wrist pains

[ana]

sometimes when i play really fast, i get a dull cramping pain from the top of my wrist to the upper tendon in my arm. 

does anybody else experience this and how do you correct it?                                                     

[faulty_damper]

Exactly what is it that you play that causes it?

[Brian Healey]

Without having all the information......

I've had the same thing happen to me, where I was experiencing pain in the base of my hand, where the wrist meets the hand. In my case, the main problem was that I have an aberrant tendon in my thumb, which means that one of the tendons pulls in a slightly irrelgular angle. Along with overuse, and not-quite-optimal technique, this can be a huge problem. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do (beyond surgery) to fix the tendon, but there are things you can do to deal with it. In my case, a technique overhaul that put less stress on my hand comepletly fixed the problem, along with some certain warm-up stretches and vitamin supplements (vitamin C, B-6, and vitamin E) that my doctor prescribed.

The first thing you should do is consult a competant hand doctor to find out if there is a physical problem, which there was in my case. It may very well be that your problem is something completely different than the one I described. You should also consult your piano teacher (if you have one at the moment) about your problem. I've had a couple students who have developed tendonitis because they were practicing things like Hanon on their own that I did not assign to them. Make sure that if you're doing exercises like this that you're being guided by the teacher.

The only difference is that I was experiencing pain all the time, not just when I was playing fast, so that makes me think it may be something different. Either way, it's most likely a technique problem where you've got too much stress going on. Like faulty damper said, can you be more specific about the problem?