Weekly Newsletter #26

 February 4, 2022

One thing is for sure, all of us know the feeling of our hands hurting from playing. Whether that was establishing your callouses when you first started out, or more likely, a common occurrence in either your picking hand or fretting hand. 

Unless the pain comes from getting your fingers calloused, you shouldn’t be hurting when you play guitar. Today I will show you one of the most common causes for pain while playing and how it can be fixed. 

I hear questions from my students regularly about their hands hurting in different positions and what they can do to stop this from occurring. 

Pain is simply a signal that something is wrong; and it’s a signal that you should listen to, especially while playing guitar. This means, whatever you do don’t play through the pain! This can lead to injury and can prevent you from playing for longer periods of time. 

The most common spot for pain is the wrist of your fretting hand, although the pain might not be located there, the root of the pain almost certainly is. 

How do you sit when you play guitar? Do you sit with both feet flat on the ground, with the guitar over your right leg and the neck parallel to the floor? 

This is one of the most common positions for playing and it is honestly one of the worst ones to use. 

When sitting in this position it puts the neck at such a low angle relative to your hand and arm that you are forced to hunch over the guitar, dipping your left shoulder downward so that your hand can get underneath the neck. 

The instinct here is to bring your hand below the neck so that you can reach the lower strings and get a wider stretch across multiple frets. 

If this is the position you use, go ahead and sit that way and make a 6-string bar chord. You’ll notice that your wrist is bent very heavily, almost at a 90 degree angle. 

This is the source of your pain. To test this out, hold your arm upward so your fingers point at the ceiling and your palm faces a wall, sort of like you are high-fiving someone. Now wiggle all your fingers dramatically. Keep your wrist straight and try out every single extreme position and movement using just your fingers. 

Now take your hand and bend it as hard as you can at the wrist until your palm is facing the floor. Now try to wiggle your fingers the same way. 

Most likely you noticed how much harder is was to move them. This is the exact same thing that is going on when you play guitar with such an extreme wrist bend, which is usually caused by the guitar sitting so low. 

To remedy this, you need to raise the neck of the guitar upward so it sits at an angle. Think of the position a classical guitarist sits in. You don’t have to have a footstool and put the guitar on your left leg (although this is one way to solve the problem) but you should definitely elevate the neck of the guitar. 

Take a look at this VIDEO for a detailed explanation about this position and how to avoid pain. 

By bringing the neck upward from a parallel angle (in relation to the floor) to something more like a 45-degree angle you achieve multiple things: 

Better Posture: The fretboard now sits at eye level rather than at your waist. This will prevent you from hunching over the guitar, which curves your shoulders and engages your neck, back and shoulder muscles. 

Sitting in this position for too long can damage not just your spine from hunching, but will certainly cause your muscles to fatigue, which will force you to begin using more arm and forearm muscles to compensate. This in turn puts stress on your wrist and fingers, which results in pain. 

Eye Level: This elevated position also has the advantage of being easier for you to see the fretboard and having it sit closer to your eyes. While practicing very fine motor skills in a slow fashion, it is helpful to be close enough to your fingers to catch the smallest of movements. 

Relaxed fingers: Elevating the fretboard reduces the stress on your wrist and fingers by allowing your arm to come up from below the neck. This results in a straight or nearly straight wrist. 

By achieving this straight wrist position, you eliminate all the tension that builds when you bend so heavily at the wrist in order to reach around the neck. While bending at the wrist you are basically pinching off the tendons that control your fingers in the carpal tunnel. Playing with a straight wrist allows your fingers to move unimpeded. 

Avoid Injury: Bending at the wrist while playing and putting such high levels of stress and tension on your tendons can easily result in tendonitis and/or carpal tunnel syndrome. Keeping your wrist straight is a surefire way to avoid these catastrophic injuries. 

While the wrist is not the only location for pain and discomfort, it is certainly the most common, simply because of how most players sit. 

Instead of sitting with the neck so low, you can cross your right leg over your left to get slight elevation, but it will not be high enough for eye level. Some players sit with a strap, while others use a pillow or some type of guitar-specific pad, which allows the neck to sit upward. 

Regardless of the method you choose, the ultimate aim is to find a way to keep your wrist straight. This is unfortunately impossible if sitting in the standard “right leg position”. 

Maintain a sharp eye on your posture and how you sit and hold the guitar. Without a fully functioning body, guitar playing just gets ever more difficult than it already is! 

-Max Rich