Musculoskeletal pain affects you directly and indirectly. It can cause you pain and discomfort and dramatically decrease your quality of life. At its worst, it can lead you to pay expensive healthcare costs, force you to miss days at work, force you to change careers, or cause you debilitating injury. Indirectly, it can affect you by decreasing the productivity of your co-workers, family members, or the entire economy, and dramatically increase healthcare costs for everyone. These impacts offer further cause for concern, since the number of people who have access to a computer at home or work has and will increase steadily for the foreseeable future: as of the first quarter of 2008, the number of internet users in the world was over 1.3 billion out of the approximately 6.7 billion people in the world (Miniwatts Marketing Group, 2008). At the same time, the large-scale adoption of the internet and the personal computer is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2003 computer-related injuries’ direct and indirect costs were between $20 and $100 billion annually and affected millions of people in the U.S. alone. If people do not change their behavior, as the internet and computers increase in usage and scale, so too will the problem.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for solving the problem of computer-related injury. In addition, the human body is complicated; there still quite a bit we don’t understand about it. On the other hand, a number of contributing factors, or “bad apples,” can be removed to generally improve the situation. Becoming a computer athlete ultimately means removing these known causes. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive list of “bad apples,” but at least it is a start.

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