Here’s the facts. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of musician’s will have an injury that seriously impacts their playing at some point in their career.
To make matters more challenging, in injury prediction research a past injury is one of the most consistent predictors of future injury. So if you’ve been injured once, a flare up or new injury in the future is not uncommon.
That means if you haven’t been injured yet, there’s a reasonable chance you may be at some point.
Despite how common injuries are in musicians, they are stigmatized. Injured musicians are made to feel like they are doing something wrong, like they are bad musicians, that the injury is their fault, that they are exaggerating, or that pain is part of being a musician so deal with it.
It has led to a culture where pain is ignored when it arises. Hope that it will go away is the main treatment strategy. And a great deal of careers have unnecessarily ended.
A Path Forward
All of that sounds like doom and gloom, but there is a path towards a culture of music that maintains the very high levels of performance while also addressing pain, injury and wellness.
It turns out that high level sports has gone though a very similar transition. It’s not perfect, but how professional sports deals with pain, injury, wellness and performance health has made great strides in the past decades.
The needs of musicians are very different from athletes, but both are high performance realms. There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from athletics that can accelerate improvements in the culture of music.
Of course that doesn’t mean that the transition will be easy or quick. There are so many factors out of your immediate control that will take a painfully long time to improve.
However, there are also a ton of things that athletics has figured out over the past several decades that you can begin to implement now, without permission from anyone, without waiting for the culture to change, and if you so choose…without anyone knowing.
What Needs to Change
I really think that the majority of the progress in athletics is a result of two main changes.
The first is the acceptance that injuries happen, coupled with early, effective injury management. This has led to the practice of addressing injuries when they are small and easily fixed problems, rather than waiting until they are really challenging, big problems.
The second is not just spending time and energy on activities that improve performance, but also dedicating time time to things that reduce the likelihood of injury happening in the first place.
This article series will focus on the first: Helping you develop a better understanding of all of the things that you can do on your own to reverse pain when it is a small and more easily fixed problem.
We’ll take a look at the overarching principles of how pain and the body works. We will also dive into some really actionable techniques, exercises and measures you can take to turn around minor aches before they become full fledged injuries.
Before We Get Started…
First, my default recommendation is that if you are having pain that is limiting you’re playing, you should really find a good healthcare practitioner to perform a thorough evaluation and provide a customized treatment program.
Yes, finding someone good is hard, but it can make all the difference. If you don’t know who to see, I may be able to help.
Second, please be sure to read all of the terms and disclaimers. This is meant to be helpful and useful information, but it is educational in nature and not to be confused with professional medical advice.
Finally, I would recommend that you get familiar with how overuse injuries work. I put together a 15 minute podcast on an analogy that I use called The Water and The Cup.
If you haven’t already, I would recommend listening to that before going on so that you fully understand the context of the strategies covered.
What’s Next
The first step of early injury management is knowing when you are getting close to injury and you need do something about it.
If things are really painful, then you obviously need to make changes, but that’s not the best time to intervene.
To use the water and the cup analogy, the best time to intervene is when the cup is getting full, but has not yet overflowed.
The next article will teach you how to identify that point by understanding what I call “the spectrum of sensation.” It will also go over the most common times in a musician’s life when things will go wrong.
So, listen to the water and the cup analogy and get ready to learn about how to interpret what you are feeling and when injuries tend to occur.
Photo by Elisa Kennemer on Unsplash