Episode: 68
Title: HPR0068: Shoulder Stretches!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0068/hpr0068.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 10:57:19

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dilemma.
Okay.
And welcome back to Hacker Public Radio, this is Peter Nicolitis from The Fresh
Ubuntu Podcast.
Today, I'm going to be taking a bit of a different approach and covering something not overly
technical, but something that all of us hackers we ought to be aware of.
And that is basically a little bit of desktop ergonomics.
The reason I'm talking about this today is that just yesterday I was diagnosed as having
Bersitis, and that's a rather painful inflammation, in my case, in my shoulder.
And it makes certain things like opening doors and sometimes moving the mouse quite painful.
So that got me thinking about RSI's and other things that we get from sitting hunched
over a PC all day, and if you're like me, you probably spend a good amount of time at
your computer.
And not enough time stretching to make up for this.
Now it was, I think, over a year ago, I remember there was a woman that was interviewed.
I don't remember her name, but she was on the Linux link tech show.
And I remember her saying how like the worst possible thing for any human being was to
sit at a computer for more than an hour a day, something to that effect.
And I remember a link going off on her, and I thought it was one of the funniest episodes
ever.
I'm going to have to try to dig that one up.
Anyway, I'm not quite as extreme as her, obviously not, otherwise I wouldn't be in
the computer industry.
But what I've done is just collected a few simple exercises that you can do to help ease
the strain that you're putting on your body by sitting at your desk all day.
Now there are tons of ergonomic resources out on the internet.
I'm not going to go through a lot of them, but I'll link a couple here in the show notes.
And the best thing you can do for starters is make sure that your desk and your chair
are set up properly for you.
And basically that usually involves you sitting at mostly right angles, making sure that all
of your joints, whether your hips, your knees, your arms, etc., are at right angles when
you are sitting at your desk.
So if your chair is too high, and for instance maybe just barely your toes are touching the
floor, then your chair needs to be lower.
And if you feel like your desk is too high as a result, then you probably need a lower desk.
So something, these are things that you need to pay attention to and need to adjust so
that you have the right height.
Otherwise you may develop an injury or pain like I did where your desk was too high.
And as a result, you're constantly lifting your shoulder too much and that may have been
a contributing factor to my injury.
So that's one thing to do is make sure that your desk and your chair are set up properly.
You also want to make sure that your monitor or flat panel display is set up at the right
height.
It should not be too low so that your neck is always hanging down or too high so that
you're always straining up to look at it.
There are some different schools of thought.
I personally prefer to have the monitor just slightly below straight ahead so that I'm
looking down slightly when I look at the monitor.
But do a little digging to see what your own personal preference is on that.
But if you feel any sort of strain when you're sitting at your desk, you want to look into
that and adjust accordingly.
Now one thing that I think I feel a lot when I'm sitting at the desk is I feel the strain
in my shoulders.
And my friend said the expression he used to describe it was the shoulders love the ears.
Basically I was his way of describing how the shoulders would creep up over time.
If you ever walk outside and a chill wind, like a gust of wind goes through and you all
hunch up, that's exactly the same kind of thing that happens over time as you're sitting
at the computer.
Your shoulders will kind of like creep up.
What you don't realize is that that's putting a lot of tension on your muscles and tendons
and then the joints in the whole neck and shoulders area.
One great way to work that out is to take, if you don't have an exercise band like an
elastic band, that's great, but you don't need that.
If you have like an old t-shirt or in this case I have a smart wool sock here, which is
about a foot or so in length, what you can do is grab the sock or the t-shirt by the
ends so that your arms are about, well in my case about a foot and a half apart and hold
it out in front of you.
So I'm going to try to demonstrate this.
Of course you can't see it because it's not a video cast, but hey, hold it out standing
up straight and then what you want to do is grab both ends of the sock and try to get
your shoulder blades to come together.
So you're basically opening up the chest portion of your body, opening up your chest and
clenching your back.
This is almost exact opposite of what happens when you normally sit at a computer.
If you can envision yourself hunched over, that's the position that people normally end
up getting into when they sit at their computer.
You want to do the opposite.
You want to unfold, open up your chest, open and then clench up the scapula or your shoulder
blades.
So do that and then hold the sock out in front of you and just hold that position pulling
out on the sock and hold that position for about 15 seconds and you should feel the stretch
pretty quickly in the shoulder and the scapula area.
Now if the sound, the volume levels are changing a little bit because I'm moving back and
away from the mic as I actually do these stretches.
So once you've held that for about 15 seconds or more if you're comfortable with it, you
can repeat the stretch this time straight up.
So again, bring your shoulder blades together as much as you can while gripping the ends
of the sock and this time hold your arms straight above your head.
So you're doing the same stretch.
You're like Superman flying straight up and again pulling that and you should feel that
anywhere from your shoulders all the way down to the middle of your back and afterwards
it feels really great.
It may hurt while you're doing it.
You don't want to do it so much that it really, really hurts but you should at least feel
the stretch which is a good thing.
Once you've held that for 15 seconds or so, hold your arms down behind your back straight
behind.
So just grab the sock and on both ends with the sock behind you and do the same stretch
again, clenching your shoulder blades but this time with the sock down, so down at around
hip level.
So you're doing the same thing.
Now you're like the human cannon ball or what not.
You're flying forward but your arms are down behind you because the tendency when you're
doing this stretch is to lean forward.
That's not really going to help in the shoulder area.
The point is to bring these finally what you can do is do the same stretch once again.
Stand your shoulder blades together, but try to bring your arms up with both hands.
This is probably the hardest part of those shoulder blades together.
You want to bring your arms up behind your back, standing straight.
So instead of raising the mouth, you get good at raising your arms up behind you, it's
kind of tricky.
Squat, for instance, with your back to your desk or to a table and actually get yourself
more of a stretch but that's kind of advanced.
I would not recommend that if you're new to this or if you're likely to fall over because
then you could really wrench your arms out of their, you know, out of whack.
So you may not want to start with that.
But again, grab the sock, hold it behind you, clenching those shoulder blades tight, arms
about a foot and a half apart, and just raise them up as high as you can hold them until
you feel the stretch.
You don't want to feel extreme pain, obviously.
And then just hold it there for about 15 to 30 seconds.
And again, when you're done, you let those go.
If you've done all four of those stretches, you should feel an improvement in your shoulders
all around.
You should feel your muscles be a little more relaxed like they've gotten some exercise.
And this will help you long-term.
It will help you cope with hours a day of sitting at the keyboard.
So do those, do these stretches, literally they take a minute, right?
I gave you four positions and you know, each one takes about 15 seconds.
So you can spend one minute a day and help undo a lot of the hunched up posture that we
get from sitting at PC's all the time.
There are a number of other stretches you can do.
If you're interested in stuff like this, you know, things that you can do, sitting on
the floor, sitting in your chair, all sorts of things.
Right things for your lower back and your hips.
I'm not going to cover those right now because again, I said, shoulders are the most, most
common place where we need the work.
So that's it.
That's not really a super technical thing, but again, I think something that applies very
much to the hacking community.
So stand up straight, guys, you know, there's no excuse for poor posture.
All right.
Until next time, this is Peter from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast.
You can follow us over there at freshobuntu.org.
And my blog is over at pn72.com.
And if you've got any questions about stretching or shoulders or the wonders of bursitis, just
drop me a note.
Take care, everybody.
Bye.
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