[Candyman1984]

hey man i practice about four to five hours a day and i used to get that pain in my elbow as well. It eventually goes away so just take a bong rip and work through it. just wait till the pinky cramp`s from learng to finger pick.

[jackr]

Well if you are practicing sometimes 8+ hours a day I assume you may want to play professionally or you are just obsessively passionate about it!

I am not a firm believer in natural talent. I believe the harder you work at it and study it the more maturally talented you become.

Perhaps to ease some of the pain you can devote some of that time to studying theory or writing wheras you are still having forward momemetum and progress but it wont destroy your elbow.

[IamDocWatson]

i guess proffessionaly...i want to be able to preform music thats enjoyable and even impressive....and if that takes say 10 years to achieve i figure if i work twice as hard maybe i can achieve that goal in 9 years..see im kicking myself for not picking up the instrument sooner...all because people said it is too hard and takes too long to learn, so now im tryin to make up for lost time

at this point though i may be some what addicted in a way...i told myself to ease up for a week or two but so far today ive practiced more than usual ...oh well..its just i think there may be a thin like between "no pain no gain" and serious injury

[Pete B.]

Yeah, in this case it sounds more like a repetitive motion injury (as opposed to have lifted a heavy object, and now it hurts).

Given a tempo avg of 100bpm, and flatpickin' is 2x that for the right hand picking motion, and maybe 3x that for the left hand finger motion... for 8 hours a day? That's alot of tendon tweaks!
[I was gonna say: "Dat's a'spice-ee saus-seeeeeg'e!"]


Maybe consider switching to an electric for these marathons, and see if the pain subsides.