Tag: Health

Avoiding hand and wrist injury when playing guitar – part two

Nicole NealLeave a comment

Following on from my post last week about developing and maintaining a somewhat straight line most of the time between hand and forearm when playing to minimise risk of injury to the wrist and hand I thought I’d follow on with another important factor in avoiding and minimising risk of injury. Well, this is something that has worked fantastically well for me, so I’d like to share.

As Frankie said back in 1984 – relax! And when I say relax I mean this both physically and mentally. Usually addressing the latter first considerably helps with the former.

Often easier said than done though, right?

So how do I go about relaxing? Well, here are my top three things I do to make me mentally relaxed and at my most physically accessible for playing:

  • I approach my practice with a relaxed state of mind – I don’t rush into the practice room, it doesn’t matter if I’m late this time, it matters that I’m there. I lay aside the day’s “busyness” for 30 minutes or an hour, none of that matters during this time whilst coming to play. Whatever is or has been going on can certainly wait for an hour. And I use this same approach when coming to perform – by approaching our practice in this way, we’re training in not just the notes, and the physical movements, and the music and so on, we’re also training in the mental approach and the feeling associated with coming to play.
  • If I’m finding that challenging then there are a couple of physical exercises I do to help get relaxed (i) take four or five deep breaths, breathing in for a count of three and out for a count of three. This acts as a reset button for you system, gets oxygen right into the deeper parts of the lungs and cleans out the carbon dioxide from the deeper parts of the lungs too and (ii) I get doing some of my Alexander Technique semi-supine on the floor.
  • When sitting with the guitar I draw attention to where I’m holding unnecessary tension in my body, checking in with my various body parts and release if necessary – neck, jaw, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, hands, fingers, upper back, lower back, chest, abdomen, hips, thighs, calves, feet and toes.

So yes, these things help to prepare me to be physically accessible for playing in two ways:

(1) Less tension and rigidity = greater ease of movement, a more fluid and legato feel, a less “heavy” and laboured sounding right hand; you can ask more of you body when it has less rigidity in it.

(2) As the instrument is touching your body part of its resonance moves through you – the more relaxed you are, the easier the vibrations pass through you, and the more beautiful, resnonant and full the sound you can make.

And back to the main point of this post – how does relaxing prevent injury? Well, think about it like this – what happens to any material, when stressed, be it wood, plastic, whatever, that is rigid and unbending? It won’t yield, and ends up cracking and breaking? What happens to more flexible material such as bamboo, tall grass, or other material with more “give” in it? It moves with the applied stress and the movement; it goes with it, it doesn’t try to resist and as such can return to it’s normal position unscathed. (I’m in no way a materials scientist – in case you couldn’t tell! hah hah! – but you get where I’m going here….)

So it can help to think of our muscles, tendons and ligaments as working at the optimum when they’re working like bamboo – stront, but working at their best when we’re asking them to work with a bit of “give”. And awareness of tension in parts of the body seemingly unrelated to the wrists and hands is key in avoiding injury to the wrist and hands – playing the guitar is as much about the rest of your body as it is about hands and fingers. By learning to relax, or firstly learning to be aware of where tension lies (as with observance and awareness brings change), we can minimise tension, aid more fluid and musical playing and importantly, trouble, pain and injury-free playing.

Related articles

Cold hands, warm…guitar?! Keeping your hands toasty and warm for playing guitar

Nicole Neal1 Comment
Deutsch: Latentwärmespeicher, Taschenwärmer
Pocket Hand Warmers – Toasty! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Now that the cooler months are here – well, they are in the south-eastern part of Australia anyway (and yes, overseas peeps Australia does get cold! We even have snow on the mountains!) keeping your hands warm and flexible for playing can be a challenge.

 

I, along with my Guitar Orchestra colleagues, certainly experienced this yesterday afternoon at a concert in a solid brick church where the temperature was even colder inside than it was outside!

 

So yes, cold hands and the stiffness and loss of dexterity was definitely a challenge to be overcome yesterday, particularly as I was going to be playing Sor’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart – a piece that calls for tip top dexterity. Rehearsing in the concert space my hands were nearly blue with cold and moving through the fourth and fifth variations of the Sor piece was quite a challenge. I was expecting this to be the case, however, and so went along to the concert somewhat prepared with a little trick I’ve been using lately that I thought I’d share with you.

 

I have seen folks wearing fingerless gloves, but for me at least gloves don’t really work that well to generate heat if my hands are already cold (and it doesn’t take much for that to happen with me; I must have a warm heart!). I’ve not given the fingerless gloves a go yet whilst playing or practicing, but I think they’re certainly worth checking out. So I’ll let you know about those.

 

Anyway, as I said gloves alone aren’t usually enough to generate warmth in my hands. I need a source of heat. I have seen another guitarist once use a hairdryer on his hands, but you can run the risk of scalding yourself and you can probably only do one hand at a time (so one hand freezes whilst the other gets warm) unless you manage to position the hairdryer between your knees. It also relies on the venue you’re going to having a fully functioning socket backstage (not always the case!) and can be a little noisy too.

 

So I decided this season to give a go to some pocket hand warmers and I’m pleased to say I’ve had a lot of success with them so far. Yesterday they worked like a treat for me – I set them off popped them in the pocket of my jacket after having “warmed up” with an initial play through and got my hands lovely and toasty and warm before going out to play the recital.

 

For those of you who don’t know what a pocket hand warmer is, it’s palm-sized pack of gel (sodium acetate, which is a harmless substance – in fact it’s used in potato chips as a flavour enhancer) that creates heat through a exothermic crystallisation of the sodium acetate. Each pack has a little metal disc that when you click it set of a chain reaction and said exothermic reaction which produces heat to around 55 degrees centigrade and stays nice and warm for a good 30-40 minutes. The blurb on the pack says one hour, but the good penetrating warmth lasts for around 30 minutes.

 

The other good thing about these hand warmers is that they are reusable. Just pop them in a pan of boiling water for 5 minutes to melt the crystals and it’s fully recharged and ready to use again.

 

You can pick the pocket hand warmers up in outdoors stores, as they’re really marketed towards hikers, campers and skiers. Fellow guitarists, give them a go I say and stay toasty warm and ready for action!!