How long have you been touch typing - and from what age?  The sad thing is that I left it so late to learn touch typing.  We only had a handful of computers back in my school days and you were lucky to get near one.  I only recollect having about five mediocre typing lessons in all.

I've had to get used to holding my hands and fingers in a totally new way - a way that felt completely alien to me when I first started out.  And I've had to move fingers that I never really used before when typing.

It may well be that I have a little arthritis in my joints that doesn't help matters but I'm not going to throw in the towel just yet!

@jin, not wanting to hijack this thread, but to clarify - I had no pain in my wrists, hands and fingers before I learnt how to touch type.  Prior to that, my pain was in my shoulder, neck and head.  Part of which I believe was a result from looking down at the keyboard.  Touch typing has helped me.  Though perhaps it's not the magic bullet that I had hoped for.

@jin, perhaps your teething pain is also a result of your recent uptake of touch typing?  The position and stance is really quite different.  Even curving your fingers to the home position - can feel quite strained when you first start out and for me it creates some tension in my hands.  As you grow more practiced, it's possible to loosen the hands and fingers up a little. I have tried Colemak (albeit briefly) - and I'd feel more pain in the left than Dvorak without a doubt.  For me the next thing to try is a different keyboard - I'll try a split one.

Jin Here is my dvorak experience after around month and 12 days, with around 13 days lost due to training on Imak and neglecting dvorak where I reached a max speed of 57WPM. I must also say that I have never made an attempt to make any lessons for dvorak of the difficult words as I used to do with colemak and beside the intensive first 11 days I am all the time at gym training and swimming or walking in the nature and I practice when I come home for 1 hour on typeracer and hi games and thats it. The beautiful thing is that the layout jumps with you into speed with burst. For example, I was around 50 then I jumped to 56 then 63 and today 67 WPM for five minutes test on high game. I only jump when I concentrate at accuracy and I never jumped when typing fast, so focus on accuracy and as your muscle memory increase you will see bursts in speed. I think the reason why people say that it took them long time to reach 100 WPM on Dvorak is that the right hand pinky needs time to train and become muscular :) and the left hand index also needs to train to stretch fast to the i key and by time I think you will notice that actually you left hand index is hovering not over u but over the space between u an i and sometimes over i.  Now comparing my experience with dvorak to Colemak, It took me half the training time to reach this speed where after 43 days on Colemak I was at a speed of 64 WPM for 5 minutes test https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?id=997.  Moreover, it is true that Colemak utilizes the home key better than dvorak, but the secret is in alternation which I have proofed through simple test that it was much faster than rolls. Actually, dvorak  is not a perfect layout in terms of speed and the speed could be further enhanced as I did with IDvork but I think dvorak made it like this (the u before the i) to suit a all typists. Anyways, the most important thing to me is that I am typing with ease and comfort at this speed which I never did on both QWERTY and Colemak.
Here is a snap shot of my record today.

Finally I have a layout that I have designed beside Imak and it is called Imakfanton, I have never tested it because I was testing the versions of Imak and I would like somebody to help me and test it. In testing this layout at http://www.codesharp.co.uk/dvorak/Sampl … /News.html  it gives me more alternation than dvorak and it has the lowest finger ration among all layouts especially if y is moved above i, and even if It stayed in its current position it still has lower finger ratio than any other layout. I like this layout because it doesn't have any major rolls between the pinky and the ring finger, but what I did not like before I try dvorak is that it was biased to the right hand slightly less than dvorak, and it turns out that this is not a problem with dvorak at all. The other thing that I did not like is sometime you have to type 4 letters using the right hand, like atio in vocation, but actually this is a very fast roll, and the good thing with this layout is that it still preserve the punctuation in place.
The layout comes in two flavors with only difference in the placement of keys of the left hand side, and both placement are good although I prefer the one in the image show below

the id of the other version which keeps the home row on the left side in inward roll is

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,46,44,31,16,45,24,33,23,21,38,25,26,27,28,18,30,34,47,37,20,19,29,17,22,39,40,41,42,32,48,35,43,15,36,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60

which you can load here to see.
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

I doubt if that guy said he would hurt the layout of the finger, you through your experience has already proved, I believe you.

Okay; thank you for the information!

I think it gets easier over time with practice, and concur with most of the above.  Initially my hands and fingers really ached.  That's what brought me here in the first place.  It felt like I was the only one who had a problem.  Perhaps those that had been touch typing for years had just forgotten about their own teething issues.

I was agreeing that when beginning to touch type we probably stress the fingers more.

I agree with you that the pain and damage can creep in slowly and build up over time.  I get annoyed with people that espouse that computer related injury is all in the mind, and that it's easily surmountable.

Hey nimbostratue, I see you made great progress in your speed. I've changed my Typeracer account, it's theoh.