Hello @phoenix0509, I see this is your first post and would like to thank you for sharing your PMR experience and welcome you to Mayo Clinic Connect. It really is a great place to learn together by sharing your experiences and learning from the experience of other members. My PMR seemed to be worse in the morning both times when it was active. Then once I was awake and able to move a little that seemed to help (along with the prednisone ☺) with the pain. Most of my pain from PMR was also in the shoulders, arms, hands and the lower back. The key for me was starting at 20 mg dose which took care of almost all the pain and then start tapering off as I was able to do with a minimum amount of pain. Each of us are different and I think that's a big struggle learning how much pain you can deal with when tapering off of prednisone.

Are you able to ask your doctor about splitting your dosage between morning and evening, or maybe adding the 5 mg dosage increase he suggested in the evening? I think that some members have mentioned it helped them to split the dosage. I started both my occurrences of PMR at 20 mg which I think is a fairly common starting point.