Musicians: Move Better & Play Better

While you’re busy mastering any musical instrument, inevitably, a relationship is also busy developing between your instrument and your body. For any musician, the art lies in moving the body as efficiently as possible to guard off any possible aches, pains and even injuries. The Alexander Technique (AT for short) has already helped countless musicians, and here, we lay out the basics so you can start playing better and playing healthy.

Doing Too Much

Athletes, actors, musicians, public speakers: all people who use their bodies in very specific ways. Any mental or physical limitation is going to hinder your performance, whether you’re competing in the Olympics, delivering a Shakespearean monologue, or hitting the stage with your band. These limitations can take a myriad of different forms: stage fright, bad habits, bad posture, a heavy instrument, even past trauma, the list goes on. Any good teacher will be aware of these details, but a specialist who deals with posture, breathing and muscle tension, is likely to catch the problem earlier.

In the heat of the moment, musicians often do far too much. Brass musicians often take too big a breath, vocalists stick out their neck every time they hit that high note, guitarists hunched over their axes, and so on. Look around at the rest of your band mates, as long as you’re all sounding good and you’re not in any pain, everything’s fine, right? Wrong. These kinds of injuries sneak up on you, especially if you rehearse for a few hours every day so that, sooner or later, a lot of musicians end up suffering from one symptom or another, whether it’s protesting vocal cords, RSI-related symptoms in musicians who play stringed instruments, neck problems in saxophone players, back pain in pianists and other musicians. Basically, the range of possible symptoms is broad.

It’s Not Hard Work

Rather than being a series of exercises, the Alexander Technique is more about letting things go. Any unnecessary movements cost energy, cause fatigue, muscle tension and cramping, messing with your timing, your sound and ultimately, your creativity. Because many musicians and performers keep training specific muscles to perform a task they just aren’t designed for, while the muscles they should be using slowly weaken, it’s easy to get completely stuck. The hands of a trained therapist can help you realise how much easier things get when you stop trying so hard and pay more attention to how you move, focus more on the direction of your movement and the lightness of your movement.

F.M. Alexander

The Australian Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955) was an expert when it comes to getting stuck. He was an actor by training and would often lose his voice in the middle of performances. To try to pin-point where the problem lay, he devised a complex system of mirrors that he could use to observe his posture while rehearsing scenes. He carried out the process meticulously – almost scientifically, and what he noticed was that during recitals he would push his chin forward and his head back, forcing his neck to pull in slightly, shortening his posture.

Six Kilos

Through further experimentation, Alexander discovered a relationship between the head, neck and back muscles and noticed that his voice continued to function normally as long as he lengthened his neck and held his head a little forward. When you realise that you have around six kilos (the weight of the average human head) balanced on top of your spine, it’s not hard to imagine that this relationship exists. It’s not much different from trying to balance a heavy bowling ball on top of a broom handle. If the balance isn’t perfect, then all of the muscles that go into holding the head up suddenly have to work twice as hard, even when you tilt your head forward or back by just a few degrees. The AT mantra is to hold your head higher and slightly forwards. This is more about the feeling of balance rather than actually tilting your head, because tilting your head is what causes unnecessary muscle tension. Try gently moving your head backwards and forwards and try to find the position that feels the easiest and most natural. You should find that resting your head exactly in the middle requires the least effort from your neck muscles.

Inhibiting

Unlearning bad habits is not all that easy. If you want to unlearn anything, then you need to start by becoming constantly aware of the way you’re moving. In AT, the term ‘inhibiting’ is used a lot, meaning ‘to prevent’. To inhibit a bad habit, the idea is to take your time before taking action. This involves building in a little pause so you can give yourself the time needed to think about what you’re doing, gain the freedom to choose to do it differently and, therefore, free yourself from those old and ingrained habits. When you’re faced with a more difficult situation, are feeling emotional or you’re juggling too many things at once, it’s understandable that you can get a little bit tense. By adopting the AT approach and ‘inhibiting’, you can learn to overcome that tension. You might think that delaying your response will slow you down, but you’ll quickly notice that it actually feels more natural and saves more time than just thoughtlessly reacting and wasting energy. ‘Mindfulness’ might actually be the fitting modern term for Alexander’s concept of inhibiting.

The Chair Exercise

A classic AT exercise is to simply stand up and then sit down in a chair. If you’re wiped out after a gig, you’re likely to just plonk yourself down without thinking about it, applying a lot of force on your internal organs and joints and actually making you feel even more tired than you were in the first place. To counter this, you can easily try the AT approach to sitting yourself:

  1. Stand in front of the chair and wait a moment (inhibit your movement) before actually moving. Relax your neck, lengthen your spine and broaden your back.
  2. Let your head fall forward a little, move your knees forward and push your hips back.
  3. As you come to sit, make sure that your feet are flat on the ground and that your behind lands on the seat of the chair. Lengthen the spine from the top to the bottom.
  4. Now, stand up, repeating the same movements in reversed order.

Application

The Alexander Technique can be applied to a lot of different things. If you spend a lot of time sitting behind a computer (as a composer, producer or studio engineer) then you can use AT to prevent back and wrist problems. AT also includes a lot of tips for vocalists about posture, breathing and warm-up exercises to help keep the vocal cords in good condition. Since drummers are using all four limbs at once, learning about AT can also help to prevent aches, pains and injuries. But, as well as guidance about the physical side of being a musician, AT also offers a lot of guidance about the mental side to help performers overcome fear of failure or stage fright.

Wiser Movements

The Alexander Technique isn’t the only posture and movement method for musicians. There’s also yoga, the Feldenkrais method, Tai Chi, Chi kung, Rolfing, Pilates, and the Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) devised by David Berceli. What all of these methods and techniques have in common is the goal of bringing the body back to its natural balance and, from there, using the innate wisdom of the body to introduce it to new ways of moving. Or, more specifically, feeling different ways of doing things. The approach to the list of methods above can vary greatly. The Alexander and Rolfing techniques are relatively passive, where the therapist tries to relax the body through external specific actions, physical manipulation, touch and guided movements. The idea is that, because you are now aware of how tense your body becomes when repeating old habits, you also have the choice to do things differently and more efficiently. The other methods are more visceral, where the idea is to allow the body to find the best possible shape through specific postures and poses, movements and movement combinations. There is also an overlap. Moshe Feldenkrais, for example, actually studied with Alexander and was also influenced by Eastern martial arts. There’s also a clear relationship between Chinese medicine and Indian ayurvedic yoga where, in both practices, the meridians of the body form an essential pillar. What’s central to these practices is allowing the energy within the body to flow freely, and making sure that muscle tension isn’t preventing the body from freely expressing. Unlike psychology, it’s not necessary to understand where the muscle tension ultimately stems from, just as long as it’s able to leave the body. For musicians, it can sometimes be a bit of a mission to find the right solution to a physical problem. Luckily, these days it’s easy to use the internet to find more information about how these movement methods work and start helping yourself.

See also…

» How to Breathe: For Vocalists & Musicians
» Sitting Posture for Musicians: Learn to Sit Again
» Want to Play Tight? Then Nail These Exercises
» Independence Exercises for Drummers
» Learn how to play with a plectrum!

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