Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Musician’s Maintenance, where it’s my job to get you a few actionable resources to help your body stay strong and resilient to injury.
This week I’ve got 1) Beneficial exercises (not just) for flutists 2) Building a training routine you actually look forward to 3) One of my favorite exercises for wrist and finger health.
Let’s go!
1. Beneficial exercises (not just) for flutists
Flutists are among the most frequently injured musicians in the orchestra (only high strings experience more injuries). Luckily, flutists have a musician’s health champion in Angela McCuiston. She is a flutist, NASM certified personal trainer and owner of Music Strong Fitness.
McCuiston recently wrote a nice article for Flute Specialists on beneficial exercises for flutists. Luckily for the rest of you musicians, they are excellent exercises for you as well. In the article, she covers…
- A chest stretch
- A wrist stretch
- 2 upper back/shoulder exercises
- A core exercises
- And a few things you can do for your neck.
Give the article a look, try the exercises in the videos, and if you like Angela’s work, be sure you check out her book called The Musician’s Essential Exercises. Or if you are really motivated, look into her online coaching for musicians.
Read: Beneficial Exercises for Flutists
2. Building a training routine you actually look forward to
The team over at GMB.io is doing some great stuff for general health, wellness and movement competence by focusing less on exercise and more on learning interesting movements. They recently posted an article that talks about how to make your training routine more enjoyable.
You see, they’ve noticed that many people associate exercise with pain and punishment (drop and give me 20!!). But they argue it doesn’t have to be that way and offer a few tips to get a little more joy out of your training.
Here are the main points (with a little commentary), check out the full article for the details.
- Expand your movement vocabulary (learning something new is more interesting the grinding out reps).
- Learn how to play productively (playful movement beats boring exercise in most cases)
- Exercise you enjoy beats exercise you hate any day (because you might actually do it!)
If you aren’t familiar with their approach, check them out. They’ve got a free 1 week kickstart program (if you sign up with your email) that will introduce you to more of what they do, as well as several online programs you can purchase if you want more.
I’ll be curious what you think of the movements they use. They borrow heavily from gymnastics, so there’s quite a bit of work with the hands on the ground, which I know musicians can be wary of. Hit reply and let me know if you have either positive or negative reactions to this style of exercise.
Read: Here’s how you build a training routine you actually look forward to doing every day
3. One of my favorite exercises for wrist and finger health
Do you know who may have more finger and wrist injuries than musicians? Gymnasts. The culture around gymnastics is more exercise-centric than music, so it makes sense that they’ve developed and practiced more strategies to keep their fingers and wrists healthy than musicians.
The first knuckle raise is one exercise that I’m not sure has made it into musicians’ communities, but that I think may be very helpful for those wrist and finger flexor muscles that tend to get so tight. You can watch the video in the link at the bottom, but here’s a quick description.
Get down on your hands and knees with your palms flat on the ground (if this already hurts your wrists, stand up and put your palms flat on a wall. Everything else is the same. I actually use this standing variation in the warm-up that I put together).
Position your shoulders right over your hands. Lift your thumbs off the ground a little. Next push your palms up off the ground while keeping your elbows straight and the entire finger in contact with the floor. If you’re tight, you won’t lift too high up. That’s ok. Don’t force anything. Pause and lower down slowly.
Perform 1-3 rounds of 10-15 repetitions with a tempo of 1-2 seconds up and 3-4 seconds lowering back down.
As we talked about in last week’s newsletter on behavior change, the simple program that you do is much better than a more comprehensive program that you don’t. Keeping that in mind, if I were to pick just two exercises from the injury prevention program that I think would give you the most benefit for the least amount of time and effort, I would choose this and the thoracic rotation exercise.
That’s it for this week’s newsletter. Now go give those a try!