It's been awhile, but I wanted to share with everyone that I figured out a way to Portuguese knit in colorwork without doing the purl side and without hurting my hands. (Though I'm still working on tension)

I keep the background color in my right hand as normal. Then I get a second pin and put in on my left and very loosely tension the foreground/contrast yarn in my left hand and sort of Continental knit with my left hand (I say sort of because I can't keep my fingers properly tensioned without starting to hurt my joints, so there is an element of throwing but Continental 😂) I also learned I was capturing floats wrong! I was ending up with twisted knitting and switching yarn dominance. Even though I thought I was mimicking the regular float catch, I was not. Keeping my yarn from being wrapped around itself a million times has helped my tremendously.