Getting burning in the forearm with wrist motion

[SMmack]

After a third run through the YouTube content and a bit of the primer. I realised I was picking with a forearm rotation primary motion with USX, similar to how most people would do strumming in funk. But I’ve been having issues with it both trying to use two-way pickslanting (as I also use rotation for changing escape) and with getting excessive tension from this motion. The most obvious way to feel this is the song Basket Case, it involves circle picking and larger motions so the tension shows up quickly. I can play it at 160BPM, but 170 is where I start getting that burning being too much to play though anymore. So I set out to learn wrist motion with less forearm motion but it’s actually ended up causing me more problems than it’s solved so far.

I’ve spent a while trying to learn using wrist motion instead of forearm both with USX, DSX, and DBX. It’s still fresh but it feels more accurate and stable than with a forearm rotation primary. The biggest issue is that the burning fatigue seems to come faster with wrist motion than with my old method, so the burn is more intense, and shows up a bit earlier. I tried a bit of elbow motion but was starting to get the same pain. Then started looking into thumb motion. However I think I need to figure out what’s causing this burning sensation in my forearm before I can realistically move on. What stumps me though is if I put all my concentration into making the whole arm as relaxed as possible while driving from the wrist, I seem to actually end up getting more burning than I do when just focusing on what I’m playing instead.

I’ll post my USX Motion and ignore the others for now as I imagine whatever’s causing it is going to be a similar issue. Here’s a clip of what I’m going for:

New USX Wrist Motion

Picking and showing where this burning is:

NEW USX Picking

Basket Case giving me a proper burn making it hard to go on near the end:

New USX Basket Case

Slower Version of picking:

New USX Pentatonic

Can I get some insight on why I’m struggling so much with burning on every picking motion I’ve tried, and what I can do to fix it, because 160pbm has been my limit for the past 8 years.

[fitousimon]

Hi! First of all, kudos to you for filming yourself and asking for feedback with the goal of improving. It’s never an easy thing to do, but you’ll definitely see that it pays off.

Watching your videos, two things really stand out to me. First, your hand and arm look extremely tense when you play. I think you’d benefit from relaxing more and using gravity and the natural weight of your hand a bit more to help you fall onto the next string.

That brings me to my second point, especially on the pentatonic section: I don’t think you’re using enough rest strokes, and sometimes your picking motion looks a little too circular, almost like string hopping.

Also, I see you’re using a thin pick, I know for me it helped to take a bigger (1.5mm minimum) one to relax my hand, I felt less resistance with that