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Thanks @Skyman911 and @petelanger
Hi Shaw, I understand the frustration of playing chords with deficits in the hand and wrist. The first thing I want to point out as you said this is only your second week playing. I don’t know too many newer players that can make the C chord in the second week. We hear a lot of frustration over that in the forums, andI myself had a frustration when I first started playing trying to get a clear C. The best advice that I have is be gentle because you are fairly new do the best you can and if you give it a good effort 10 minutes or so you can mark it complete the lesson and you can move on. You will have plenty of practice on these chords as you move through the program. You should gain more dexterity in your hand, even with some type of neuropathy or neurologic disorder, just through repetition, practice, and stretch stretching so that brings me to my next suggestion.
Always stretch before and after playing specially if you have hand wrist, forearm fingers any type of issue with them everyone should be stretching before and after, but especially if you have issues, this will help get the tendons and muscle stretched and will help you have more dexterity in your hands in order to play there’s the stretching course it’s in the skill section. I suggest checking it out and seeing if you can incorporate something into your daily routine and throughout the day you can even do these.Try to keep your hands warm so you can buy those hand warmers that might help loosen them up a little bit before playing and after playing.
The more you play the more the muscles and tendons get stretched out, and there are stretching exercises that you can do on the guitar. The best one that I can think of is go up to like the fifth or 7th frets, because they are much closer together. Using just your fretting hand, place tour index finger on the 7th fret. Keep it down throughout the first go around, then you’ll switch to the middle finger being the anchored finger. See the video.
In the video, I misspoke about only needing 2 notes to be a chord. A chord always needs 3 distinct note, but people forget about open strings. Many open strings are a part of a note, and you can therefore find 2 notes to fret, and still have an open string be the 3rd note. That being said, 2 notes are referred to as an interval. They are often used in 2 note power chords, etc
In addition to the broken wrists and hands, I have essential tremors that can make it quite interesting to play sometimes. I tend to stick to strumming and rhythm guitar as my workaround to not being able to do finger style well or often. The fingers just won’t cooperate sometimes. I simply laugh and move on when it happens.
Hang in there, and keep on plunking.