How to reduce pain in the hands

Being a professional designer or artist means you are repeating some movements on a regular basis. Usually you don’t even think about it until it start to cause pain. Have you ever experienced pain in the wrist or fingers while typing or drawing digitally? That’s great if have not. But you if you already had you probably – it’s quite a dilemma when doing what you love and earns your living hurts!

I’ve faced this problem about a year ago when my fingers ached while I was using touchpad on my Mac Book Pro. I really enjoyed this touchpad during for about a year and a half. It appeared to be so convenient even for doing vector art. But the sudden pain that did not go away was quite annoying and really made me worry. Here are my steps on the way to solve this problem:

1. So first of all I’ve stopped using touchpad and totally switched to intuos3 A4 Wacom Tablet. But you can not take the A4 tablet with you when you’re meeting a client, cause this might be taken as something weird.
   
   
2. That’s why I’ve decided to buy a small fancy mouse with a nice psychedelic ornament on it. But it still was not the right choice. The pain in the hand was still there when I was using it. The mouse on the image below is not the exact one but it was something similar.
   
3. One of my colleagues recommended me to buy Apple Magic Mouse. It definitely helped. The hand is quite relaxed while lying on it because of it’s small height. Now I take it with me when I’m out with my laptop, but I’m not going to do much drawing. This does not happen too often so I’ve changed it’s batteries only once since I’ve bought it about half a year ago, which is also nice.
   
   
4. Half a year passed since I’ve switched to this routine, but the fingers still ached and I had some pain in the wrist. Then I came up with an obvious decision – I’ve started to push up. Since I weight about 80 kilos (approximately 176 pounds) and I did not have much exercise during the last year I started with only 10 push-ups two times a day. It was not challenging at all, but I was afraid that I could hurt my hand. I’m adding 2 push-ups every day so the hand is getting more exercise. The wrist started to feel much better after 3-4 days passed. I’d definitely recommend this method, cause it very natural and you don’t have to go anywhere or pay anyone to do it!
   

Still the fingers hurt a bit while I’m typing. So I’m thinking about getting a separate keyboard instead of using laptop’s one.

I hope this article was useful and maybe some of you will get rid of pain in the hands using some of my experience. Take care!