Welcome back to Musician’s Maintenance, for musician’s who just can’t afford to have pain and injury limit their playing.
This issue is brought to you by me! If you are either experiencing pain that is related to your playing or if you are interested in proactively preventing injury, I may be able to help. Learn more here.
I’m Cody, and I appreciate spending the next few minutes in your inbox. Below you’ll find resources and exercises to help you maintain your body at least as well as you maintain your instrument. Let’s get to it!
Bulletproof Your Shoulders
Shoulders are a common site of tension, pain and injury for musicians. Weakness of the stabilizing muscles around the shoulder (called the rotator cuff muscles) can also be associated with pain, stiffness and tension of the neck, mid back and the forearm.
Here are a few great exercises to take care of your shoulders from physical therapist Jack Dockery. Watch the videos to learn the movements, then try the program below.
- Shoulder Circles: 10 slow repetitions. No pain allowed. If you have trouble going all the way around either widen your hands or use a band.
- Sidelying Shoulder External Rotation: 10 slow repetitions on each side. You can use a water bottle instead of a weight. Here’s my version of this same exercise.
- Incline Single Arm Punch: 10 slow repetitions on each side. You can use a wall, but if the position of your hand is uncomfortable, you can also do it with your hand on a counter top.
- Prone Pull Downs: 5-10 slow repetitions. This one can be deceptively hard. If it is, don’t use the stick and let your hands stay closer to the ground.
- Overhead Taps: 5-10 per side.
As always, make sure you understand the newsletter exercise ground rules before you start. Also, if this program doesn’t work for you, check out the workouts library to find something that does.
Bulletproof Your Shoulders | Jack Dockery, PT, DPT via Instagram
How to Practice When You’re on Physical Rest
Sometimes your body needs a break, but that doesn’t meant that there aren’t productive things that you can do to improve your music.
Francesca Leo of Playing without Pain and Kimberly Hankins of The Aligned Musician have put together a great contest called #100daysofsustainablepractice on Instagram. Here’s the post with all of the details.
As part of the contest Francesca put together this nice piece on strategies to practice away from your instrument. Here’s the short version…
- Engage in any form of self care
- Visualization exercise
- Score study
- Singing your music (or if you are a singer, play it on the piano)
- Re-writing your music on staff paper
- Clapping rhythms
Be sure to checkout the full post for all of the details and follow along with the #100daysofsustainablepractice posts for more tips.
How to Practice When You are on Physical Rest | #100daysofsustainablepractice via Instagram
Help Turn the Tide of Injury in Musicians
The rate of injury in musicians is insanely high and it ends more careers than it needs to.
If you want to be a part the solution, one of the easiest things you can do is connect fellow musicians with good resources.
If you find information like this helpful, please consider forwarding this email to a friend, colleague, teacher or classmate. They can also sign up here. Thanks!