What do I do when I have a painful wrist playing guitar?

Are your wrists sore when you try to play the guitar? If you are worried if this is expected, or if this is something of concern.

Here are some of the common reasons why wrist pain may be happening for you, and how you can solve it.

In the beginning of learning to play the guitar, you may have a little bit of soreness in your wrist. This is where your body is developing more muscle to be able to build up the strength required for you to play. Especially when this is something you haven’t done before.

When do you know not to play through pain?

When it is shooting pain. If it is a dull ache, you should be okay. To make sure you don’t injure yourself long term. Keep your practising time to 20-30 minutes at a time initially.

Serious injury can happen with playing the guitar. Playing through pain can result in you hurting your tendons and causing inflammation.

Posture when playing guitar

Posture can also contribute to wrist pain. This is from any tension travelling from the shoulders down to the wrist. Which makes it harder for you to play the guitar effortlessly.

Learning to play barre chords

Learning to play barre chords can kind of feel like you are learning to play guitar all over again. During this stage, your hand position may feel awkward or weird. And you may feel some more pain near your wrist area. Again, there are necessary muscles that require strength building up for barre chords. All of which takes time to build.

Preventing injury

Make sure you do lots of stretches and practise building up those muscles slowly. On the other side of it, make sure you are using the right technique for barre chords as well and using minimum pressure to play the chords. This is to save yourself from using more force than necessary.

How to make sure you are using minimum pressure when playing barre chords?

This is a good exercise to make sure that you aren’t pressing on your barre chords too hard.

Start up with your barre chord position with it muted. Then slowly press down on the strings while strumming. You want to find the sweet spot when it starts to ring out without buzzing. You may even have to check each of your fingers independently.

This is one of the ways to solve your pain with barre chords and is a very common one that we see.

If you’ve got a guitar teacher then they should be helping you to ensure you are playing correct technique and posture to prevent any harm to your body from playing guitar.

About Guitar Tuition East London based in East Village London, taking a holistic approach to teaching guitar. And making sure that their guitar students are injury and pain-free for their lifetime of playing. They offer guitar lessons to both children and adults that are fun, engaging with innovative teaching methods to help them get fast results on the guitar.