Hello and welcome to another edition of Musician’s Maintenance Weekly, where you get a few tid-bits of injury prevention and performance health information to help care for your body like a professional.
This week we’ll cover 1) A method to monitor your injury risk 2) Performing without Pain
Let’s get to it…
1) A method to monitor injury risk
There was a time not too long ago in sports where the training approach was “just do more.” More training was thought to be better and if an athlete couldn’t handle the load, that was their problem. Sound familiar?
These days, those responsible for training professional athletes take a far more nuanced approach to training, especially as it relates to injury risk. One of the concepts that may apply to musicians is acute:chronic workload ratio. I found a good article on this topic for sports, but it’s probably a deeper dive than you need. Here’s a very simplified version of what it is and how it might look for musicians.
Acute workload is how much you do over 1 week. Chronic workload is your average weekly workload over the past month. An example may help.
Example 1: Hypothetical “normal” playing schedule
Let’s say with all of your music related activities you played your instrument for an average of 5 hours each day over the past week. This is your acute workload.
Let’s say that over the past month your workload has been very consistent and that for each of the 4 weeks before this one you played for an average of 5 hours per day. This is your chronic workload.
In this case, your acute:chronic workload ratio is or 1.0 (divide acute by chronic). This ratio is right in the sweet spot, between 0.8 and 1.3 that is quoted in the article. Lower than 0.8 and you are undertraining. Over 1.5 and you are overtraining and are in the “danger zone” for injury.
Example 2: Attending a festival
Now that you can interpret the numbers a little, let’s take another example. Let’s say that over the past four weeks you’ve still averaged 5 hours per day. But the most recent week you were at a festival and were on your instrument 9 hours per day.
Now your acute:chronic workload ratio is 1.8 (9 divided by 5) and you are at a much greater risk for injury.
Workload is more than just time on instrument
If you look at the article, monitoring workload can get much more complicated than this as well. Time playing is just one variable. You could also factor in intensity, such as the challenge of repertoire or how much fatigue you experience while playing. Professional sports have all kinds of ways they monitor workload these days, including wearable technology. If anything it’s impressive to see how far athletics has come in this area and where it might be headed for musicians. That being said though, when you’re trying to do this on your own, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by data and give up, so it’s probably best to keep things simple.
The take home here is to keep in mind how much you are playing on any given week, and how that compares to the four weeks prior so that you can estimate how close you are to the injury risk “danger zone” and make some adjustments before you start to hurt.
Read: Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio
2) Performing Without Pain
If you’ve got a minor pain, or know you need to do a better job taking care of your body and you are at the point where you feel that investing some time and money into the problem is what you need to do, then I would highly recommend checking out Rachel White Galvin’s Perform Without Pain Premier Program.
Here’s the program summary
- Module 1: What is pain (I reviewed this for her and it’s quite good)
- Module 2: Harnessing your innate power for change
- Module 3: Learning to regulate stress
- Module 4: Deloading
- Module 5: Introduction to strength training
- Module 6: Unlocking your posture
- Module 7: Learning to squat
- Module 8: Finishing strong
As you can see, the program takes a broader and more nuanced approach to injury and health in general, which is exactly what I think musician’s health could use these days.
All the details are on the site, give it a look and consider investing a little into the health and resilience of your body.