Alexander Technique: Arm Use
So many pianists struggle with pain and injury. While there are many possible causes, I’ve found one to be prevalent in the students I’ve taught: they cut off the support of the larger muscles and rely too much on the small muscles of the hands, wrists, and forearms.
Students who are new to note reading tend to hyperfocus on each note, causing them to rely too much on their fingers. You may see this with your own students. When I used to work with young students, we talked about using their arms to help. The marionette puppet hanging on my door was a useful tool for many of them!
But even as beginners progress into the intermediate level, the habit of overusing the fingers can stay with them, even if they’ve become good readers. Repeated overuse of those small muscles will cause them to tire, weaken, and become more prone to injury.
By the time we get to university, it’s likely that someone has taught us to use our arms in some way, but we may not have learned to use our arms efficiently, as parts of a whole system. Alexander Technique offers us a way to do this.
The large muscles of our back are meant to support our arms, yet so often pianists integrate arm weight into the neck and shoulders instead. I have vivid memories of myself and my peers in college clutching one shoulder or the other while we took breaks from practicing in the hallway! Now I know that we were taking arm weight into the upper trapezius rather than allowing the whole back to support the arms.
The following video illustrates a simple practice that helps us access the back muscles to support our arms. It’s a brief exercise that you can do yourself and with your students.
Now that you’ve practiced integrating arm weight into the whole back, you can connect from the back all the way to your fingers. The video below offers a brief warmup to mentally connect our back muscles through the arms to our hands. It’s a great exercise to practice with your students to remind them of the connection of the arms to the back, and to bring that connection all the way to their fingers.
The way we think is the way we move, so if we practice exercises like these and learn to connect to our back muscles, we’ll be able to access them while we play. Then they can support our arms and we won’t feel the need to overuse our hands.
Pianists have varied ideas about technique, but most of us can agree that it can be tiring to have our arms out in front of us for long periods of time. The ideas in this article are simply meant to help support your arms, which shouldn’t conflict with your technique in any way. In fact, it should allow your technique to function even more effectively.
If you’d like to learn more about how Alexander Technique can inform your piano playing and teaching, download our free PDF to get started!