Hey all, I'm running into a dilemma. Recently got back into playing and have been very keen on posture and ergonomics and really trying to relax when I play.

Unfortunately, my wrists and shoulders are constantly hurting when I play. Granted, I work a desk job which probably doesn't help, but I do stretch and am in good shape overall.

My guess is that I am taller than average (6'4") and what I've run into when playing is that if I shift my guitar towards my picking hand to allow a better angle for my fretting hand, my picking shoulder hurts. If I shift my guitar towards my fretting hand to ease the pain on my shoulder, my fretting wrist hurts.

If I rotate my guitar to where it's perfectly vertical, the back end sticks out so much that I have to put my shoulder in a weird angle to reach the strings (which doesn't last for long). I try to keep the guitar as vertical as possible (less than 10 degrees of the strings facing me).

The only truly comfortable position I can play is having the neck angled at least 45 degrees and to play above the higher parts of the fretboard (like just above the neck pickup). While the 45 degrees is okay, and I think I can fix that my addressing neck dive on my guitar, the picking hand playing above the frets is not right.

I have also addressed my strap height to mitigate the problems as best I can.

The guitars I play and some other common issues:

LTD Hybrid-300: Super lightweight but the neck drops. It also likes to rotate towards me (like if you were to put the guitar on a roasting spit, the strings like to rotate to face me).

Suzuki SLS-50 (Gibson LP knock off): Thing is HEAVY. But it sits right. Problem here is that the body is so thick that no matter how I hold it, my picking shoulder hurts trying to get around the thing.