Making your wrists strong

[Fruitloop]

RSI (repetitive stress injury) is the bane of every musician who practices a lot. There a lots of discussion of correct technique and posture but I see very little talk about plain old exercise. My story is that I used to suffer from many ailments common to the guitarist who plays a lot. Weakened grip strength, numbness, tingling, you name it. I didn't realize it then but the main contributor to that was my poor general physique and condition.

It all changed when I started to exercise and work out...

The basics:
Do cardiovascular training. Jogging, swimming, long walks, basketball, football (talking about soccer). Anything where you get your heart rate up. While it doesn't improve your muscular strength really the elevated blood flow and metabolism does wonders.

Do strength training. Push-ups, pull-ups, dumbell curls (get a gym membership). The best thing here is free weight training. Using your body or moving dumbells activates not only the muscles your trying to train but also all the supporting muscles. In most instances the muscles in your forearm are included (the single most important muscle for guitarists).

Some useful wrist/forearm exercises

Homemade roller:
Anything that is shaped like a tube will work for this. Ideally you'll get a round wooden stick about 5cm in diameter. Drill a hole in the center of it and tie a string in it. On the other end of the string attach a weight (bottle filled with water works well). Now roll the stick so the string gets wound up around it. After the string is all wound up unwound it. You will experience burning in your forearm very quickly. Great exercise!

Powerball:
Buy a powerball. It takes some practice to get it moving but once you do it's great fun and it works your wrist really good.

Gripper:
You can get these from most sporting good stores or walmart type places. Basically it's a device which provides resistance as you grip it and try to make a fist. Very basic but very effective.

One last thing to remember is that the fingers themselves don't contain muscles, it's mostly in the forearm. RSI occurs when the muscles aren't strong enough to absorb the stress they are put under, that's when it is transfered to the tendons and ligaments. And they cannot repair themselves like muscles can.