My speed today is Harper is not testing today. ;)

I will resume on Wednesday.

Have you seen a doctor about it? RSI is serious stuff.

Also you might want to think about other changes such as chair, desk, input devices, ...

For the pains, you need to stretch and shake loose to better extremity circulation. Ideally, build up strength in the area as well - plenty of repetitions with light weights should do the trick. For the best results your should get a tailored training regime from a good ergophysiotherapist.

So I can tell you now how well writing is going.

I'm installing Dragon. :P

If you are typing the Colemak sets that I gave you, you should not aim for passing the set with a specific speed at this stage as they are some what difficult, just try to be accurate above 90%. You will benefit much more if you type the 6 sets around 3 times a day. When I learned Colemak, Some sets like the (io* oi*...) I could not go over 25WPM although I was typing on Colemak with average of 50WPM.

BTW, congratulation for reaching 25WPM, it is an achievement, especially that you are learning to touch type also :).

As much as I like using knowledge to improve my life, I can't see myself switching to an ergo keyboard. A good non-ergo mechanical offers advantages over membrane keyboards (which I have been using for too long) and I'll be getting one soon.

That's OK though. I use a Trackman (and have for like 15 years) and that alone cuts down on stress a lot. :)

(And no, Nimbo, those are the common word sets still. I will start on the other sets after I hit 30/99 on all 18 common words sets.)

In my experience, typing real sentences is more beneficial than random words...I know that you need to build muscle memory for common words but more importantly you need to build "word pattern memory" meaning learning how words tumble into the next. If you are practicing random words like:

father book man has keep my made life light sometimes well play side at feet just off one does again sentence leave spell same live his cut back

you are not developing any word pattern memory because you rarely type those words in that sequence. You would be much better off typing out common word phrases.

Hang in there. Pretty soon you will be "rolling" along nicely with colemak.

I hear ya...personally I tend to type faster with sentences than with common random words...because I get a better flow going. I made an effort to avoid spending too much time on random words for just this reason, and I think I benefited from that.

I really like it when people say in my experience, but the question here would be: what is your experience?. Have you been doing research on this topic for more than two years, have you learned more than 20 layouts and tested different methods to gain speed and reduce effort while learning them, like I did. Have you been trying to understand the physiology of the hand and how to make typing more fluid!!! If so then you would not have said that. The correct way to say it is that it is not enough to practice the common words, but they are extremely essential in the beginning to build muscle memory for common bigrams and common pattern. If you know how to type 'ea' 'ou' , ect.. quickly it would not be hard for you to type "eat", "heat", "beat". Bottom line here is that to learn to type effectively and fast,  in a shorter period of time then this is one of the most effective ways. As I recommend that after 25-30 WPM one should start to incorporated real life words, and that is what I have done in my lessons thread, but the focus was also to learn common words that has similar pattern to get the mind and hand used to it.

@Harper's: as you have notice that I have not included "." and "," in my lessons.There are two reasons:

1- Since this thread is for colemak, I supposed that most of the people are touch typist and they already know these two from qwerty
2- these two are really annoying to type and can increase hand pain because not only they are at the bottom row and require wrist movement, but also you have to hit space after them which puts the hand in awkward position, so in order to reduce the typing effort I tired not to incorporate these two.

Also I tried not to incorporate the shifts a lot as they are one of the most damaging keys on the wrists.

Since you are a new touch-typist and you probably would want to learn these, my advice is to play over typeracer as there are a lot of ". ," ,  and shifts there  and you do not feel bored typing these when you  are mainly concentrating on beating the opponent :), unless of course your hands started to ache :(.

Of note: I'm in need of a reminder to use my contractions again. I've noticed that I stopped using them when I changed layouts.

But that may be hard in the beginning. Try it out but don't focus a lot on it if it doesn't work ;)

I broke down and I am quitting Colemak use for work. I will see if I have any time left over to practice, but at this point I have lost so much time that I will need to completely ignore my family in order to catch up on my writing.

I think that the disadvantage of not being a touch typist was just too much in the end.

(I will still be using Colemak any time I post in this thread.)