How To STOP Wrist Pain on Guitar - MUST SEE

Congratulations. You decided to take up learning guitar, but you are suffering from some major wrist pain. This is a common problem among beginner guitar players, and I'm going to show you some of the common fixes for this issue right now.

So wrist pain happens for a number of reasons, and a lot of times it's either the positioning of the guitar or the positioning of your hand. Hand. All right, so let's start with the guitar. I always tell students, get one of these. So you can see here, I'm wearing my guitar strap. Okay. Why is a guitar strap important in helping you with wrist pain? So you'll notice that my guitar is actually pointed upward, Right? Look at that boom. You can see it even in the close up. You can see how cut through on that frame is. My guitar tends to be pointed upwards. It's not really flat. And by having a guitar strap, it can help keep my guitar up there. Why do this? There's what we call the classical position of guitar. And you'll so often, if you see flamenco guitar players or you see someone who plays classical guitar, they tend to play with the guitar like this. See how up and down the neck is? So it's basically the butt end of the guitar is right in between your legs. And a lot of people, they play like this because what does it do for the wrist? Look at my wrist, how straight and natural it is. Okay. I find this kind of weird. I don't like to play, especially with acoustic. It's a bit overwhelming for me. So what I like to do is to keep my guitar on my dominant knee, my strumming hand, and then I use my guitar strap to keep the neck of my guitar elevated to make it more ergonomically correct. Ergonomics, if you are in a workforce, you know, ergonomics is what the kind of the natural way of making things comfortable for the ball, actually. Let me look up the. I don't even know I know what it is, but I don't know what it means. The study of people's efficiency in their working environment. So we're trying to make the guitar more efficient so that you don't have to do all these weird things. The other thing that happens when the guitar is like this, a lot of times students get their elbow stuck in the side of their body. So that off, obviously can cause a lot of risk issues. Issues, because now you're tweaking your hand to get it into two certain ways. So number one, make sure you get a guitar strap. You set it up properly the proper way to set up your guitar strap, if you stand up and the guitar doesn't move, it's great. When I play the guitar sitting or standing, it's in the same spot. Okay. The guitar doesn't move. So if your guitar is. If your guitar is doing a lot of that, it means your guitar strap is not tight enough. Okay. I like to keep my guitar right here. Doesn't move whether I stand up or I sit down. Next, let's talk about the actual wrist itself. So hopefully we fixed our guitar. Let's talk about the wrist itself. Okay, so there's basically two wrist positions. One I call waiter's pose and one I call praying mantis. And they are horrible for guitar players. They cause a lot of pain. So let's start off with waiter's pose, and I'll show you how to fix that. So waiter's pose is this. It's when you are collapsing your wrist like this under the guitar. So. Oh, you're tweaking. You're gonna feel a lot of pain in here. You're kind of crunching. You're overextending your wrist, and it hurts. Okay, so. Oh, all right. So how do you do that? Usually what happens is people are choking up on the fretboard too much. The other reason fret pain like this will happen is because right back here. See that guy? That's your thumb. For a lot of students, they do this. The thumb goes sideways, and when your thumb goes sideways, Watch my wrist. Oh, see what happened? Let me put back. So you want your thumb to be straight up and down on the back of the guitar. Watch what happens when I go to the side. Oh, I just lost all of my stretch. So a lot of you guys are losing a lot of stretch to play chords. And then look what happened. Boom, I got the waiter's pose. Okay, we do not want waiter's pose. It's going to put a lot of pressure. I mean, that just hurts more doing that. So shake your hand out if you see yourself getting into waiter's pose. Check your thumb first. Most likely, it's your thumb. See, look at that. Just watch my wrist. All I'm doing is moving my thumb on the back of the guitar, and you can see my wrist adjusting so your wrist is much more neutral and natural. Look at my wrist here. You essentially want your wrist to be as comfortable as possible. Okay, so what's that? There'll be a little bend, a little curve. But we're not. We're not doing the other thing, which is praying mantis position. Right here. See how my. So we have waiter's pose. Praying mantis position. Praying mantis position is when you're really pushing. And again, it's going to hurt on this outside of your wrist. There's one more wrist pain I'm going to show you. Now that I'm thinking about it, let's solve a praying mantis first. So praying mantis is. It's usually because the guitar is not in the right spot, and you're having to jut out your shoulder or your elbow because you feel like, you know, you don't have enough. Enough reach. So what I want you to do, I want you to find the natural position to come into your guit. What you want to do is you want to drop your hand down, and I just want you to bring your hand up to the guitar. Don't make a chord. Just put your fingers on the fretboard and look what happens. You can see how natural the wrist is.

We always want to try and keep a natural position when playing the guitar. If we do this, we're going to hurt ourselves. If we do this, we're going to hurt ourselves. Okay? So this is the best way to correct both of those postures, to lower the guitar and bring it up. Okay. And the third type of pain is from the thumb. Okay. And sometimes it will travel into the side of the wrist, but if you're going to feel it, it's actually more of a pad in this pad of the thumb. And what that is caused by, by you pressing too hard on the back of the fretboard. So how I fix this, I tell students, because everyone thinks their thumb is a st essential in playing guitar chords. It really isn't. What you should be able to do is peel your thumb off the back of the guitar and you lose the entire chord. The thumb is literally just there to hold the fingers in place, but it doesn't require as much pressure as you think. So I tell students, here's my thumb. Play your chords. Just try it. Play your chords without your thumb.

You'll realize how little. It's probably going to be awkward. Okay, that's awkward. But you probably will realize how little. It'll help you understand how little your thumb needs to press on the back of your guitar. Now, if you're looking for great exercise that will start stretching out your hand and give you a lot more finger flexibility, then go check out my beginner spider exercise right over there.