#callouses

Wow! We're very impressed with the quality and quantity of responses for day 1! Thank you to everyone who has posted or plans to post for yesterday's prompts.

great workout today!

deadies have me tired AF. but felt really good and I hit all my reps without any issues! working on doing pull-ups without my straps and ow my hands. incline bench went well too, hit 6, 6, 7 reps for my sets which I’m happy with.

Moved to this blog with OP's permission :) SO! Callouses are something anyone who has spent any substantial time playing a string instrument (that isn't a piano) has had to deal with. Here are the highlights:

Callouses don't hurt, but they are leftovers from injury. It's a common misconception, and I see it in stories a lot, that calloused fingers = sore fingers, when that's not the case. When you're first learning to play a guitar, you'll be especially prone to sore fingers because pressing the tips of your digits into tiny wires for hours at a time can be quite painful and cause skin peeling, blisters and bleeding. So the skin "toughens" around this spot, forming the actual callous.

Callouses are points of numbness. Because the skin has toughened up, fingertips will start to lose the sense of touch at the same level they had before the callous formed. There's still plenty of "feeling" and it's not like the entirety of the finger has lost all sensation, but it's like there's a little "pad" that sits ontop of the finger, if I had to describe it. Like wearing a glove, but only on the very tip.

The most extensive callouses are usually on the left hand. But of course, if the person is left-handed, they'll be on the right. Right-handed people fret with their left hand, and left-handed people fret with their right (unless they're like my husband and just learned to play right-handed despite being a lefty, which is also fairly common). Most guitarists have callouses on all of their fretting hand's fingers, except the thumb. Unless of course...

...you're talking about the bassist? They might be calloused on both hands. Bassists who do a lot of finger-style plucking, which is most of us, will have callouses on our plucking/strumming hands, too. Especially the index and middle fingers, which are the ones we use the most. And if your bassist is doing a lot of slap, then the thumb of their plucking finger might also have a good amount of callous built-up on it, too. And if you do slap/pop the same way I do, which uses my thumb to slap and my ring finger to pop... well, you can guess what my hands look like. :)

Callouses don't really ever go away. They peel, they slough off, and they're capable of being lacerated to oblivion like any skin is... Still, if you've gotten to the point where you have calloused fingers, it's probable that you like to play fairly regularly and won't give your skin a chance to ever heal... but let's say someone's put out of commission for a few years or is otherwise forced to put their instrument down for a while. Speaking from personal experience, I have had a few years go by where my guitar-playing wasn't significant, and the callouses did seem to recede a bit... but they never completely went away. The numbness was still there, and the "finger pads" present. Too, I have seen some older people who've played their whole lives up until arthritis got too bad to continue, and some of these cats have them so deep that the indentation of the strings still shows through.

Also why is strumming starting to beckme the hardest part? I should never have stopped playing for the amount of time that I did.

Which was about a year and some change.

So, you could say that I haven't played the guitar in over a year.

Or something crazy like that.

😖😬