Happy Halloween my spooky musician friends. Do you know what’s scarier than all of the ghouls and goblins you can run into on Halloween? Pain and stiffness in the wrists and forearms. Every instrument requires a ton from your wrists and forearms, so this is one of those areas that can effect almost any musician.
It’s such an important area, that I’ve addressed the topic a few times in the past (here and here), but today I wanted to put together a three step process for taking care of your wrists and forearms.
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Let’s get to work!
1) Step 1: Get your upper back and shoulder blades moving
The first step is to get your upper back and shoulder blades moving. At first, this may not make sense, but there is a fair amount of research linking forearm pain with limitations in these areas. Plus, they are areas that many musicians aren’t addressing. Not only are these areas linked to pain in the wrists and forearms, but they have also been linked to shoulder and neck pain as well.
Here’s a great routine from Austin Pancer of The Functional Musician that will get you started. It’s a circuit of 3 excellent exercises. Give ’em a look, then go get your upper back and shoulder blades moving.
A Quick Mobility Circuit | The Functional Musician
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2) Step 2: Self Mobilization for the forearm and wrist muscles
The next step is to do some self mobilization of the muscles in the wrist and forearm. There are a lot of myths out there about what this actually does. I’ve heard everything from breaking up “adhesions” to “melting” fascia. While these are intuitive ideas, there isn’t evidence to support them. The best explanation is that you are working on “trigger points” in the muscle. Trigger points are a big topic, but the short version is that when you have an overflowing cup situation, one way your body will try to protect you is by up-regulating the nerves that go to your muscles, leading to increased contraction in some fibers, which can contribute to pain and stiffness.
The long term solution is to work on why your cup is overflowing. In the short term though, deep pressure into those trigger points can help down-regulate the nerves that go to the wrist and forearm muscles, which can let the muscle fibers relax and reduce pain and stiffness. The key is to find the right intensity for you. Too little and nothing changes. Too much and you’re nerves will get even more up-regulated.
To find the right amount of pressure, it should be a little uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t make you make faces and you should be able to keep slow and relaxed breathing.
Here’s a few nice wrist and forearm self mobilizations from musician’s health coach Rusty Osborne that use a lacrosse ball. Try these and find the right amount of pressure. 1-2 minutes to each area should be plenty. Extra credit if you pair it with the breathing pattern from this edition!
Musician’s With Arm Pain Watch This | Rusty Osborne
3) Step 3: Loosen up your wrists
The last step is what most people do first. Loosen up the wrists and fingers. Often times this is done with just static stretching of the muscles. I think that a more dynamic approach along with a stretch for the wrist joint itself (which will also stretch the muscles) will be more effective in less time.
Here are 4 simple exercises for wrist mobility from doctor of physical therapy Aaron Galutera. The last one is a wrist joint mobilization, which is similar to a static stretch. As I’ve talked about before, static stretching shouldn’t be a part of your warm-up, so this would be best done at a time when you are not getting ready to play.
4 Simple Exercises for Wrist Mobility | Dr. Aaron Galutera PT, DPT