Ergonomics and Good mood
Today we had a very nice ergonomic class.
We had been taught about how to stay at our working places and when to get a
rest. It was a great reminding for us, because very often we forget about it,
very, very often. This becomes a big problem after in life, a health problem,
due to our lifestyle. Physically, human body is not made to be sedentary, our
history told us that we should move, because we used doing this for hunting and
climbing trees in order to get fruits.
If to dive deeper into our body
construction you can easily understand why we get pains when we get used to
sedentary life. The pain can come from muscles or bones. Inactive muscles tend
to become worn socks, because they hang on the bone inactive, and their elasticity
become weaker. But they don’t give you pain. The one which are giving pain are
the stressed muscles. These muscles are those which are always under pressure. We
get stressed muscles when we are used to a body pose which are wrong
comfortable. Wrong comfortable means that you feel that for you is more comfortable,
but for your body health is not. This happens to people who are working in
front of the computer. If we have in our habit keeping a wrong pose it will
give us headaches, arm aches and back aches, because we are keeping some of the
muscles stressed.
The bones aches come due to keeping them
into extreme poses. We had been given a nice biological example with the
structure of cartilages in bones. Apparently the cartilages are thicker at the
center of the bone and thinner at the margins. Due to this, when we are holding
our bones on extremes the liquid which is between cartilages, called synovial
fluid, is getting squeezed to the other side, and the cartilages is willing to
erode. That’s why is a good idea to have a non-extreme pose of the bones,
especially when working for a long time. You wonder what to do to keep our
cartilages healthy and beautiful as on image? It is actually easy; you just can
do exercises with your bones and muscles once in a while. Or you can get a
program which will remind you to rest (and exercise). It is very annoying, but
healthy things are not always comfortable.
I have found some basic advices of how to
keep a better mood at work if you improve your working position:
1) Make sure that the weight of your arms is supported at all times. If your arms are not supported, the muscles of your neck and shoulders will be crying by the end of the day.
That means that your arm always should rest on a
surface, even if you’re using the mouse. If the surface between the table and
the mouse is too big, try and put a book or a box under your arm.
2) Watch your head position, and try to keep the weight of your head directly above its base of support (neck). Don’t “crane” your head and neck forward.
4) The monitor should be placed directly in front of you, with the top no higher than eye level. The keyboard should be directly in front of the monitor so you don’t have to frequently turn your head and neck.
5) Talking on the phone with the phone receiver jammed between the neck and ear is really bad practice. You know that’s true, so don’t do it!
6) The keyboard and the mouse should close enough to prevent excessive reaching which strains the shoulders and arms.
7) Avoid eye strain by making sure that your monitor is not too close, it should be at least an arm’s length away.
8) Take steps to control screen glare, and make sure that the monitor is not placed in front of a window or a bright background.
9) You can rest your eyes periodically for several seconds by looking at objects at a distance to give your eyes a break.
10) The feet should not be dangling when you are seated. If your feet don’t comfortably reach the floor or there is pressure on the backs of your legs, use a footrest or lower the keyboard and chair.
The 10 advices source is this.
Be aware of your working possition and time, it will make your life easyer.
With love a purple frog :)
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