As musicians, we often spend quite a few hours of each day practicing with our instruments. During this time, we might forget, or not even realize, that we are not maintaining the correct body posture which could help prevent injury. For me personally, when I get into the groove of what I am playing on the guitar, I don't have a care in the world other than the music. I've picked up some bad habits over the years, including holding my wrists in an awkward position, and hunching over while I play. And I ended up paying the price for such laziness.
A couple of
years ago, I began to experience serious wrist pain in my left hand region, and
as I also spend a lot of time working in front of the computer, I originally
blamed the computer keyboard I was using at work. But as I thought more about it, and paid more
attention to the way in which I was using my keyboard at the office, I noticed
that both of my hands were in the right position. This, along with the fact that my right hand
wrist felt perfectly fine, let me to believe that something else must be the
cause of the pain which I was experiencing in my left wrist.
The pain was
at its most severe whenever I was playing the guitar, so it didn't take long to
put two and two together, and realize that it was the way in which I was
holding the instrument that was the cause of my suffering. So I began to read up more on ergonomics for
musicians, and was amazed that there is so much which has been written on the
subject. Not only that, but there are
some great Youtube videos out there about it as well. For example, here is a great one of the owner
of Peekamoose Custom Guitars talking about how you don't want to be pressing
your fingers too hard on the guitar strings all the time. Instead, you want a guitar with a nice fret
board where you barely have to press down at all to get the sound that you
want.
This indeed
makes a lot of sense, so when you are picking out a guitar to buy, you ought to
keep that in mind. Choosing a guitar
that is very easy on your fingertips can make a world of difference in
preventing wrist pain further on down the road.
In my case, I realized that I didn't even need to press down as hard as
I was on my strings, and that I have just developed the habit of doing so. Just easing up a bit, I realized that I could
still get just as good of a sound, and noticed a gradual improvement in the
wrist pain I'd been experiencing.
So it is
indeed very important to learn about ergonomics in relation to your musical
instrument. I will be talking about this
more another time, as I would like to go into more detail on the proper posture
to have while playing the guitar, or other instruments out there.
