Cameron Carbone

I honestly thought typing was innocuous.

Last week an orthopedic hand specialist diagnosed me with acute tendinitis right before a two day Meinl shoot. Education reels one day, performances with my band Absentia the next. Both forearms cooked.

I spent hours scripting on my laptop, stacked 3 to 4 hours of drumming on top, then hit way harder than usual for the cameras. Plus my sleep had been trash for weeks and my stress was running higher than normal.

My forearms finally tapped out.

The big lesson for me:

Your body counts all of it.

Emails, charts, designing curriculum, scripting, editing, practicing, bad sleep, higher stress... It is the same tissue doing slightly different jobs, plus a nervous system that turns up the volume on pain when you are run down.

Right now I am:

• Treating typing as real load

• Counting sleep and stress as part of the equation, not separate from it

• Avoiding huge laptop days before heavy drum days

• Breaking practice into smaller chunks when I can

I am not a medical pro, just a drummer sharing what I am learning. If you are in pain, please see a qualified specialist.

Save this for your next busy week and tell me in the comments what has flared your arms up the most.