Wrist/Muscle pain with Bar chords

Dear Guitar friends,

I would love to get some advice to try and sort this issue. I've been practicing bar for a while now, mostly Bm and F#m (normally coming from A). I'm slow and not yet clean in chord change, but it's okish if the rhythm is not too fat.

However, issue is another, it's quite painful for me to play these chords. I don't know if I'm able to explain, but I feel pain in the wrist and in the muscle between thumb and index finger. It's painful so after a couple of bars I need to remove hand and stop for a while.

I've been practicing this for a while, so I tend to believe it's not developing muscle, but rather I'm doing something wrong, either in general or vs my body needs. I'm publishing here a couple of pictures, both chords, front and behind. Any chance you can give any advice to improve this? Many thanks! Diego

Thanks for writing in! Learning guitar comes with a bit of pain. From developing calluses to wrist position to back soreness. Calluses hurt, there's no way around that. But wrist and forearm pain should be kept to a minimum. Judging from the second and third picture you posted, your wrist position doesn't look like the issue. But your fingers look a bit tight and tense. The first and second picture show your middle finger in a crampped position. All your fingers should touch the fretboard in a straight fashion, more or less.

I would suggest trying a classical positioning for the time being. It's much better on the wrist. Put the body of the guitar on your left thigh instead of your right. Then angle the neck upward. The body of the guitar will be between your knees. Put your left foot on a box to lift the guitar even further. You will notice your wrist is much more straight. This position will minimize wrist tension.

Discomfort is normal, pain should be avoided. Good luck!

i learned at 70yrs old and yes there is pain.

The best tip I have re: barre chord wrist pain is to ignore the instructions from others and place your barre finger LAST. Place the other fingers that are making the actual chord first, and only then lay down your index finger.

Huge difference.

Thanks for all your advice!

In fact I'm not concerned with the pain. During first times pain to fingers was crazy, but I went ahead and overcame it, now I have calluses. So somewhat used to pain being part of the game, and that doesn't discourage me :)

I was mostly mentioning the pain more as an indicator of me potentially doing something wrong, and therefore seeking for advice to correct and succeeding in improving tecnique. I will try with the classical guitar position. Indeed I'm also feeling back soreness this days, as I'm particularly bent over the guitar to make bar sound good.

Thank you also @Faith for the tip on placing index bar last. I admit I tried quite a lot of fingers sequence, and found what working best is now 1) Placing bar, 2) placing thumb behind the fret where I need to place ring+pinky (as a sort of guide to orient those 2 fingers) and finally 3) Middle finger (particularly challenging on Bm). I tried combinations where bar came last, but I found in that sequence the index comes in very weak, and some strings are muted, on top of the fact that by placing index last I'm quite inaccurate in placing the other fingers first.

Can you give bit more details on this? Happy to experiment further!

Many thanks again :)

Diego

I’ve been playing for a year now and am doing alrighty with barre chords, but finding that my endurance wasn’t good. ( tire after a few minutes). The suggestion re focusing on the other fingers then the barre itself makes a difference.. less effort for me and it appears that I am more consistent with playing all strings! Thanks... I only wish that I knew about this before ! 😂

Interesting! I'm going to give it a try. It's really difficult thinking about resetting the way I do it so far, because I found some way to make it sound, so focussing on the other fingers finds me really slow. Will give it a try anyway as it seems to be effective.

Thanks for the tip!