It's literally science
(midwest.social)
fossilesque
Science MemesI use a trackball mouse. That must be why my back is doing great.
"Hmmm, I'm going to write you a prescription for 75% more RGB LED backlighting"
I have all those things, but my back hurts because I fucked it up on my 20's moving file cabinets at a minimum wage job.
I do consider it the reason i don't have carpal tunnel after 30 years of IT/Code/Sysadmin though.
The last time I hired a few people to help me move, I gave each one an extra $30 just to get themselves a goddamn back brace, that shit makes me worried when I see young people yanking heavy shit around like it's not doing anything to their bodies.
real solution for most people would be to start exercising
Exactly right. Just a bit of exercise every week is enough to get stronger muscles and no pain in back or anywhere else. At least that worked for me, and its easy to do.
Peoples bodies are rarely used for physical work if you work in some sitting down position all day, and it means you lose all muscles with time.
Stretching too, it doesn't have to be complicated like yoga, just find a doorjamb and put your arm against it or push against a wall or something, try to touch your toes, raise your arms, breath deep and hold your positions, don't wiggle or lunge, just stop where you feel a pull and hold it, try to cover all your major support areas.
Actually my back hurts because your mother damaged it with her large mass when we were engaged in coitus.
I read coitus as combat. Makes sense I suppose
Daaaaaaad stop
That's what she said
š§
There's a big difference between "Dad" and "Daddy" though less than the users of one think.
I use a really small table and literally sit on the ground, and I got no back pain
context: it was supposed to be temporary when my table got damaged, but I ended liking it
I use none of those and my lower back is fine. Lifting weights fixed all that shit almost immediately.
I could have sworn it was due to the severe injury I sustained, but who am I to argue with science?
~~Degenerative disc disorder~~ bad mouse
Hundreds of upvotes on a shitpost can't be wrong!
I'm using a "laying chair" which is superior for posture
š„ļøš¦
I actually do this sometimes, feels good
Until you actually need to stand and realize you've stressed your neck muscles and lower back
Who let you in my house?
I never get back pain, because I get it all in my shoulders and neck instead.
Mouse Quest player core
I'm a personal trainer, I've destroyed two lumbar discs, gotten disc replacement surgery and currently working with a physiotherapist to get back on track. Back pain can have many causes. Anything from disc degeneration to muscle imbalances. If you're not in pain that prevents you from doing them, there are a few exercises my physiotherapist has me doing.
- Glute bridge to activate your glutes. Underactive glutes can cause you to compensate with your lower back muscles, causing overuse.
- Prone cobra for strengthening your back muscles.
- Plank and side plank for strengthening your abdominals, obliques and deeper core muscles
- Lying hamstring stretch. Tight hamstrings, common in people who are sedentary or sit a lot for work, can cause referred lower back pain.
- Kneeling hip flexor stretch. Hip flexors are also commonly tight in people who are sedentary or sit a lot. Can cause a muscle imbalance with the posterior chain, altering the length-tension relationship in the muscles.
But if you have more severe lower back pain, go see a doctor and get an MRI if necessary to find out if there's something going on with your discs. Don't just try to work through pain and ignore the problem. That's what I did, and it just made things worse. You may not necessarily need surgery, but it's good to find the root cause so you know what options you have.
I popped my two discs around L5. So far I'm trying to avoid surgery, pain is mostly under control at the moment but I've had extreme ups and downs for the last few months so...
Thank you for the exercise advice, I'll look them up and compare with what I'm currently doing. I do the McGill big 3 every day plus some other exercises and stretches I learned during physical therapy but I don't know the names of those.
I don't know exactly what these are based on your descriptions, but I went through physical therapy and was given some stretches/exercises that do for sure help some. It isn't a "cure", but as you said, if you have back pain and can do them, you should be trying to.
TL;DR your back hurts because you're poor.
Nah, OP is just being elitist trying to justify those purchases. (not that they're bad ideas, just unnecessary)
The real answer is posture and lack of streching and exercize. Unless you have an underlying issue like scoliosis, stretching and exercize fix 90% of the aches and pains young people whine about with "getting old" in their 30's.
Pretty sure OP is sarcastic
Yea, it's a meme. Though sadly a lot of people I run into unironically think the meme is the best solution.
Until knowledge becomes laughably common, I'm going to try to spread what is best. Especially when the better option is way cheaper.
Nah it's because I don't have enough monitors.
Need a 4th one to balance things out nicely
But then you won't have a middle one to look straight ahead. Go for 5 instead
Nah, need to go straight to 9, 3x3 matrix. It's acceptable to pause at 6 if you are budget conscious.
3 wide, middle stacked
Ah the olā crosshair setup
Time to up the resolution
I don't have as much desk time as I used to. My back hurts because I'm old and I have done a bunch of different jobs that hurt my back in a bunch of different ways.
I hate that planking is the best exercise for strengthening your lower back. Theyāre just so boring to do.
Deadlifts would like a word!
Also they are more fun, you feel like a super hero that can lift a house, and it's a compound lift!
You can spice them up with alternating leg raises or do a superman or bird dog. There are also loads of other exercises that work. The best exercise isn't the most effective one, it's the one you actually do consistently
The best exercise is the one you actually do
Thatās how I finally got to exercise regularly. First, I spend way too long trying to hype myself up for running. Never happened. I hate running. No amount of convenience can convince me. Then I started hiking and yoga and swimming and whatever came my way. Sure, I donāt have any sort of routine, but I do some sport very regularly!
I did planking for about a thousand years (or so it felt) and it didn't really help at all. What did help massively was dumbbell swings! In just a couple of days my back pain was like 90% gone, totally gone today.
I'm quite tall, so YMMV.
Tall back pain person here. Gonna try this
Make soft careful swings to 90Ā° (like from bottom and up til it's in front of you, not high up), just a couple the first day.
I use a 16 kilo one, I only have that one, it's heavy as fuck but very effective for me.
Good luck, and please do tell how it went!
Pushups are also great, also helps with breasts that get easily fucked with your shoulders laying forwards while on computer long days. That shit got me so bad I had to take sick leave for a week due to shoulder pain
Agreed. Planks and cardio are my downfall because they are mind numbingly boring
That's the best part about cardio. You can do so many other things while doing it. ... OK well, not lots of different things, but once you're past the hell of getting into a shape, you kindof just zone out into the music/podcast/video/what ever and huffpuff away for a while while entertained.
If you go to a gym, some even have theatre rooms filled with treadmills/etc and a movie playing.
I don't end up pushing very hard when I do cardio that way because my attention is divided, but yeah something is better than nothing
It's often actually important to not go too crazy for 'just' day to day cardio. So that actually helps normally.
Unless you're trying to specifically improve cardio, like a runner trying to improve times, mellow cardio is what you want. If you are trying to improve cardio, then definitely mind on the game doing something like intervals!
Absent minded intense cardio is how you get heart attacks. (y'know, outside of the normal health issues that compund into them, often triggered by something 'intense')
While dumb expensive the Aeron chair makes sitting at a desk all day do able and not painful.
Agree. You can also find them second hand at pretty decent prices
Used steel case leap. Doesn't look pretty or have RGB, or a built in mini fridge or whatever, but it works and it costs like 100-200usd.
You're talking about v1 I assume? V2's go for quite a bit more
Both ours are v2. We bought them at like office wholesale warehouse things. Like when offices closed and sell off all their stuff.
What are you, a fucking casual? GTFO of here unless you're using a computer-brain interface and floating in a vat. People like you make me sick.
The best posture is the next posture!
Had some pro ergonomic wizards visit my place of work a million years ago and they kept saying this and it has stuck in my mind like an echo from the ancient world.
I try to switch posture regularly when I'm working. It helps.
Making sure to go on walks regularly also helps with lower back pain in my experience! Can't speak for people who have actual conditions and such, but us regular folk, whose backs are fine, just weak due to sitting down too much, there are ways to combat it without paying an arm and a leg for fancy equipment.
I use all three of those and my back hurts more.
Stretch. If you don't know how, look up yoga routines, and make sure not to force yourself into any positions you cannot easily reach. Until you're more experienced with pushing against your body's limits, it's pretty easy to hurt yourself pushing up against limits.
Then you stop using them and the back hurts even more.
Could also be kidney stones
Or lupus.
It's never lupus.
Can anyone reccomend a split keyboard? I bought one last week, but it's tiny and lacks FN keys and holding down alt practically curls my thumb into my pinkie.
I love my glove80 but it's not without a learning curve
Kinesis are king. But if you want a cheaper option, Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic or whatever it's called is quite good, even though it's not properly split. The halves are angled so that your wrists wouldn't be crooked.
And when I inevitably break the key mechanism trying to clean inside, I unpack old reliable MS Natural 4000 and clack away again.
I'll look into the kinesis! I finally got a chair for my office/game desk, and my arms are resting too far apart for a connected keyboard.
Kinesis Freestyle2. I've had mine since COVID and still love it. They have both Mac and PC key layouts, including function keys.
Edit: I'll add it's an "at home" keyboard for me. If you need to travel with it frequently, it's not super mobile.
Someone else reccomended the kinesis as well! Mobility is not a major concern, if it fits in a backpack, I'm OK. Is it mechanical? As everyone knows, keys that go clickety-clack are a must
I remember when I was a teenager and those things were all the rage (mid 90s). I wanted one just because they were alternative.
Fast forward a whole bunch of years and I'm pilfering the supply closet at work, and happen to stumble upon a slightly dusty, but functional and genuine OG Microsoft split keyboard. So of course I just had to.
Let's just say that keyboard is back collecting dust in that exact same spot. The ergos of it were okish, like your hand naturally rests like that. But even just that little difference of layout messed my muscle memory up way too much. And you are right, hitting some of the function keys was too alien.
I tried a standing desk and it made my back pain a lot worse.
With a standing desk, you have to be very careful in not being stationary. Standing in the same position for an hour is not great for your back at all, but the goal of a standing desk is to constantly move a little bit and relax your back muscles. Ideally, you want some sort of standing desk pad that forces you to subconsciously constantly move.
Yeah, extremely cheesy way of putting it: The best work position is the next one.
I.e. don't stay in one position for a long time, but rather switch it up regularly.
split keyboard recs?
I use a DIY keyboard called the Dactyl Manuform and I love it to bits
I have a Lily58 that I love. I put mine together myself (save for soldering. The place I found mine offered a service to do that before shipping) so itās a bit different looking than this one shown in their preview, but itās the same layout.
https://keebd.com/en-us/products/lily58-pro-keyboard-kit
oooh, 2 cool!
Svalboard Lightly
https://svalboard.com/
!ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world
Thereās several out there depending on what you want. I donāt mess with anything like ortholinear or Ergodox because the stagger is weird. So in the āregular keyboard but splitā space, if you donāt want to build your own, thereās the cloud9, the dygma raise 2, and even such like the Feker Alice looks cool too - itās not mechanically split but does give the split curve feel like the MS Ergo.
I love my Moonlander keyboard at home: https://www.zsa.io/moonlander
And I built an Iris for my desk at work: https://keeb.io/products/iris-se-kit
Oh good, I thought it was from the repeated hard pounding in the ass.
It's both.
Did all that, turns out it is just Cervical Spondylosis.
How does split keyboard help?
Even just a keyboard with left and right halves angled toward the respective arms would help. Because with a typical keyboard, the arms come at it at an angle, and then the wrists are crooked to have the fingers on the straight key rows. An angled or split keyboard allows to keep the wrists straight.
It allows two people to have better posture when they're both hacking into the mainframe on the same keyboard.
Lol
I get this reference lol
It allows you to keep your arms shoulder-width apart which makes it easier to avoid hunching.
Same as the ergonomic mouse. Natural poses are less stressful.
Which means palms facing each other instead of facing down in one case, and hands should-wide apart with relaxed shoulders instead hunching in the other.
Caveat: Most people nowadays never learned to properly type but are self-taught. Which makes using split keyboards more challenging.
I like my split keyboard and ergonomic mouse tho
I have a tkl to get some close mouse space, how do you deal with it using a split? Where do you put the mouse?
I have a trackball mouse in the middle.
Makes sense! I strongly dislike trackballs/track-"nipples" though. Maybe it's a configuration issue, a mouse is so quicker and precise no?
My lower back is the opposite where standing straight for a while actually causes pain.
(Me crossing out āaggressive twerkingā) Dang, wrong again.
