Typing Warm-up Exercises

The hand’s temperature is a likely factor that many typing aspirants miss when starting typing practice. Have you ever had a day where your fingers felt ‘stiff’ or ‘slugish’? Of course you have, and that is indeed a biological limitation. In Lesson 36, we consider the implications of environment and physical preparation on your 2-minute performance. Warm-up typing exercises offer you that repeatable, sustained high performance which your rivals can’t deliver, come what may, and depending on the weather or the cooling and heating system in the exam room.

The Biology of Cold Hands

When you have cold hands, your body goes through what is known as vasoconstriction. Cold hands result in blood flow to the small muscles in the fingers and forearms of a typist. This leads to what is known as increased ‘latence’, or the wait time for muscles to respond to a command from the typist’s brain. During a 2-minute test where the stakes are high, cold hands may result in a loss of 5–10 WPM. Cold hands also make tendons less elastic, which (among others) may lead one to (inadvertently) hit the wrong key or to miss the top row of keys on the keyboard.

Active vs Passive Warm-ups

Preparation for your hands before a test can be done in two ways. Passive warming involves external heat sources. An example for this is washing your hands in warm water for 60 seconds before the test. This is a trick used by many stenographers to increase their hand flexibility. For active warming involvement, type while doing warm-up exercises to increase blood flow. An example for this includes doing ‘Finger Flicks’ while opening and closing your hands repeatedly or doing ‘Piano taps’ on a solid surface. Movements for this warm-up are done to ‘prime’ your nervous system so the connection between your motor cortex and your fingers are ready before the test begins.

Controlling The Exam Hall Environment

A lot of times exam center will have really low temperatures in the room because of the air conditioning. This can be a really big problem for students because if they come in with, what we call “cold” muscles, they can spend the first minute of the exam just trying to find their rhythm and by the second minute, their hands can even start to cramp because they are so tight. In this lesson, we will go over a technique called the “Pre-Flight Rub.” The goal of this exercise is to rub your two palms together for 30 seconds, and this will increase friction and thereby the heat which will increase the level of sensitivity of your fingers. This is really important because it gives you the feeling you need in order to operate the tricky Kruti Dev layout without having to look at it.