Forearm Pain

You will probably get more detailed comments and warnings from others but the simple answer is yes.

There are a variety of reasons for forearm pain but the most significant is related to technique and the second is tension.

From a technique perspective you may just not be positioning the guitar correctly to allow your arm to be straight. Keep the neck up as high as you can and parallel to your body. There is a tendency to tilt the neck back so you can see your fingers which causes your arm and wrist to have to bend too much. The second being tension, could simply be that you are squeezing too hard. Try to relax you hand and arm and only squeeze as hard as you need to eliminate buzz.

If you don't eliminate both of these you could end up with bigger problems down the road.

As Nils said - there are two options in fact.

One is your playing position; whether it's sitting or standing, you are not getting your body into a comfortable position to play. The result is tension, and it's uncomfortable, as you're finding out.

Secondly - how much warmup do you do before you play? If the answer to that is less than ten minutes of gentle scales, arpeggios and open chords, then you are on course for any one or more of; RSI, tendonitis, bursitis, tenosinuvitis and any number of painful conditions that you don't want to know about. Then my girlfriend (who is a nurse) will stick needles in you and pump you full of expensive drugs that will make you feel sick - and she'll do that every couple of weeks for possibly years. You have been warned.

Best,

A :-)

This is a very important concern; and it should be a sticky on the Beginners Discussion!

Over the past month or so, I have had to re-evaluate how I play, due to a dull pain in the right (strumming) shoulder. Fortunately, I put the guitar down for a period of time; and am feeling 100% again. Now, I play mostly standing up, or seated on a high stool. Previously, I sat anywhere, esp on a sofa that was too low, resulting in a raised, tension-filled shoulder. Now, on the advice of my guitar instructor, I position the lower bout of the guitar more on my hip, with the fretboard a little in front of me; and the headstock as close to eye level as possible. This position makes it easy as I am not reaching around the guitar to play. Also, I always use a guitar strap.

I discovered that my shoulder pain was exacerbated (or possibly caused) by "mousing" at work. And have taken steps to make my computer workstation as ergonomically correct as possible. I wonder at the challenges faced by the younger, computer generation, who have grown up spending lots of time each day in front of a computer...and the possible future effects of this activity. Its extremely important to be mindful of the ways in which we do things; and to listen to our discomforts.

Playing guitar is a physically demanding activity....

later,
~Ghost~

Yup. Me, though it was in my thumb, index and ring fingers.

New to this forum, BTW, and this sort of thing is a lot of what I've been crusing forums looking for info on, so I'll contribute. I started playing about three months ago. I'm 40 (read as "Not as young and flexible as most beginners probably are") and have a tendency to throw myself into things (read as "Put the guitar on a stand next to the sofa in the living room and picked it up whenever possible, sometimes 4 hours a day").

Anyway, after about one and a half months of playing an awful lot I started to occasionally have tingles in my left (fret) hand. I'd shake the hand out and they'd be gone the next day. Once they stuck around for a couple days. Then after another month there was this one day where I worked for about five hours on a song that had a bunch of barre chords that'd had been giving me trouble. Oh, and it was really cold that day and the house was a bit chilly. Next day my thumb, index and middle fingers were all tingly. This went on for days without getting better - in fact, it seemed like it was getting worse.

I did some research and asked some friends and the general consensus was this might be carpal tunnel. I locked the guitar up, started wearing a splint on my wrist at night but it didn't seem to get better. Holding my hand in specific positions would make my fingers go to sleep; pinching my forearm in specific places would do the same. Sometimes they'd just tingle for no apparent reason.

Finally I did get a chance to see a doctor. He didn't even look at it, after I explained what was going on he said "Carpal Tunnel". Told me that what I had was a very low grade case of it and that I needed to let it heal and then learn to stretch and warm up, and to adjust my technique to avoid it. What's going on in my case is that I've developed tendonitis in the tendons that go through my wrist. These get inflamed and that pinches the nerves that go through the same narrow tunnel in the wrist. This is what CTS is and as I understand it, in severe cases the tendonitis apparently evolves to the point where scar tissue develops and it's not just inflamation but that scar tissue causing the nerves to get pinched. When it gets severe the nerves can get permenently damaged. Getting tendons to heal takes time because they're not the kind of tissue that has a lot of blood flow to it. Also, the tendons being inflamed tends to cause them to irritate each other and so stay inflamed.

From what I've read, the pinky and ring finger tingles come from a different nerve being pinched and maybe in a different place, but I think the basic principles here are the same.

Two and a half weeks after the onset of this very annoying (though intermittant) tingling, a friend who'd dealt with serious CTS told me to take Ibuprophen, not just once in a while, but on a regular schedule, taking the maximum daily dosage allowed on the bottle. The idea is that the Ibuprophen gets the inflamation stay down long enough that the tendons can actually do some healing. After about a week and a half of this the tingles are mostly gone and I've tentatively started playing again, but only for a few minutes each evening to keep me from going crazy.

For the record I'm just telling you what happened to me, and I'm not dispensing medical advice. For medical advice you need to see a doctor.

The lessons I've learned with this are pretty obvious. I'm not a kid anymore so I need to work my body up to this instead of just going at it for hours on end right away as a beginner; I need to learn to stretch and warm up before I play; I need to learn to use good posture, to keep my all my joints as much as possible in the middle of their range, to not press the strings too hard and to above all, stay loose and relaxed; I need to take breaks when I practice; and if I get the tingles I need to knock off for a day or two.

Bumping this back to the top.

Read this, then read the thread about wrist pain. Digest.

A :-)