Typing posture and hand position

A few minutes of adjusting your chair, desk and keyboard makes typing faster and more comfortable.

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How you sit and hold your hands affects both how fast you type and how you feel after an hour of it. A good setup does not need special equipment. It needs a chair, a desk and a few minutes of adjusting.

This is general guidance for comfortable typing, not medical advice. If you have pain, numbness or tingling in your hands, wrists, arms or neck that does not go away, see a doctor or physiotherapist.

Your hands on the keyboard

• Home row: rest your fingertips lightly on A S D F and J K L ; (on other layouts, the same physical keys). Feel for the small bumps on F and J; they let you find the home row without looking.
• Curved fingers: keep your fingers gently curved, as if holding a small ball, and strike keys with the pads near the tips.
• Light touch: press keys only as hard as needed. Most keys register well before they hit bottom.
• Thumbs: rest them over the space bar. Most people press space with the thumb of the hand that did not type the last letter, but either is fine if it feels natural.
• Floating wrists: keep your wrists level and let them hover while you type. Rest them between bursts, not while pressing keys.

The finger chart shows which finger presses which key.

Wrists

Try to keep your wrists straight, both up-and-down and side-to-side. Two common habits bend them:

• Bending up: resting the heel of your hand on the desk and reaching up to the keys. Lower the keyboard or raise your chair so your forearms are roughly level.
• Bending outwards: keeping your elbows tucked in while your hands spread to the keyboard edges. Let your elbows move slightly apart so your hands line up with your forearms.

The fold-out feet under many keyboards tilt the back edge up, which can bend your wrists upwards. Many people are more comfortable with the keyboard flat.

Chair and desk

• Feet: flat on the floor or on a footrest, knees at about hip height.
• Back: sit back in the chair so your lower back is supported. Avoid perching on the front edge.
• Elbows: relaxed at your sides, bent at about a right angle, with forearms roughly level.
• Shoulders: down and relaxed. If they creep up while you type, the desk or keyboard is probably too high.
• Keyboard: directly in front of you, close enough that you do not reach forward. The letter keys, not the whole keyboard, should be centred on your body.

Screen

• Put the top of the screen at or slightly below eye level, about an arm's length away.
• Place it straight in front of you, so you do not turn your head to read.
• On a laptop, a separate keyboard, or raising the laptop on a stand with a separate keyboard, helps you keep both your neck and wrists comfortable.
• Reduce glare from windows and lights; squinting makes people lean forward.

Breaks

Long sessions without a break are hard on hands and eyes. Short, frequent pauses work better than one long one: look away from the screen for a few seconds every 20 minutes or so, and stand up, stretch your fingers and roll your shoulders every half hour to an hour. In practice sessions, ten or fifteen focused minutes is plenty; past that, tired hands mostly practise mistakes.

Posture and speed

Good posture is not only about comfort. Tense shoulders, a bent wrist or a keyboard that is too far away make your movements slower and less precise. If your speed stalls or your accuracy drops at the end of a session, check your setup before blaming your fingers. See also how to type faster and how to improve accuracy.

Laptops and phones

Laptops put the screen and keyboard together, so one of them is always in the wrong place. For short use that is fine. For long typing sessions or exam practice, use a separate keyboard if you can, ideally a standard desktop keyboard like the ones in exam centres. On phones, type with two thumbs where possible, hold the phone closer to eye level, and take regular breaks.