I don’t know, every time I see this guy playing, I have a feeling he is hurting himself when playing these super fast passages the way he does… he looks and sounds super tense. you can notice his right hand shaking when he stops and mutes.
At those speeds with those patterns, the bigger muscles are the ones doing the heavy lifting. He speaks against using the elbow, but I wouldn’t be surprised that there’s some elbow element to his technique. It would be consistent with other players we’ve seen playing at those speeds like Rusty Cooley or John Taylor.
Also, he uses his whole arm for string tracking and doesn’t anchor a part of his arm on the guitar. He even advocates it in the interview for better muting capability. Combined with very fast alternate picking, it gives the impression he’s using his arm for the picking motion, but it’s not necessarily the case.
That’s funny, because his fast motion appears to be entirely elbow. And you’re on target here with the Rusty Cooley / John Taylor observations. Most elbow techniques look similar, just because the joint is a simple one that really only moves in one axis, as far as we know.
If you’re referring to moments like what happens around the 50-second mark here, he looks pretty relaxed to me. I think we need to be careful not to assume just because a joint isn’t moving — like, say, the wrist joint, in this case — that this implies “tension” at that joint. It’s just not moving.
No doubt muscular force is required to play quickly. And there’s not anything inherently wrong with muscular exertion for doing certain things. Muscle reuse, like in stringhopping, is a different story. You can quickly build up “the burn” with that type of motion because the muscles are being asked to do an inherently stressful thing (bouncy motion) and aren’t being given any downtime.
Edit: Just as a point of comparison on form, check out @Bill_hall’s recent post for some similarly blazing elbow playing. Bill’s technique looks relaxed to me, but I’m probably biased since I already know he says it feels that way when he does it. Around the 2:26 mark, some nice stuff done with an arm / wrist position similar to what Jason uses:
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Thank you, Troy! 
I am loving all the new material on the site here! I was just watching the Joe Stump interview and I love it!
I would say that for me when I am picking faster long lines with the elbow that there is not any of what I would call bad tension…I never feel like I am straining to play fast and I never feel any sense of that I am going to lose it and have to stop. My arm sort of feel like it is just floating along to the whatever rhythmic grouping I am playing time wise. When I started using an elbow technique I wasn’t really even aware that was what I was using. It didn’t feel like a stiff technique to me. One thing I do not do is squeeze my arm when I play fast…that really does cause tension and feels stiff. I just sort of feel the motion in the pick if that makes sense. I can use my wrist for faster lines, like when I am muting and I don’t really feel any difference as far as tension. I just learned to do it this way and it seems to have worked pretty good for me over the last 30 years, lol. I do try different ways of picking for fun and for me when I use the elbow it is just feels the smoothest and feels like I can really get some power in the faster lines, plus the string tracking feels really natural. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but if you are having trouble getting the pick up to speed it might be worth looking at. For me getting the pick speed was the missing link and once I could tremelo fast everything came pretty quickly. Plus when I saw Vinnie Moore at a clinic in 87 it really gave me confidence in using it because he was so good and so clean with it,
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