Strange Changes With Compensation

BillDL

During the past couple of weeks I've played my guitars more than I've been able to play them for about a year.  I have a few.  Too many for one person in fact, but I like tinkering with guitars and I have had no need to sell any for a long while.  I was off using up holidays so I decided to go through them tuning, checking, adjusting, restringing some, oiling fretboards, and so on, and in so doing I played each for a while.  A few have been sitting unplayed for almost a year in their cases.  I always have more than one guitar sitting readily available and I usually play them several times a week if not daily, so it's not as though I haven't actually played for ages.

By the time I started on the third electric guitar I realised something odd was going on.  Each one needed very slight truss rod adjustment and I did very minor action adjustments as is usually required from time to time, but what I found surprising was that on both of the ones I had just serviced I had to move the G string saddle back a fair amount to compensate, and to a much lesser extent the A and low E.  I went through a couple more electric guitars and I actually had to flip the G string saddles around on two my tune-o-matic style bridges to get enough distance for them to compensate.  This was the case whether or not I changed strings, and my neck adjustments weren't radical enough to have affected saddle compensation to this extent.

The only thing I can think about this is that my fretting hand grip has changed significantly since I last adjusted my lesser used guitars whereby I am pressing harder on those strings. I know that the last section of my pinky is bending inwards because the joint is degrading, and the end section of my index finger has rotated looking at the tip and it is deflecting a little towards my thumb.  The odd thing about this is that the intonation was perfect when I played my acoustic guitars, and there really isn't much compensation on an acoustic saddle to begin with.  If my hand grip has been changing over the last year I guess I have probably been compensating manually and very gradually on the guitars I usually have out ready for playing.

I know about Earvana nuts and such like.  I've been playing and tinkering with guitars for 40 years, so I know how to sort out guitar issues, but this is clearly an issue with me and my own body, not my guitars' adjustments.

Has anybody else noticed something like this with your own fretting hand on guitars that were already perfectly intonated for your playing style but not played for a while?