Play Guitar Pain Free

After the gig I couldn’t use my arm for a week. It felt puffy and I would get a deep throbbing pain in my elbow any time I tried to do anything. I would also get random shots of pins and needles and tingling. While the puffy feeling went away the tingling went on for several weeks and I had to get several medical certificates for work and university because I couldn’t use my arm. I was in pretty intense pain all the time but my doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He told me it’s not carpal tunnel otherwise it would be in my wrist. I told him it matched all the descriptions but felt like it was in my elbow, and after doing some googling discovered something called Cubital Tunnel Syndrome, which is basically the same thing but compressing the ulnar nerve in the elbow.

I was told that maybe I need to accept that my arms were screwed up, cut my losses and find a new hobby that didn’t use my arms…

But I wasn’t going to accept that.

I began my journey of healing, I would take a year off guitar in order to let my symptoms heal, and it if didn’t work, I would have surgery to decompress the nerve. Over the course of a year I tryied every remedy in the book including acupuncture, kinesiology, Chiropractic work, osteopathic work, drinking special tea’s energy healing and everything in between including almost daily massage. I felt great after all of the treatments but at the end of the day I still had the deep throb and nerve pain from my finger tips to my shoulder and even eyebrow on a bad day.

Eventually I had the operation to decompress my nerve because nothing else worked. I had to take 6 weeks off wrapped up in bandages and then had to relearn to use my arm. While this seemed to fix the cubital tunnel syndrome, I then noticed that I ended up getting tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome in my other arm because I had to compensate and use it for everything else.

I was a year down the track and had had surgery but all it had achieved was moving the pain to a new area. Then when I eventually recovered enough to use both hands again, My elbow was healed but I still had ongoing tendonitis in my forearms and now carpal tunnel in both wrists. The pain wasn’t as bad, but everything from typing, to using my phone, driving, working at the supermarket brought me pain. I just accepted that I would be in pain and got on with life.

Then, two things happened that would trigger a life changing series of events.

A friend of mine bought a jetski and invited me over to ride it. I went on the back and held on and we had a great time. Then after about 20 minutes he asked if I wanted to drive. I hesitated at first because I knew it would hurt my arm. then I thought stuff it my hand is going to hurt anyway so I mayaswell have fun here and now. 90 minutes later after some heavy duty jetski riding my hand was feeling great and I had been pain free the whole time. I was so excited that I rushed home and played guitar but within 30 seconds I was in excruciating pain. I could do things like lifting weights and riding jet skis with no pain, but I couldn’t do anything with fine finger movements…something was up.

Then my grandfather had his hip replaced and the very next day was walking. I couldn’t believe it. How could this 65 year old man have hip surgery and walk the next day and young healthy me at the ripe old age of 21 be struggling with an injury 18 months later.

In frustration I googled “how to cure RSI” and that’s when my world changed.

I discovered a blog post (you can read it yourself here) by a girl named Rachael. She had been plagued by pain for a decade and after reading a book about psychosomatic pain (pain that occurs in a genuine injury once in life but is then recreated by the brain so that your pain feels as real as day but there isn’t actually anything wrong with you) was able to cure herself. I went to the website of books author and it was littered with testimonials of people with similar stories to me where their life had been taken over by pain that only prevented them from doing certain things.

I read the book and three hours later my RSI was gone.

I couldn’t believe it.

I could have my life back.

Now this might sound like absolute nonsense to you but let me go into details bout the psychosomatic pain.

Basically I had a really bad breakup a few months before the pain started and I wasn’t in a good way. I would sit and play guitar for hours just stewing on the whole thing and replaying it over and over in my head. Then I had a legitimate injury by overdoing it at the gig. Then my subconcious brain took the memory of the physical pain that I felt and conditioned me to feel it every time I played guitar as a way of trying to get me to avoid thinking about the situation. Eventually I wouldn’t stew or ruminate when I played, but the pain remained, and it was real pain that would wake me up at night and be with me every waking moment. It might sound farfetched, but you’ve probably heard stories of amputee military veterans waking up feeling pain where their limb used to be, my brain was doing the same thing.

After reading this book and doing a quick mental routine I provided, the RSI vanished instantly and I didn’t have any more carpal tunnel or cubital tunnel issues. I did however then notice that I was carrying so much tension in everything that I did and this was what was causing my tendonitis, neck pain and back pain which I didn’t even realise I was having because I was so focused on my arms and hands.

Basically I was so tense (again as a fallout from the breakup and having to deal with really bad customers at my supermarket job) that I was almost always squeezing my muscles without realising. This is basically like trying to drive your car with the foot on the break and the accelerator at the same time, except that instead of wearing away the rubber, I was grinding away at my tendons. But now that I was aware of how tense I was I could actually address it.

I got help managing my stress and the tension around my body, and how hard I was squeezing when I was playing guitar and within a few weeks my arms were back to 100% I also better managed my posture and the way I held the guitar and then my neck and back pain disappeared too. 

I was a new person.

11 years ago I couldn’t go 30 seconds without being in extreme pain and was told by doctors to give up playing guitar.

10 years ago I had an operation to decompress my nerve and had to relearn how to use my hand post surgery which I now believe I didn’t need to have.

9 years ago I read a book on psychosomatic pain which helped me cure my RSI and opened the door to allow me to address all the extra tension I was carrying in my day to day life.

Since then I’ve founded Melbourne Guitar Academy (which has grown to 6 teachers and over 200 students) completed two national and two international’s tours with my band, released 5 CD’s, built an online learning platform with over 30 courses, and written over 10 books on guitar, all because I refused to quit and stayed determined to recover from my injury.

If I can share my story and help one more person overcome the pain they feel when playing guitar then I will be happy. The possibility of giving people a second chance so that they aren’t forced to quit and give up on their dreams of playing guitar far outweighs any ridicule I receive or any perceptions of me being some crazy guy who thinks pain is all in your head.