Hand pain with mechanical keyboard?

[ethant]

I recently decided to make the jump to mechanical keyboards. It's something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but I work in an cubical office and I was not aware of the various "quiet" options that are out there. I am on a Mac and have used the Apple scissor switch keyboard for several years, I never really had any complaints with it. Two weeks ago I started working with a Matias Quiet Pro. I love the feel and features of the keyboard, but I noticed shortly after I started using it that my right hand seemed to be rather sore at the end of the day. By last Friday it was really painful. The pain seems to be in the center of my hand and radiates out on my fingers at times.

I can only think that the keyboard is the culprit. It seems weird that it would not effect both hands though. Has anyone else had a similar experience when moving to mechanical keyboards for the first time? I am wondering if it will go away once I am more used to the different feel of the keyboard, or if I should stop now before it gets any worse?

[Pacifist]

Try getting a wrist rest

The height of the keyboard is probally causing strain

[Altis]

It could be the layout (full size?) that causes the keyboard to be too far to the left for a comfortable right hand.  Was your Apple keyboard the smaller one?

Make sure the main part of the keyboard is centered.  That's caused problems for me in the past.

All things considered though, I find mechanical to be less ergonomic than the flat-keyed scissor keyboards (assuming the are full size keys).

[Binge]

I recently decided to make the jump to mechanical keyboards. It's something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but I work in an cubical office and I was not aware of the various "quiet" options that are out there. I am on a Mac and have used the Apple scissor switch keyboard for several years, I never really had any complaints with it. Two weeks ago I started working with a Matias Quiet Pro. I love the feel and features of the keyboard, but I noticed shortly after I started using it that my right hand seemed to be rather sore at the end of the day. By last Friday it was really painful. The pain seems to be in the center of my hand and radiates out on my fingers at times.

I can only think that the keyboard is the culprit. It seems weird that it would not effect both hands though. Has anyone else had a similar experience when moving to mechanical keyboards for the first time? I am wondering if it will go away once I am more used to the different feel of the keyboard, or if I should stop now before it gets any worse?

You are causing repetition with muscles which are not used to that level of pressure to actuate switches.  Look up how to do hand stretches... more than likely this is like exercising and when you exercise you should really stretch to keep the potential soreness down.

[hoggy]

Do you use the mouse with your right hand? You could swap to the left for a while to give it a bit of a break. It might take you a few days to get used to it.

[ethant]

Thanks for the suggestions all. I had been using the full size Apple keyboard (with 10 key) so it seems that the overall footprint of the keyboard is not too different. My wrist angle and the switch force certainly is. I will give a wrist rest a try and work on some hand exercises, hoping that does the trick!

[daerid]

What you really want to avoid is having your wrists bent backwards at all. If anything, you want them bent slightly forward, with your wrist a little bit higher than the keys

[nomaded]

As daerid said, you definitely don't want to raise the feet on the back of the keyboard. That should help.

[Tony]

Maybe a wrist rest is needed, since most mechanical keyboards are higher than the rubber domes.

You can try to use mouse with the left hand, to alleviate some work off the right hand.

Try some arm stretching yoga positions, like this

[Linkbane]

What you really want to avoid is having your wrists bent backwards at all. If anything, you want them bent slightly forward, with your wrist a little bit higher than the keys

Agreed. I, just a few hours ago, attempted to type with my hands going onto the keyboards at a sharp diagonal angle and am finding that it helps with both comfort (my hands and wrists do not hurt at all after extended typing at maximum speed) as well as accuracy; normally it would make shift positioning awkward, but Stamina taught me to use opposite hand shift to rectify that issue.
I recommend trying this: leave your elbows on a wrist rest and allow your hands onto the keyboard so that they point diagonally upwards and in; an angle suitable to you will be discovered.

The logic behind this being that fingers cannot move laterally, so angling them allows them to move laterally without stretching the wrist. Personally, it halves the number of keys which I have to reach for, and doesn't add any different ones. However, I use Dvorak which I assume already does wonders for my hands. I type from 120-140 wpm, and doing that for more than a handful of time on Qwerty would probably render me incapable of fencing.