Spring is here and just before we rush out the door with spade in hand spare a little thought for your limbs which have born the brunt of improper posture over the past winter months.<\/p>\n
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Some people say that human beings will always take the easiest route to complete a task, personally, I do not believe this to be true, but when working at a computer it seems that a lot of people adopt a posture that brings their head as close as possible to the computer keyboard, possibly it indicates the development of a new form of thought transfer, or maybe it is just bad posture.<\/p>\n
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The idea of causing yourself an injury by sitting down working on a computer may seem preposterous, but it is the adoption of the same bad posture day in day out that is the root cause of potential injury, such as repetitive strain injury,\u00a0 upper limb disorder or tendonitis.\u00a0 While these injuries are not as serious as ones caused by improper lifting of heavy objects. They can reduce quality of life for those who suffer from them.<\/p>\n
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There is a science called Ergonomics which is the study of the relationships between tools in the workplace and their users i.e. us. Various products have been produced over time such as wrist rests and ergonomic keyboards and guidelines on the proper posture to be adopted at a keyboard and screen are well documented.\u00a0 These guidelines suit very well to a computer workstation, but do not address\u00a0 mobile computing or computing on the move, which has become a greater part of our lives.<\/p>\n
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It woud be pointless to produce a manual of all the possible position a person can adopt while using a computer, but awareness of posture is very important if you wish to avoid strain or injury.\u00a0 Sitting in a manner that allows the vertebrae to rest on top of one another with the full spine, neck and head aligned, and the shoulders relaxed, is recommended, the Alexander technique offers good guidelines on this.<\/p>\n
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Bringing the head as near as possible to the device may seem the shortest route for our thoughts to the keyboard, but it is ignoring the needs indeed the existence of the rest of the body.<\/p>\n
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The HSE in England produce a useful leaflet on upper Limb disorders this can be downloaded at http:\/\/www.hse.gov.uk\/pubns\/indg171.pdf<\/a>, the Alexander technique have a web site dedicated to their technique and Ergonomics http:\/\/ergonomics.org\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spring is here and just before we rush out the door with spade in hand spare a little thought for your limbs which have born the brunt of improper posture over the past winter months. Some people say that human beings will always take the easiest route to complete a task, personally, I do…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[21,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.compucara.ie\/articles\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}