Hey all! Welcome back to another Musician’s Maintenance Weekly, where it’s my job to serve up the small, actionable steps you can take to keep your body working as well as your instrument.
This week I’ve got 1) How to cope with overuse injuries. 2) Seven pathways to get out of pain. 3) A great podcast interview (but I’m a little biased!).
Let’s go!
1. How to cope with overuse injuries: Karen Hall of Musician Health Resource is a professional cello player who, unfortunately, knows a thing or two about being injured. She recently wrote a post on dealing with overuse injuries. Here’s the takeaways.
- Know the root causes of overuse injuries: 1) Ramping up an activity too quickly 2) Going too long without rest or recovery breaks.
- If you do start to feel something, treat it early with Rest (yes, put the instrument down and back away), Ice, Compression, and Elevation.
- Know which of the 4 stages of injury you are in and know that the further down the list you are, the longer the recovery will be.
The article is spot on and provides simple steps you can take to manage a small problem while it is still small, rather than wishing the pain away until it becomes impossible to ignore and much harder to treat.
Do yourself a favor, especially if you’re actively ignoring some kind of minor ache, click the link below, read the article and start addressing the problem now before it gets bigger.
Read: How to Cope with Overuse Injuries
2. Seven Pathways to Get Out of Pain: It turns out that there isn’t just one way to treat pain, regardless of what the healthcare practitioner you saw may say. Thankfully author, blogger and movement geek Todd Hargrove of Better Movement recently wrote a post detailing seven ways out of pain along with caveats for each. It’s worth a full read, but here’s the list.
- Rest
- Strength Training
- Mobility
- Coordination/motor control
- Mind-body/awareness
- General health
- Manual therapy
The trick is to find what is right for you with your current ache/pain or injury. My sense is that musicians health has been dominated by the mind-body/awareness influence of Alexander Technique, which I think is great, but it’s also worth noting that there are several other options that might be worth exploring. Plus, you can often pursue several options at once.
So if something hurts, check out the article and see if there’s a path that you haven’t yet explored. If you like how Todd thinks and writes, he also has two great books A Guide to Better Movement (Affiliate) and Playing with Movement (Affiliate) that might be worth exploring as well.
Read: Seven Pathways to Get Out of Pain
3. Podcast!: Last week I was interviewed by David Cartolano of The Conditioned Musician for his podcast. We had a great chat and covered topics like posture, how neck and shoulder problems can contribute to pain in the wrist and hand, and more. I have so much fun talking about this stuff. I hope you enjoy the interview half as much as I enjoyed doing it. Ultimately I hope you find something in there that’s helpful.