You Got a Body

My legs are strong. They always have been. I had good ups in basketball, was a natural hurdler and jumper, picked up skiing rapidly, drums pretty rapidly, and can pretty easily run for miles at a good pace without much worry.

My arms, not so much. They get stronger, but only through diligent, careful exercise.

Piano is a lot of arms, as you might notice! And so as I’ve increased my piano-playing recently, my arms have had a bit of a rough go with it. The particular trigger was certainly my determination to get better at trilling - a pretty maximalist activity in terms of muscle engagement and tension.

So after basically not playing for all February because of travel and tension, here I am, on a mission to play more again, but without any nervies, shooties, whatever you wanna call the Bad Stuff that happens from over-use and tension.

That path is following a couple of concurrent paths:

• My body, my arms: this means learning basic anatomy. Videos like this are useful, but slightly overwhelming. All I’ve learned so far, high-level, is that the forearm is like a Latin party. All the muscles have straight-forward names describing where they are, what they do, what they look like, and so on. I’m unfamiliar with even the basics, like extension versus flexion, or brachii muscles, carpals, and so on.
• Playing without tension: there are lots of videos dedicated to developing proper technique and avoiding anti-patterns, like this one, and this one from Dennis Zhdanov (whose technique series on Hanon and Brahms seem worth further perusal), and especially this one from the excellent Nahre Sol. More on that later.
• Exercises and stretching! Strengthening, stretching, and resting these muscles proactively matters a lot. I’m doing a lot of wrist stretches, a lot of pressing on various flexor muscles in my forearm, and generally trying to stay very tethered to my physical muscles and how they feel.

It’s been interesting to kinda take inventory of the unit I’ve been given as a human. Not until my 30s have I really done this, which makes sense – I’m not as young as I used to be. My back is also a perpetual trouble spot for me, which means similar work needs to be done there.

I also just have this idea floating in my head of like, a tension budget. Typing on a computer, on my phone, playing piano, all make tiny withdrawals on my tension budget. Practicing trills is a night out in Vegas. And so much like real personal finance, staying cognizant of how you’re working through your budget will help. I’d like to practice piano softer, for one thing. I’d like to not just use my right hand for phone stuff.

Let’s not neglect one thing though - bodies are cool. I mean, it figures, all things are interesting if you look at them close enough. But bodies, just like brains, are just wild.