Pain

 

Many pianists ask if it is normal to have pain while playing the piano. The answer is unequivocally NO! If they are asking, chances are they have already experienced some pain. 

Many people might assume that having some pain while playing is to be expected, as it might be when doing an athletic activity or a workout where you are building muscles. They may assume that when their muscles get stronger, the pain will go away.

However, this is far from the truth. As you've read in previous posts, learning to play is NOT about building muscles. If it were, you wouldn't be seeing the amazing young children who are playing Chopin and Rachmaninoff and all the difficult pieces. They simply do not have large muscles. And they can play pieces which last 30, 40 minutes or more, and have no fatigue. If you have pain and fatigue, it is not because your muscles need to get stronger, but because you are over-using certain muscles and using them in the wrong way.

The most common pain pianists get is in the forearm. This is because they are over using the small muscles in the hand and fingers. It is not due to your forearm muscles. Although many people think the fingers are doing all the work, this is not true. You may already have been instructed to do finger exercises to get them stronger. You are probably never going to have highly-muscled fingers, and even if you do, that still would not give you the ability to play much of what the piano requires. If you are working on building muscles in the fingers, you might expect to have pain in the fingers themselves. Yet I've never encountered anyone who gets pain in the fingers themselves, or in the palm. The pain is almost always felt one level "back" up the arm, so to speak. Thus, over-use of fingers is felt in the forearm.

Another place where pain may be felt is in the wrists. Again, it has nothing to do with your wrists not being strong enough. Most likely you are sitting too low (or slouching as you sit) and letting your arms sink below keyboard level, which strains the wrist (and can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome). You could get pain from sitting too high and having your wrists higher than your hand, but I've never actually seen anyone have this issue. You could also be twisting your wrists and pivoting them back and forth, which also is a strain on them. You may have been taught techniques which employ a wrist twist, but these are not good techniques.

If you have pain in your shoulders, you don't have a muscle definiciency. Most likely you are hunching your shoulders up when you play. Consistently reminding yourself to let the shoulders down will remove the pain.

I am not saying that no muscles are used. Of course they are; muscles must move the bones. However, the muscles of your upper arm are already strong enough from your day-to-day activities to play the piano. The technique that I teach relies much more on the upper arm and less on the hand and fingers. The fingers do transfer the power of the upper arm to the keys themselves, but do not initiate the movements. This concept may not be easy to understand just from reading about it. You need to experience it yourself, and you will probably need a teacher who can guide you in order to change to this type of technique.

Please don't subscribe to the "no pain, no gain" philosophy when it comes to the piano. Having pain is the signal to you that something is wrong and needs to be changed.