Hello and welcome back to Musician’s Maintenance where it’s my job to sort through the health, fitness and musician’s injury landscape, to help you make sense of it all and boil it down into something you can actually do.
Here’s what I’ve got this week: 1) Injury Prevention for Musicians by Janice Ying, DPT 2) Neck Exercise Improves Pain in Violinists 3) Breathing Exercises to Optimize Brain Performance.
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Let’s go!
1) Injury Prevention for Musicians: The Goldilocks Paradigm?
Want a perspective on musician’s health from a physical therapist who has also experienced the challenges of injury during music school? Look no further than the Corpsonre blog, which recently featured Janice Ying, DPT of Opus Physical Therapy.
There, Janice details her struggles with injury, how physical therapy failed her, how different instruments have different needs and some of her thoughts on finding a path to a maintaining a healthy, high performance body as a musician.
Read: Injury Prevention for Musicians: The Goldilocks Paradigm? | Opus PT via Corpsonore
2) Evaluation of a Cervical Stabilization Exercise Program for Pain, Disability, and Physical Impairments in University Violinists with Nonspecific Neck Pain
For those of you who like research, here’s yet another study fresh off the press that shows that exercise reduces neck pain in violinists. The exercise program is fairly basic, but after the 6 weeks program, the violinists experienced significantly less pain.
The paper is freely available, so you can click and dive into all of the nerdy research details. If you’re not interested in all of that, you may want to just scroll down to the exercise program. The movements they use address many of the same body areas that I’ve targeted in the free Musician’s Injury Prevention Program, but you may find you like this program better.
Research: Evaluation of a Cervical Stabilization Exercise Program for Pain, Disability, and Physical Impairments in University Violinists with Nonspecific Neck Pain | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
3) Breathing Exercises to Optimize Brain Performance
You probably know by now I’m a big fan of breathwork. Here’s a great video by a Stanford based neuroscientist on how breathing exercise can help you optimize brain performance.
To me, if you are a serious musician, you need to be serious about optimizing your brain performance, because it’s the key to building muscle memory and the physical skill of playing, the expressiveness to make that skill meaningful, the resilience to handle high pressure situations, and the ability to recover enough to actually enjoy the process. It turns out that breathwork is at the center of all of these.
Watch: Breathing Exercises to Optimize Brain Performance | Andrew Huberman, Ph.D.