Hi and welcome to Musician’s Maintenance Weekly where this week we are talking about how to get your body to a place where strengthening something is actually a good idea.
In the last newsletter we talked about exercises for tendon strengthening. But the exercises came with a warning. Don’t start tendon training until you have fixed the dynamic of your cup overflowing. In other words, you need your pain to be settled and stable before you start strengthening.
But what if it’s not? This week I’ve got a few resources that I think will help. 1) R.I.C.E. or M.E.A.T after injury? 2) The Art of Rest 3) Can you still practice if you are injured.
Let’s dive in…
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1) R.I.C.E. or M.E.A.T after injury?
You’ve probably heard the recommendation to R.I.C.E. (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) after injury. The advice has been around for a long time, but there is some question if it’s really the right approach. It turns out the inflammation may be a good thing for healing, and while R.I.C.E. may be effective at reducing inflammation, it may not be the best thing to maximize injury recovery.
An alternative that has been proposed is M.E.A.T. (Movement, Exercise, Analgesics, Treatment). The idea of this approach is to maximize the body’s own healing process through gentle movement.
You’ll also notice that “Treatment” is recommended very early in the pain/injury process. This one may be tricky for you since my sense is that most musicians would prefer to ignore their injury rather than interact with the medical system. But early treatment is now a mainstay in high level athletics, so you may want to consider it for your musical career as well. Find a good physical therapist and make an appointment when the pain starts rather than when it becomes unbearable and much harder to treat.
The main treatments that I use to get things calmed down are joint mobilization, joint manipulation (fancy term for “cracking” joints), trigger point dry needling (although PT’s can’t use this in every state), soft tissue mobilization (fancy term for massage), taping, lots of education, and prescription of exercises that are specifically targeted towards recovery.
My 2 cents is that R.I.C.E. may be the right thing to do for the first 1-2 days after an acute injury, but M.E.A.T. is probably the best approach for overuse injuries and after the first few days of an acute injury.
Click the link below and learn about the potential problems with R.I.C.E. and more about M.E.A.T.
Read: R.I.C.E or M.E.A.T. after injury
2) The Art of Rest
One thing that I don’t like about the M.E.A.T. approach is that it doesn’t recommend some kind of relative rest. The fact of the matter is that if something hurts, especially in overuse injuries, it’s basically your body letting you know it needs more recovery time.
There is an art to resting though. Too much rest and you waste time and lose musicianship. Too little rest and you never fully recover, leaving you in a cycle of what can feel like a never ending injury.
Below I’ve linked to an article that is a very thorough (ok, long!) exploration of rest. Here’s a few of the highlights.
- Complete rest, like bed rest or total immobilization is too much for all but the most extreme injury cases.
- You can’t always exercise (or play) your way out of every injury either.
- Relative rest is key. Do less, but don’t stop moving.
- The two methods for resting: “Get it over with” and “If at first you don’t succeed…”
The article also offers a few ideas to keep moving while you rest: walking, swimming, hot/cold immersion, cold exposure, breath-work, and others. If you follow the M.E.A.T. guidelines and see a physical therapist early, they can give you more directed and customized recovery exercises as well.
The article is long, but if you are dealing with pain or injury, resting well can be the difference between getting back to your instrument comfortably as fast as possible and a lingering injury that takes all the joy out of your music.
3) Can you still practice your musical instrument if you are injured?
The hardest part of rest is not practicing as much as you feel like you need to in order to maintain your level of musicianship.
Fortunately, there are ways to minimize loss of playing ability while simultaneously getting the rest you need to recover as fast as humanly possible.
Jennifer Roig-Francoli is a violinist and Alexander Technique teacher who writes a blog on her website The Art of Freedom for Musicians. I dug up a blog post of hers from 2014 that offers some suggestions. Interestingly the techniques that she recommends have only gained more and more scientific support in the 6 years since her article was originally published.
Give the article a look and if you’ve got an injury that needs some time off instruments, start putting some of her tips into action.
Read: Can You Still Practice Your Musical Instrument if You Are Injured?