that's solid advice I think. I have pretty much the same story. I mean, I went all out with anabolics and such because I was also trying to get some hot babes, but I never had wrist issues after that.
Got any tips for a 30 year old who wants to prevent needing all this in the future? Wrist strength is something I never think about, but I'm sure it could sneak up on me one day.
I agree. Here's my story in case anyone finds it helpful:
I started lifting in college, and quickly transformed from being super skinny to being well-built and much stronger than the average person. But not crazy strong. I can usually bench press around 200lbs, sometimes more, sometimes less.
Regardless, 10 years after I started working out I began to develop hand/wrist pain. It went from nothing to mild to severe in the span of 8 months.
So being strong didn't prevent this from happening. But perhaps it delayed it? I probably average 8-10 hours/day on my computer and have since childhood. I also played StarCraft competitively for a number of years, a game that requires far more quick and repetitive clicking and typing movements than most other computer activities. Many StarCraft pros have had multiple surgeries. It's possible I was lucky to make it to age 29 before I had issues.
I tried everything. Most things didn't work, including taking an extended break from my computer.
What did work was going back to the gym. Lifting heavy weights 2-4x a week. Whenever I'm doing that regularly, the pain goes away. If I slack for a period of months, it begins to come back slowly.
Seconding this, and also: look to diet simultaneously for the purpose of gaining strength. Your body, not your mind, makes the decision on whether your wrists get stronger, and simply ensuring that it gets more protein and fewer antinutrients can make all the difference.
I found that regular mice gave me a lot of wrist problems after years of playing FPS games with a "death grip." I use trackballs and trackpads now. I understand that other people have trouble with trackpads so YMMV.
* Start going to the gym, and focus especially on free weight exercises. They make your arms and hands stronger, and the growth hormones released after working out promotes healing of any wrist injuries.
* Mouse sensitivity. Which is better, low or high DPI varies on a person-to-person basis but for me what worked was low as it forced me to use my hand to do large movements rather than my wrist.
* Mouse hardware. Again varies on a person-to-person basis, a mouse that is too large or too small for your hand can cause wrist pain.
* Sleep position. Sleeping on your back is probably the safest way, be sure to keep your arms relaxed on the sides. Having a pillow to hug might help as this feels somehow a natural position
* Don't play video games with a mouse. Yes this sucks as some of the best competitive multiplayer games are on the PC, but LoL, CSGO, Overwatch etc are known to cause RSI issues and lots of professional players have ruined their wrists permanently.
Switching to a console will stop any wrist problems from gaming
I've found that a mix of proper ergonomics, regular breaks, CBD oil (for inflammation), wrist braces and physical therapy exercises can do a lot of good.
not scientific evidence but just one more data point to corroborate this line of thought.
i never had even the slightest wrist problems during 26 years of typing and software development - but i've also never stopped exercising, including frequent weight-lifting.
Interesting, I've been coding professionally for about 20 years now, and never had any wrist problems. I've been pretty inconsistent with working out, but have always kept a pull up bar in my home, and even when not working out often I do a few pull ups here and there. Maybe these things are related. Never really thought about it.
advice in this thread is all over the place. that makes sense i guess, because a lot of different things might work, depending on where the problem originates. so i feel as qualified as anybody to throw my two cents in.
when i was younger, say up to my mid-twenties or so, my wrists were indestructible. i routinely played games of asteroids that would last for eight or nine hours, on one of the original atari stand-up game cabinets circa 1980, that applies just slightly less force than necessary to actually snap your wrists in half. at the time i wasn't even aware that the game was an ergonomic disaster, such was the power of my wrists.
fast-forward to the year 2000. i am now almost 40. i went to california extreme (www.caextreme.org -- great fun if you're into that sort of thing), and they of course had several asteroids machines. i was able to play about five minutes before my wrists were absolutely on fire.
same thing started happening to my mouse wrist, at about the same time. i was all of a sudden acutely aware of all the cables and tendons in there, groaning under the pressure. my wrists would sometimes go numb.
now that my wrists were forcing me to concentrate on them, i noticed that i almost always had my entire forearm really tensed up and cramped while typing and mousing. it had never been a problem before, due to my younger super-wrists, but now it was.
so all i had to do was take it easier on myself. notice when i'm tensing up, and stop it. along with the usual stuff: take a break every few hours. get up and think about something else.
This is what worked for me too. Natural keyboard, moving mouse position, seating position, etc. all helped a bit, but after a day or two in gym my wrists simply stopped hurting and felt "healthier". When I stopped gym for 2 months and the pain returned, once I resumed my gym routine the pain stopped again within one or two sessions.
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.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. Suffered for about a year, read the book, 100% cured within a month. Still no issues three years later. I have terrible posture and type all day on a laptop. I shudder to think of the alternate future in which I continued grappling with wrist pain for the rest of my career.
I dropped out of college and within 6 months had debilitating wrist pain. I couldn't even hold a mouse for more than about 20 minutes. I "fixed" it through wrist braces, like the author suggested, ergonomic keyboards (paid $1000 for a datahand keyboard while it was out of production), etc. Yet I still couldn't do simple thing like use a laptop keyboard pain free for 15 minutes. However, it was not until last year that I eliminated the pain completely.
The solution was simple strength training. Not weight lifting (I think that was a major contributor early on.) Within a few weeks of starting the beginner program in the book "You Are Your Own Gym" the pain was gone. I fully expected to have severe wrist pain and nerve damage for the rest of my life.
I hope this helps someone. The solutions to this problem are overblown (granted I suspect a combination of wrist braces and pain killers could push some people far past a recoverable edge.)
reply