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A Short Keyboard May Help Your Mouse Shoulder

Mouse shoulder is pain in your right shoulder from mousing too much. One of the common causes of mouse shoulder is reaching for the mouse. If you have a regular keyboard like the one on the right, you’ll notice that almost 1/3 of the length of the keyboard is taken up by the arrow keys and numeric keypad. With your mouse on the right side, that extra length forces you to have to reach further for the mouse. That reaching effort adds up to discomfort over time.

Reaching over a regular keyboard (left) and an extreme example (right) Images from healthycomputing.com

To remedy this problem, you may want to try a short keyboard. A short keyboard is just a keyboard without the keypad, like the Goldtouch adjustable keyboard. If you just can’t live without a keypad, you can purchase that separately, although I wouldn’t pay too much for just that piece.

After you removed the cause of the problem, give your shoulder some time to recover and remember to keep your arm relaxed and closed to your side when mousing.