Hey guys my wrist hurts when i try to play three notes per string pentatonic patterns is it normal at the beginning or its because of my technique?
Take it from someone who practiced several hours every single day, like really worked his arse off on this stuff, from age 14 to age 24 and never really got as good as lots of other people who definitely (like, they confirmed it themselves) only worked a small fraction as hard at it as I did:
LISTEN TO YOUR WRIST. When you start to feel that wrist pain, and/or when you feel that big meaty muscle where your thumb meets your palm start to tense up, DO NOT get stoic. Don't be a tough guy about this. Don't get pissed off at your body's frailty, grit your teeth, decide "no pain no gain," and try to mind-over-matter this issue and force your body to comply. There are plenty of other challenges you'll face as you learn this instrument where being a hard-nosed, can't-be-killed badass is the right attitude, but never mistake this particular issue for one of those!
When your wrist starts to hurt, stop right away and shake out your hand. Take a big deep breath, and focus on making the muscles in your arm, shoulder, and hand (actually your whole bod, but especially those spots) relax again. Then assess your posture. Are your shoulders back? Is your spine straight?
And perhaps most important, are you keeping your wrist straight, or at least almost totally straight except for very brief moments when your stretch is at maximum, and then going right back to completely relaxed and straight? Were you trying to accomplish the 3-note stretch by bending your wrist around the neck to try and get your whole hand in front the neck? For many people's anatomy, bending your wrist to get the hand around to the front *feels* intuitively like it's the right thing to do when you need to stretch across 5 frets. It is not. It is destructive as hell to your wrist. The worst thing about my personal experience as a self-taught guitarist is that no one ever told me this. It screwed me over big time.
Slow the metronome down a LOT, and put all of your focus into keeping your hand relaxed and your wrist straight for the stretch. Your hand doesn't need to be in front of the neck, it just feels like it needs that. It will seem impossible, especially if you've spent a bunch of hours training your hand the wrong way. It will feel sort of heartbreaking to completely change your technique to one where you can't do the scale anywhere near as fast for a while, but just remind yourself that the way you had been doing it was giving you carpal tunnel, tendonitis, ganglion cysts in your wrist, and eventually trigger finger, so it was not sustainable. The hardest thing about getting good at the guitar is training yourself to actively RELAX. It is the opposite of what you instinctively want to do. Forcing your muscles to relax, while keeping your posture solid, is where the stoic badassery comes in. EYE OF THE TIGER, but, like, this is music, not boxing. Do the hard thing. Relax.