#callouses

[scion-of-ethiron]

After weightlifting does anyone pick at their callouses cause I have really bad callouses, and I have a small pile of skin I've peeled off. It's painless and satisfying

[calling4glaives]

Nyx Week 2025 - Day 2

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.

We can't wait to see what you've made for Day 2. For those still working on theirs - good luck! We're right there with you.

[bigcityideas]

Sister's boyfriend and his calloused heel

[meticulous-tendencies]

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.

only minor hip pain which got better as the night went on after the workout. my back might be a little sore tomorrow but i’ll see! hoping I just keep feeling good 😊

[walking-talking-encyclopedia]

I love you moths I love you snails I love you worms I love you ivy I love you moss I love you mushrooms I love you freckles I love you callouses I love you blemishes… I love you all the things over looked and under appreciated and called repulsive that truly show what being alive really means.

[chordsykat]

I have something I have always wanted to know. I'm writing a fanfic and I don't play an instrument, but say I have two characters who play guitar and they touch each other. Can they feel it or do callouses dull the sense of touch? Does it hurt? Do they go away? What's up with that?

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.

So, was this more information than you ever wanted to know about "guitar fingers?" Probably. But I do hope it helps. :) Happy writing!

[cuddliestbear]

So, I've been almost nonstop practicing guitar the past week and my finger tips are in agony. I used to play more often and so I had callouses, which helped with the agony situation. I no longer have callouses and forgot that pain happens first. And my fingies are not happy with my decisions.

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.

😖😬

But, so far I can play Riptide and Silent Night. So I have that going for me.

[infinitemachine]

So I bought this guitar for my birthday after not touching one since playing for maybe two weeks when I was 15, and I would just like to say that suddenly having callouses on my fingertips feels very strange.