Hello and welcome back to Musician’s Maintenance where it’s my job to help you educate yourself on how to keep your body fit to play.
Here’s the resources I’ve curated for you this week: 1) How to injure yourself (the RIGHT way) 2) One of the best exercises for your spine that you’re probably not doing 3) Research Review: Testing an exercise program for professional musicians
(Note: If you enjoy these newsletters, please consider forwarding this email to a friend, colleague, teacher or classmate. They can sign up here and then you won’t be the only one you know doing spinal waves).
Let’s get to it…
1) How to injure yourself (the RIGHT way) with the Aligned Musician and the Conditioned Musician
Kimberly Hankins of @thealignedmusician recently interviewed David Cartolano of @theconditionedmusician on her podcast and it was awesome.
Click below to find it on your favorite podcasting service and hear two musicians, both with excellent backgrounds in musician’s health, discuss musician’s injury, mindset, responsibility, the mind-body connection and more.
Listen: How to get injured (the RIGHT way) | The Aligned Musician Podcast
Sponsor: The Foam Roller
You may think of a foam roller as a tool for creating therapeutic pain (which it can be). But for musicians, a foam roller can also be a great tool to create stability challenges that will help you work those hard to find, but very important little muscles that protect you from injury.
It has even been used in an injury prevention program that was developed for professional orchestral musicians.
It’s simple, versatile, and effective which makes it a great addition to your set of tools for self-maintenance.
The Foam Roller | (Affiliate: If you buy through this link, I get a small portion of the sale at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting the Musician’s Maintenance mission!)
2) One of the best exercises for your spine that you’re probably not doing
Spines are really complicated, but if you look at the way we exercise them you’d think all they need to be is more flexible, stronger or more “stable.”
If you think about it though, your spine is like a bunch of chain links (24 to be exact) and it’s important to keep each of those connections moving and healthy. However, most exercises are either done without moving the spine, or just bending the whole thing, which makes it easy to move through the links that are working and avoid moving the ones that are stiff and could really use the work.
Here’s an exercise that can teach you to get each link moving. It looks funny, but if you spend all day in one place holding an instrument, learning to move each segment individually can be very helpful.
Watch: The Basic Spinal Wave | Ido Portal
3) Research Review: Testing an exercise program for professional musicians
In the last Research Review I took you through an article that described the rigorous development of an injury prevention exercise program for professional orchestral musicians. Now we are going to look at the next study in this series, where the researchers look to determine whether or not the program they developed effectively reduces injury rates in professional musicians..
Listen: Testing an exercise program for professional musicians | Musician’s Maintenance