The best way to prevent injury is to take preventative measures to avoid future strain. What this means in practice is to try becoming more ergonomic, reduce overexertion, and increase your range of motion through stretching. Here are some things you can do that could help:
Ergonomics at the desk
- Ensure that your wrists and fingers remain parallel to your forearms while playing.
- Try to prevent bending or turning your fingers to accommodate a key setup. A concave spread setup, where your fingers naturally rest on the keys when fully stretched out, is a great option to look into.
- Have a flat, level play surface for your wrists and forearms, to prevent unnecessary pressure or poor form compensation.
- Try to keep your wrists flat on your surface, preferably with gel padding to absorb harsh impacts from stamina intensive or very fast content.
Time management
- Try to limit your sessions to approximately two hours in length. Exceeding this amount seems to put additional stress on the body and will catch up with you if you're playing frequently, especially while limit pushing.
- Don't play more than 3-4 full sessions a week (basically always give yourself at least a day or two to recover). It is overexertion and will catch up with you over time.
- Take intermissions between particularly stamina draining songs, where you quickly massage your wrists, play far easier content for a few minutes, or both.
Ergonomics away from the desk
- I highly recommend doing
these stretches twice a day, every day. It will help increase your range of motion and reduce some strain and pain of existing wrist issues. These stretches basically saved me like 4 months ago.
- Physical activity and exercise are great, and can amplify your abilities if done with caution. Be weary of lifting mainly with your wrist, or needlessly contorting your wrist while trying to do anything physical. Also be weary of specifically working out your arms and then also playing Etterna on the same day, it is probably too much stress to handle at once.
- Try to get some half decent nutrition and a fair bit of protein in your diet. This is more than just for wrist injury prevention, but your body needs fuel to heal itself. Try not to fill your tank exclusively with sugar and empty calories so your body can do it's thing.
- If your wrists currently hurt when doing various mundane tasks, I'd recommend getting a gel wrap or splint to wear for your wrist(s) when you aren't using them, or are using them lightly.
Also never forget
- ALWAYS listen to your body! If you feel a sharp spike in pain in your wrists or fingers at any point, don't push through it. Don't proceed. Sharp pains are never good when working out, and they aren't good here either! If you feel like a knife just hit your hand, give it a good massage and a few days to hopefully fix itself. Always take it easy when coming back from sharp pain, because you can trigger it again if you aren't careful.