Clicking Buttons.
If you perform 10,000 mouse click operations a day, which is easy to do and separate to the 200,000 plus keyboard you might perform in a day, then based on a 222 working days (44 weeks) working a year you perform over 2,000,000, TWO MILLION mouse clicks a year.

How Far Do You Have to Go?
Let us just say for example that on average you move your mouse just 2 inches between each click.

Approx. 2 inches
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That is 4,000,000 inches, which is 333,333 feet or (@5280 feet to a mile) 63.13 miles or 101 Kilometers a year. So you are walking on your hands for over a mile a week! Doesn't using you larger upper arms muscles make more sense now?

Typists using mechanical typewriters were thought not to suffer RSI so much simply because the mechanical mechanism took a short period of time to move the key to the paper and then return to rest. Another key couldn't be used during this period so, even though small, a Nano-Break, in which the finger muscles got a short rest interval, was always had. Additionally and differently those typist's hands and arms were always moving in 3 dimensions and not just two as with the now flat computer keyboard, so promoting circulation.

They never had to contend with mousing and considering that most people suffer in there mousing limb, it is seemingly the most culpable in causing premature limb wear due to Static Limb Posture.

Wrist Rests:
Neither could typists rest their wrists on hard surfaces so that the weight of their own hands and forearms bore down on the actual carpal tunnel region itself, where blood vessels are closest to the surface, with the effect that circulation is physically hindered even more. They had no wrist pads, gel filled or otherwise, which act as a partial tourniquet for the wrist; Our Advice; throw them away!

Gripped Mice and Trackballs:
Trackballs have you moving fingers with absolutely no arm movement whatsoever and mice gripped between fingers and thumb can place a tremendous burden on the thumb. It is said that 1lb of force applied by the thumb tip produces 10 lbs of force on the thumb joint at the palm. On that basis if you apply only 1 oz of force each second for a total of 3 hours a day, that is equal to 6,750 lbs force or 3.38 tons of force per second per day, a load born entirely by the thumb/palm joint! That in our 222 working days a year equates to 750 tons per year. We are capable of remarkable things, but not indefinitely.

We can therefore only recommend the use of other computer mouse devices to those who can hold their breath under water for longer than 10 minutes, because they are the only people who overcome the biomechanics and biochemistry that make side effects from mousing with any other devices, almost inevitable. See the American Journal Of Industrial Medicine Article on the Clinical References Page. So the rest of us must mouse within the confines that nature has prescribed for us and use the tools that work with us or suffer the consequences.

Return to Overview or see What to Expect