Have you considered bodyweight training? I much prefer it to weight lifting. I can do it in my home without a bunch of space-hogging equipment. You Are Your Own Gym by Mark Lauren is a good place to start. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345528581

I recently picked up You Are Your Own Gym, by Mark Lauren, which seems to be good for that.

Read "You are your own gym". All you need to get started for the first 1-2 years.

For the mind:

"One small step can change your life" by Robert Maurer

For the body:

"You Are Your Own Gym" by Mark Lauren

I think it was something related to the tight grip used in lifting weights.

I started with the beginning workouts from the book You Are Your Own Gym. In retrospect, 90% of the benefit was from the pushups, which I had completely avoided doing once I started getting severe wrist pain.

I've been doing strength training as well. As a skinny kid during high school weighing ~116lbs or so, it was a shock when I turned 27 and was hit 150lbs. I was getting tired more easily, stairs were harder than they used to be... I decided then that it was time to do something about it.

I use Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym program (book + companion app), and it's been great. The program is 10 weeks long, it's all bodyweight exercises using stuff you have around the house. There are 4 difficulty settings, and program is 10 weeks long. The app is nice because it walks you through the exercises with videos and timers. I feel like I've got a ton more energy and I'm in a more positive mood more often.

Not having to go out to a gym is a huge plus for me. I don't like gyms much, always feel out of place and like I'm competing with other people there. Plus there's the hassle of having to drive there, shower, drive back... it just adds a lot of overhead to something that needs to be as easy as possible to ensure consistency.

For me it just feels so good to do sports regularly, so I do sports 4 times a week for 30 minutes in my living room. I follow the exercises of the following book: "You Are Your Own Gym: The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises" by Mark Lauren and Joshua Clark. There is an exercise plan so you know what to do and nearly all exercises can be done without special equipment. And the best - most of the 30 minutes you just lay down and recover ;). I can really recommend it.

A few years ago I found a book which is basically this, called You Are Your Own Gym. It's full of body weight exercises, plus a 10-week program built on these exercises. It seemed like it was written for exactly me -- someone who doesn't like going to the gym, and doesn't like long boring cardio. I had some good success following the book's program on and off for a few years.

Then a couple months before the pandemic I joined the author's new subscription service called Mark Lauren On Demand. It's a library of workout videos and programs, organized by difficulty. It's like $8.99/month and I think it's the best thing I pay for. I'm definitely in the best shape I've ever been.

Workout videos are surely not a new idea, but I hadn't tried that format before this, and I like that the videos are literally him doing the exercises along with you, including warmup and cooldown. It means I can look at the timestamp and know exactly how long it'll take to do a workout that day. And I like that it's all scheduled out for me. I just have to show up (in my basement).

Book + workout program is at https://marklauren.com/

I dropped out of college and within 6 months had debilitating wrist pain. I couldn't even hold a mouse for more than about 20 minutes. I "fixed" it through wrist braces, like the author suggested, ergonomic keyboards (paid $1000 for a datahand keyboard while it was out of production), etc. Yet I still couldn't do simple thing like use a laptop keyboard pain free for 15 minutes. However, it was not until last year that I eliminated the pain completely.

The solution was simple strength training. Not weight lifting (I think that was a major contributor early on.) Within a few weeks of starting the beginner program in the book "You Are Your Own Gym" the pain was gone. I fully expected to have severe wrist pain and nerve damage for the rest of my life.

I hope this helps someone. The solutions to this problem are overblown (granted I suspect a combination of wrist braces and pain killers could push some people far past a recoverable edge.)

I've spent thousands of dollars on ergonomic keyboards and chairs. In the end all of them were nothing more than a crutch.

Here is the comment I left on the original blog post, since I think most readers will miss it; I've shared this before here to one degree or another:

I can one up you on this, I cured my RSI.

My story is similar to yours (short of the rolfing and acupuncture.) Around 2005 developed extremely painful RSI. Just using a non-ergonomic keyboard hurt like hell within 10 minutes. The only thing that really helped was limiting my work and typing.

That was, until I started doing body weight exercises back in late 2010. Back in 2005 when it hit me hard I was lifting weights regularly. That led me to believe that the weight lifting was at least half responsible. I backed off all upper body strength training completely. I felt like I was physically damaging myself when I did.

I wanted to build up some basic strength so I got this book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I hadn’t done a pushup in years so I started out doing them against a wall. By the end of the month I was doing normal pushups no problem. Then one day I got really sick and sat in bed on my laptop. Hours in I realized I had no pain whatsoever. It was mind blowing. Just months earlier things had progressed so my hands were partially numb all of the time.

Its been over a year and a half now. I had a few tiny incidents were I developed minor pain. I can do pull ups all day long. I can do clapping pushups. I can do handstand pushups. No wrist pain using a laptop 12 hours straight. I was really cautious saying this at first but I’m pretty sure now that I’m cured — assuming I get up with my workouts.