Repetitive strain injury, or RSI, develops when the same motions stress your muscles, tendons, and nerves day after day. For computer users, the most common forms are carpal tunnel syndrome (nerve compression in the wrist) and tendonitis in the wrist, forearm, or shoulder. The good news: most cases are preventable with the right workstation setup, movement habits, and typing technique.
Set Your Monitor at the Right Height and Distance
A poorly placed screen forces you to crane your neck or lean forward, loading your neck and shoulder muscles in ways they aren’t designed to sustain for hours. OSHA recommends placing your monitor directly in front of you, between 20 and 40 inches from your eyes. The top line of the screen should sit at or slightly below eye level, with the center of the display about 15 to 20 degrees below your horizontal line of sight.
Tilt the monitor 10 to 20 degrees so the screen is roughly perpendicular to where you’re actually looking. If you work near a window, position the monitor perpendicular to it. A screen that faces a window or has a window behind it creates glare, which leads to squinting, leaning, and the kind of awkward posture that compounds neck and shoulder strain over a full workday.
Get Your Chair and Desk Working Together
Start with chair height. Your feet should rest flat on the floor with your knees at roughly a 90-degree angle. If your desk is too high for that, use a footrest rather than raising the chair and letting your feet dangle.
Set the backrest angle between 98 and 110 degrees for focused typing. That slight recline takes pressure off your spinal discs compared to sitting perfectly upright at 90 degrees. Position the lumbar support so it fits into the inward curve of your lower back, roughly at belly-button height. This is the natural apex of your lumbar curve, and supporting it there prevents the slow slump that transfers strain to your upper back and shoulders over the course of a day.
Position Your Keyboard Below Elbow Height
Where your keyboard sits relative to your elbows matters more than most people realize. Research from Cornell University’s ergonomics program shows the keyboard should be below your seated elbow height, with a gentle slope tilting away from you. This lets your hands reach the keys while your wrists stay in a neutral position, meaning they’re not bent up, down, or to the side.
Most keyboard feet (those little flip-out tabs on the back) actually work against you. They tilt the keyboard toward you, forcing your wrists into extension, which is the exact posture that increases pressure inside the carpal tunnel. If your desk doesn’t have a keyboard tray, try keeping the keyboard flat or even slightly negatively tilted so the front edge is a touch higher than the back.
Place your mouse right next to the keyboard at the same height so you don’t have to reach up or out to use it. Reaching repeatedly for a mouse that’s too far away or too high is one of the most common triggers for shoulder and forearm pain in office workers.
Support Your Wrists Between Keystrokes
There’s an ongoing debate about whether to “float” your wrists above the keyboard while typing. Floating means hovering your hands with no forearm support, and while it keeps your wrists straight, it forces the muscles on the back of your forearm to contract constantly just to hold your hands in place. That sustained, low-level muscle tension is itself a path to strain and tendon irritation over time.
A better approach: use a wrist rest or desk surface to support your forearms and the heels of your palms when you’re not actively pressing keys. During typing, your fingers should do the moving while your forearms stay lightly supported. The goal is to avoid both extremes. Don’t press your wrists hard into a sharp desk edge (that compresses nerves), and don’t hold them unsupported in the air for hours.
Take Breaks That Actually Help
You’ve probably heard the 20-20-20 rule: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. It’s widely recommended for eye strain, but a 2022 study published in Optometry and Vision Science tested it directly and found that 20-second visual breaks at various intervals didn’t significantly reduce eye strain symptoms compared to no breaks at all. The breaks were simply too short to make a measurable difference.
What does help is getting up and changing your posture. A 20-second eye break won’t do much for the tendons and muscles in your hands, wrists, and shoulders. Aim for a 2 to 5 minute movement break every 30 to 60 minutes. Stand, walk, shake out your hands, roll your shoulders. The point isn’t a specific formula. It’s interrupting the sustained, static posture that causes tissue fatigue.
Strengthen and Stretch Your Hands and Forearms
A structured exercise program can make a real difference. A 2024 study in the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health tested a seven-exercise routine on office workers who already had early symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. Participants performed the exercises at least three times a week for eight weeks.
You don’t need to follow that exact protocol, but incorporating a few of these movements into your routine helps keep your tendons flexible and your forearm muscles balanced:
- Wrist flexion and extension stretches. Hold one hand out with your arm straight, then use the other hand to gently pull your fingers back (extending the wrist), hold until the tension eases, then push them forward (flexing the wrist). Do both hands.
- Forearm rotation. With your elbow bent at 90 degrees, slowly rotate your forearm so your palm faces up, then down. Adding a light resistance band or small weight increases the benefit.
- Chest and shoulder opener. Place your hand flat on a doorframe at shoulder height, then slowly turn your body away until you feel a stretch across your chest and the front of your shoulder. This counteracts the rounded-shoulder posture that hours of typing reinforces.
- Resisted hand extension. Wrap a rubber band around your fingertips and spread your fingers apart against the resistance. This strengthens the muscles that oppose the gripping and curling motion of typing.
Hold stretches until you feel the tissue relax rather than counting to a set number. For resistance exercises, aim for 10 to 15 repetitions per hand.
Control Your Lighting
This one is easy to overlook, but bad lighting creates RSI problems indirectly. When glare washes out your screen or ambient light is too dim, you unconsciously lean forward, tilt your head, or hunch your shoulders to see better. Over weeks, those small postural shifts add up.
For workstations using LCD monitors (which is nearly everyone now), OSHA recommends ambient lighting up to about 73 foot-candles. In practical terms, that means your office should be well-lit but not so bright that you see reflections on your screen. Overhead fluorescent lights directly above your monitor are a common culprit. If you can’t move them, an anti-glare screen filter on your monitor helps, and positioning your screen perpendicular to windows eliminates the worst natural-light glare.
Type Lighter Than You Think You Need To
Many people pound the keys harder than necessary, especially when they’re focused or frustrated. Modern keyboards register a keystroke well before the key bottoms out. Typing with a lighter touch reduces the impact force on your finger tendons with every single keystroke, and across thousands of keystrokes per day, that adds up significantly. If you can hear yourself typing loudly, you’re pressing harder than you need to.
Mechanical keyboards with lighter actuation forces can help if you find yourself habitually bottoming out keys. Split or ergonomic keyboards that angle outward also reduce the twisting (called ulnar deviation) that a standard flat keyboard forces on your wrists. These aren’t essential purchases, but they’re worth considering if you type for many hours daily and are already noticing discomfort.