a single standard computer set-up for nine and 15-year-olds alike.”, and alarmingly she notes that “around 60% of children she meets have first symptoms of RSI, including strain-related pain in the neck and shoulders.”

This is a staggering fact and if RSI is impacting children years before they start looking for employment then we truly are sitting on a RSI health time bomb.

All in all an excellent summary article on where we are at with RSI.

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Career RSI

RSI potential in these stressful economic times

In these stressful economic times, it can become commonplace to spend time worrying about whether we may be in danger of losing our jobs or not. As the economy downturns, some businesses will start to review expenditure and decide whether or not to downsize. This lingering threat can result in workers putting in extra hours in an effort to make themselves look less expendable.

Many of these jobs will involve working at a computer for many hours a day, often continuously. If employees are working longer, in stressful environment because of job security reasons, they will be exposing themselves to health risks on top of job security risks.

According to one article –

“The TUC said research among 2,600 union safety reps showed that almost two thirds reported that stress or overwork were a concern in their workplace.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “Stress casts a gloomy shadow over far too many UK workplaces. And as the

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fitness Miscellaneous RSI Tips

Yoga as a tool to combat RSI

YogaDuring my RSI awareness presentations I refer to the need for people at risk of RSI as well as those who already experience its effects to adopt physical activities. Yoga is one of those activities that I suggest. Why yoga?

In a nutshell, it combines a fairly physical activity encompassing muscle and tendon stretches from your head to your toes, with core conditioning and balance practices. This is coupled with controlled breathing techniques to allow the participant to focus their mind on the present moment. As well as the physical practice, yoga teaches techniques to promote deep relaxation and the ability to clear everyday thoughts from the mind with meditation. This powerful combination really can address a lot of the factors that lead to conditions like RSI (primarily driven by the overused micro-movements of muscles and tendons coupled with bad ergonomics and stressful working conditions).

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Ergonomics RSI Tips

Forearm extensor muscles, wrist position and RSI

When you position your hands at a keyboard as discussed in an earlier article referring to ‘typing with clawed hands’, bad positioning of the wrist can lead to overuse injuries caused by strain in your forearm extensor muscles.

clawed_hands_rsi_sm.jpgThe common position for hands hovering above a keyboard is as shown on the right, which I refer to as the ‘claw’. This position elevates the tension in the aforementioned extensor muscles, causing them to become fatigued over prolonged periods of time. Typing whilst the hand/wrists are in this position (another common posture mistake) will further

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Career Ergonomics RSI Tips

RSI – What to do? (Part 3 – RSI Dealing With A Long Term Condition)

The following article is a follow-on from RSI – What to do? (Part 1 – RSI Initial Symptoms) and RSI – What to do? (Part 2 – RSI Dealing With Progressive Symptoms) .

OK, so you are experiencing a long term RSI condition, ie it has gradually worsened for more than 2 years. You are in continual pain at work and find it difficult to do your job. You have perhaps gone through consultations with ergonomists, doctors, physiotherapists and just about anybody who’ll listen, but still you find no relief. You struggle to remember what it felt like not to associate pain with computer use. You may be wearing an arm brace (and probably have a large collection of them by now), and you probably have a sizeable collection of strange ergonomic mice at your computer that don’t seem to help. Your employer keeps expecting the same work output from you and you stress about how you can get through it. You get by by doing what you can, but generally come home each night from work and feel anxious about the situation and the searing pain down your arms. You wonder what you can do, and how you are supposed to live a normal life – you can’t remember what normal life was like before this injury!

So what are the options then? Well I remember a great bit of advice from my father

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Career RSI

Lunch breaks are not for wimps!

I found this article on the BBC News Magazine web page which got me all fired up just by it’s title “Are lunch breaks really for wimps?“. The article points to research which paints a truly scary picture of current work practices. The following are some quotes –

“Only one in six workers takes a regular lunch break.”

“One consequence of the credit crunch is that breaks are getting even shorter as job insecurity increases.”

“Employees are struggling to keep on top of to-do lists and think the answer is to work harder, eating a sandwich at their desk as opposed to taking a full lunch break, and also not having sufficient breaks during the rest of the day.”

“The vast majority of people are having lunch at their desk while working. That’s the average person now. Very rarely do they get out of the office.”

“If senior management create a culture that lunch is for wimps, it’s counter productive. We all need breaks.”

The research quoted in this article, if valid, foretells a very bleak scenario for

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Ergonomics RSI

My own RSI pain experience

My own experience with RSI pain is that it sets in fairly quickly (over a period of 6 months to 1 year) from the start with mild tingling over the right and left hands/forefingers to more full-blown pain. I had been working extensively doing Computer Aided Design work and producing large quantities of documentation. In the image below, the red areas indicate the main areas where I experienced most of my RSI pain.

rsi arm pain

The areas of pain included –

  • Acute pain over right index and middle fingers
  • Pain over backs of hands
  • Acute pain right wrist
  • Acute pain over outer edge of right thumb
  • Right upper forearm extensor pain
  • Finger joint pain when typing
  • Similar story with left arm (less intense, but I am right handed)

Each separate area of pain could be attributable to a certain cause, and sometimes one symptom would

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