Practice time

[Laroo]

Today I was practicing for an hour an half on moving up and down the fret board with different fingerings and whatnot, and I noticed when I my hand was kind of tensing up. Now, when that happens, is that like a burning in your leg to show the muscle is really building or is it a sign to stop?

In other words, should you play through that pain, or should you quit before it does damage?

[Bizarro]

It is probably time to take a break, stretch, and relax a bit.

[potshot]

Definitely pause and take a moment to concentrate on releasing the tension in your hand. You can usually play cleaner and faster when your hand is more relaxed, and when you are finding something easy to play, you generally play it with a relaxed hand. So tension's not the way to go.

The tension can be a partially good sign if you're talking about something like tension in your fretting hand thumb from playing barre chords. If your thumb strength is still developing, a bit of tension in the thumb shows you're giving it a bit of a workout, so it should help your strength increase. But once again, don't push it. If the tension is in the fingers or the wrist, I would say that's not such a good thing. If you're playing with a metronome, slow it down a step.

[Koala]

Absolutely! As soon as you feel pain stop, if its bad as in "INJURY" ice it immediately!

[forgottenking2]

The weight lifting/guitar playing is not so far off, if you are just starting you can't just blaze through scale patterns or arpeggios as fast as you can for two or three hours just like when you are first starting to work out you can't just load 150 pounds and start bench pressing (specially if you've been a coach potato before) unless you really want to injure yourself (and if that's the case I can show you some easier ways to do so :D ) SO take it easy at first and eventually build up stamina.

I hope this helps.

Regards,