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David and Dick made some good points, but there are still gray areas.
I'm paying the chiro big bucks to get rid of the chicken-neck thing, right
now. It'll take a year or more or adjustments and exercises. My wife has it
worse than I do and may not recover as far, and certainly not as fast. To
keep from doing it to myself again, I'm being much more careful about
monitor distance/placement.
I'm also going to get a timer to remind myself to get up and wander around
every hour or so.
Regarding the arms, I used to think that having nothing under the forearms
or wrists was the way to go. Then, I started getting arm, wrist and hand
problems. It wasn't the infamous and much-overdiagnosed carpal tunnel
syndrome. We eventually traced it back to a knot in my upper back, which
resulted from endless days of sitting in front of monitors with my arms held
out in front of me (to type and mouse). If the arms are unsupported, the
upper-back muscles have to remain in tension. Since the arms are relatively
close to the body, and you are not carrying any additional weight in your
mitts, the clenching is subtle. Being subtle, it goes unnoticed. Going
unnoticed, it continues for much longer periods than it should.
Trigger points and other damage can form either from just the constant
low-level punishment, or from you performing some innocuous movement that
should not give you any trouble. But, since you've pre-fatigued the back
muscles by hours of sitting before you reach for a pen or stoop for your
purse, or try to catch that barbeque peanut before it hits the floor... you
get a spasm. Do that enough and eventually it doesn't go away. For some
people, "enough" is just once or twice.
With a trigger point or other chronic problem, you instinctively avoid using
the affected part, so you compensate slightly with your posture and by
favoring one size when you perform everyday actions. Over the years, those
things compound. None of it is usually painful in the initial stages, so you
keep ingnoring and adding slight compensative contortions... that in turn
put further unbalanced stresses on your parts and bits. One day, you find
that you've become your parents or your grand-parents -- way, way too early.
Until you've really messed yourself up, it can all be corrected. Certainly,
it can all be prevented. Unfortunately, the younger programmers and writers
who sit with their spines curved under, or with the beginnings of the
forward-tilting chicken-neck thing, don't feel any problem -- they're still
young and invulnerable. Later on, when they've put in thousands and
thousands of hours of bad posture, it comes home to roost, but by then they
are early-middle aged or older. Among other things, as they've stiffened and
developed little sorenesses, those have all crept in slowly and
unobtrusively. You can tolerate a lot before it spurs you to action.
Sometimes that's not good.
Ideally, we would all have some physical activity interspersed into our
every day. The problems that most of us eventually develop come from doing
too much of one thing, even if we do it "perfectly". Variety is the
spice... :-)
Kevin
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