Desk Ergonomics - Every Diagram on the internet is wrong!

I ran across the following image recently from the article here.

The image is courtesy of Ergotron but I never found it on their website or I would have provided a link other than that one. On a side note, I have tried to use an Ergotron, but it didn't work for me. I'm too tall for one, two it didn't stay clamped to the desk, three the springs were too weak for my monitor, four it bounced when I typed. For someone else it might work out though. I know other people that like them. I think they are shorter and use a smaller monitor.

Anyway, back to my point. I honestly can't stand diagrams like this that have been floating around as long as I've used a computer for the correct ergonomic positioning. There are so many things wrong with this from a movement and ergonomic perspective it isn't even funny. Anyway, I'm going to start writing about this in future articles, but I wanted to point out a couple major issues with this diagram for "ergonomic perfection".

1. The legs are parallel to the floor. Not good. You want your thighs slightly sloped toward the knee. Same goes for the elbow. However sloped forearms makes using a mouse difficult, but I have a solution for this that I will post about in the future. The correct angle for legs and arms is 120 degrees. This isn't always achievable but that is as close to neutral as one can get without standing with their arms at their side and palms facing their legs.

2. The height of the monitor is incorrect. Monitor placement is an extremely complicated subject. It depends on your size and the size of the monitor, and most importantly, where on the monitor you look the most. Like I said, it's complicated. Your eye muscles are very strong in holding your eye up so you can look down, but are much weaker when looking up, so you certainly don't want to be looking up too much. I will write a future post about monitor placement because this is so important.