Hey there and welcome to another edition of the Musician’s Maintenance Weekly, where I pass along a few resources for you to check out, so that you can better care for that music makin’ body of yours.
This week I’ve got 1) Why you need to re-think your posture. 2) The battle for your mind that you need to recognize 3) An exercise to work those shoulder blades.
Let’s get to it…
1. “Perfect” Posture Causing Problems: Posture seems simple enough. Just have good posture and everything is fine. But it’s not that simple and what is “good” posture anyhow.
There’s often a tension between “correct” posture and an efficient posture that actually works for the unique body that is yours. Recently Dr. Rachel White Galvin of Mindfelt Methods wrote a guest post on CorpSonore that details her tricky history with posture from the perspective of an injured musician and how looking at posture differently played a big role in her recovery.
Read: Posture Reimagined with the Feldenkrais Method
2. The Great Battle of Fire and Light: In each of our minds, there is a tug of war between the desires of your primitive mind against the desires of your higher mind. High level performance, avoiding injury and especially recovering from an injury all require your higher mind to be in control. Unfortunately these challenging situations are usually when the primitive mind takes over and drags you into its smoke filled cave of pain, depression, fear and anxiety. A big part of my job as a PT, working with people in the midst of pain and injury, is to be a primitive mind tamer. One of the best strategies to put the higher mind back in control is simply awareness.
Wait But Why is an awesome site with insightful, super long form articles (complemented by stick figure diagrams and swearing) on a range of interesting topics. Recently they’ve done a huge series on what the hell is going on with society and politics today. The first article in the series struck me because it has probably the most clear description of this battle between the higher mind and primitive mind that I have come across.
Take a few minutes, read the article and just start noticing which mind is driving your behavior. As you do this, I bet the light of your higher mind will begin to shine through and good things will happen.
Read: The Great Battle of Fire and Light
3. Take Care of those Shoulder Blades: As a musician, the muscles around your shoulder blade are hugely important. If they are working well, they make a stable and efficient base for your shoulder and neck to work off of. If they aren’t, that base can become less efficient and you’ll have to compensate somewhere else to make things work.
It’s kind of like the difference between running on a sandy beach versus running on a track. You can run on the beach, but you’ll get tired faster and go slower.
The scapular wall slide exercise targets a shoulder blade muscle called the serratus anterior, which is especially important in holding things up in front of your body for long periods of time. This is one of my favorite introductory exercises to get people started training this muscle group.
Check out the video and give it a try.
Watch and Try: Scapular Wall Slide Exercise
Sharing: If you found any of this helpful, consider forwarding it along to a friend, teacher, colleague, or any other musician you think may be interested. Thanks!
Until next week,
Cody
P.S. As always if you have questions, feedback, requests for topics you are interested in, or just want to say hi, go ahead and hit reply and your message will go straight to my inbox!
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