Do you have a stiff neck after work at home or the office? What about an eye twitch or lower-back pain? It might be time for an ergonomic upgrade. Office workers can often spend long hours sitting in the same place, leading to pain and other more severe problems. With the way work has changed, people may need to think about their setups in multiple places.
“People are [trying] to find what the workstation of the future is going to look like,” said Kristin Amlie, principal ergonomist and program manager of the Ergonomics & Human Factors Program at the University of California at San Francisco. Pre-pandemic, people worked from one desk at the office. “Now it might be a shared workstation or a different one every time plus one at home.
” Here are five tips from ergonomic experts to create a more comfortable and less painful work environment. – – – Your workspace shouldn’t require you to lean, squint, crouch or awkwardly contort to do your job. Your desk should be spacious enough for you to comfortably reach all of your devices and have an arm’s length of distance between you and your computer screen, said Marco Campello, a New York University clinical associate professor and director of the school’s Langone Occupational and Industrial Orthopedic Center.
Otherwise, you could suffer from eyestrain and fatigue. The desk should be 26 to 30 inches deep and allow you to rest your forearms, versus your wrists, when you type, Amlie said. To get the perfect height, one.
