You always wanna be extremely careful that you are not hurting yourself when practicing. So trust your instincts on that. The only pain you should fight through is your left hand fingers and the "outside" pain when fretting and bending and all that. Anything else should make you tired in an even and relaxed way.

As a new service here on Guitartricks.com, we are starting to post casual video responses to forum questions. Soon they will be featured on the site for everyone to see, but for now I am sending you a link to youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCZ6KeQMtY

And here it is in writing!

It sounds like you might be strumming from your elbow. A lot of people (Including myself until 2 years ago) get the main strumming and picking motion by moving their underarm up and down vertically. This means the motion comes from the elbow, and it's extremely energy consuming, tiring and very limited when it comes to speed- I know you're probably not thinking about speed at this point, but somewhere down the road you may wanna play fast!

The ideal strumming and picking motion should come from rotating your underarm. Think of your underarm like a power drill!

1) The first way to feel what I'm talking about is by angling your wrist 90 degrees and strumming like that, making sure that you are rotating your underarm to get your RH moving up and down. Your elbow must be almost completely still!

Once you get a feel for it you can slowly start straightening out your wrist, but focus on keeping the "power drill" going.

2) Alternatively you can try to strum while being really loose in your wrist when strumming. That automatically gives you some of the right movement! But I recommend the first way I described.

Hope this helped you. Make sure the pain is gonna before you resume your practicing. It's good to ice your arm, but limit it to 10 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening.

Let me know if you have any further questions!
Anders