The Wooting 60HE+ is Tenz’s Favourite Keyboard, why?
Tenz says he can’t use any other keyboard. But, could the Wooting and it’s special features mean you are at risk for injury?
I’ve seen the Wooting60HE has take the gaming community by storm. Tons of top tier pros including some of my players along with TenZ, f0rsaken, Twistzz and Something have been adopting this new keeb. I wanted to share my perspective on it as someone who works in esports.
The Wooting is essentially a very responsive keyboard. You can set the depth a key press registers and how much you have to release the key before you can press it again. Here are visuals from Wooting to explain this.
In an FPS like Valorant counterstrafing well (stop, quickly shoot, then move again) is a competitive advantage. The Wooting allows you to do things that are basically impossible without it.
Theoretically this is a legit competitive advantage. Check it out:
That’s the good stuff but what about the downsides, are there any risks for injury or finger pain?
The two features we need to investigate are the super low travel and high APMs the keyboard could incentivize. Let’s take a look at the research:
There is no research on the virtual travel distances of the wooting which means we look at the next best thing: research on a similar concept, physical low travel keyboards.
A study on the effect of ultra low travel keyboards on typing force, muscle activity, wrist posture, typing performance and self reported-comfort found no consistent or substantial differences in muscle activity AND typists used less force. Less force means less energy expenditure per action and potentially more endurance which is a good thing.
The more interesting difference was the wrist position in the low travel group did have 4 degrees less wrist extension with 4 more degrees of ulnar deviation. I suspect this has more to do with the wrist angle of the keyboard rather than the low travel. Lower wrist extension is usually quite comfortable and 4 degrees more ulnar deviation is totally acceptable.
As you can tell it’s a very subtle difference and would not be a red flag if I saw someone playing this way.
As I mentioned before this research is on a physical travel distance not the virtual travel distance of the Wooting. The Wooting also has an 0.1 mm minimum travel instead of the 0.5 mm studied and I would suspect most people would depress a key deeper than 0.1 mm even if they set the trigger at 0.1 mm.
We are making some leaps in thinking here but I believe we can safely extrapolate that lower travel would not be a risk factor for injury.
Now let's look at the potential risk of increased APM. The Wooting is so responsive it may actually incentivize spamming keys more than a regular keyboard. This thing is made for counterstrafing so you should make the most of it, no?
Typing quickly by itself has not been shown to be associated with wrist or finger pain. However, studies have suggested higher overall typing speed above 300 APM may. This is definitely possible with gaming.
Here is a gamer in fortnite performing a ludicrous amount of actions per minute:
Ultimately higher APMs can be a risk but only when there are also sustained periods of gameplay without breaks. I want to stress if you do your exercises, take breaks, and recover well then your hands should definitely be able to handle the extra APM.
Here are some exercises you can do if you want to be Wooting ready:
Ultigrip
DB Wrist Flexion
Fingertip Press
Try out 3x10 for each 1x/day.
Verdict: potentially game changing piece of kit that is more impactful top players that requires extra conditioning to use without worry. It has my seal of approval!