Recently my son started to practice Tai Chi – an internal Chinese martial art that is often practiced for health reasons. Tai Chi is originally a sophisticated martial art in which you learn to control and relax your mind and your body and to win over the hard with softness this way. It is not really about fighting these days but rather about practicing ultimate principles that enable you to reach a certain state of body and mind in which you can do unbelievable things, fighting is just one of these.

I find that applying the very same techniques and principles to guitar playing makes a lot of sense. Maybe it is not ideal for all music styles but surely for the Mark Knopfler style. It even seems to me that it is not possible to play this way without these principles. So what are these principles in detail and how do they refer to playing the guitar for this style?

Relaxation

One key element is relaxation. The whole body should be as relaxed as possible. And the mind, too. Your muscles become loose which allows extremely fast movements. If you want to play fast guitar licks this will not work with hard and cramped muscles – at least it will not sound the way you want it to, and playing with a lot of muscle tension will get you in trouble like becoming RSI.

Concentration

A relaxed mind allows you to concentrate. In return, keeping up a high level of concentration will reduce your muscle tension. After some time doing so the mind becomes extremely calm and clear. It should be no question how this will benefit for playing ultra-accurate, percussive rhythms or super-fluid casual licks like Mark Knopfler is famous for.

Yin and yang

You might have heard about these: the contrast behind all aspects of life that is the cause of all changes and all movements. It is an easy but at the same time very complex philosophy. In short: nothing can exist without its counterpart, without the opposite. Applying to music and guitar playing would mean for example to leave adequate pauses between the notes you play, or contrasting loud notes  with very soft,  low  notes  (just listen to the legendary first solo of Sultans of Swing). Everything in a perfect guitar solo must be in harmony with everything else, everything must be balanced. Bass notes require a contrast of treble notes,  short staccato licks should be contrasted with sustaining singing notes, and so on. I think you get the idea.

While these were really ultimate principles, the next ones are rather concrete details:

Body posture

The body can only reach its full potential when all parts of the body are exactly in the position they are really meant to be. Only this way relaxation is possible. This means the spine should be almost straight with only minimal pressure on your intervertebral discs. The shoulder must be relaxed. If you keep them slightly lifted (like we almost all do most of the time), your arm muscles cannot operate properly. All false positions of any body parts will block the flow of energy through your body.

Breathing

The breath should be deep and even. Try to “breathe into your belly”, not into your chest. Especially try to avoid holding the breath while playing, and to inhale quickly in breaks between licks. Ideally breathing should be natural and not be interrupted when trying to do something comlicated, like playing a special riff or lick. Probably you never payed attention to this aspect. Watch yourself and find out what you do under which circumstances.

Practicing slowly

In Tai Chi complex movements (which are normally whole-body movements) are practised extremly slow – like in slow motion. This way you will become aware of any wrong details like a too high muscle tension, lifted shoulders, or anything else that does not feel perfect. Do the same when practicing guitar: slow it down extremely and try to pay attention to **all details at the same time** – something you are noromally not able to when doing the same thing at a higher speed.

I am convinced that applying these rules will help you a lot to become a better guitar playing – it is not possible to overcome certain limits without them. And what seems to work for fighting or guitar playing also will work for nearly all things in our lives. So applying these principles for all things in life makes a lot of sense – you will not only be able to do things you cannot do otherwise, you will also feel much better and happier. And what can be more important than this?

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2
• How to avoid RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome, wrist pain etc. when playing guitar extensively (part 1)
• Zen and the art of playing the guitar

In the first article on this subject I explained what RSI is and where it results from. This second article should focus on what you can do to overcome it in case you already have problems.

Since I am not a medical doctor and do neither work in this field, I might not be competent to write about such a complex thing. For this reason everything I recommend must be “on your own risk”. Besides, everyone is different, so what worked for me might not be the right thing for you. Nevertheless, some years ago I had myself some problems with RSI, but I found help and some good ideas about it. Consequently I got rid of it rather quickly.

So, what exactly happened? At that time I was working self-employed and spent all my work time at the computer: typing and mouse clicking all day long. And after work I played guitar, which of course put more stress upon my arm muscles. One day I got a sharp pain in my right forearm, even when doing simple things like mouse-clicking, not to mention picking a guitar string. I thought it was better to stop with it for that day, but it was not better the next, and neither the day after. When I finally went to a doctor, it had become even worse, a constant pain in my arm.

What did the doctor say? He said it came from working too much, I should make a break for some time, and he prescribed some pills to reduce the pain and the inflammation, but these had a lot of unwanted side effects, which was why I was reluctant to take them (besides I never ever take pills). Not working meant no money by the way, and stopping guitar playing was a nightmare anyway, and for how long? A horror scenario.

I consulted  a second doctor, and he did and said completely different things than the first (!?). He said a tendon on the upper side of my arm was inflamed and even bounces with a little click when doing certain movements. Hmm, didn’t I tell him that I have pain mainly on the inner side of my forearam, and not on the upper side? Do they never listen? He gave me some injections – at least with a homeopathic medicament. And he prescribed some massages. He emphasized that I had to go to a particular masseur who would be the best for some reason.
I couldn’t get an appointment there before a couple of days later, so I had the next appointment at that doctor’s (for some more of these injections) before I had a chance to get the massages. I remember that the first thing the doctor asked was if I had already been to the masseur and what was his opinion about my pain – which sounded like a rather strange question to me because HE was the doctor, and a masseur, well, just massages, I thought.

The reason for pain – contracted muscles

The next day I had my first appointment for the massages. The masseur said he first had to examine my arm, and he also asked what *exactly* lead to the problems (something the doctors did not want to know). After this examination he told me that I had overused my flexor muscles, while my extension muscles were too weak. For this reason the balance between flexion and extension was disturbed, as a result my flexor muscles remained in a slightly contracted or even cramped state. The contracted muscles in the forearm lead to more tension on the tendons, which means more friction at the joints, and this is the reason for the inflammation. The pain in your wrist is a direct result of a problem somewhere else, it is simply that the tendons and joints are the weakest link in the chain and thus more susceptible for pain and inflammation.

He ‘showed’ me these contracted muscles – which means he pushed on them which resulted in a typical dull pain. This problem was not restricted to my aching forearm, there were contracted muscles also in my upper arm and at the base of the thumb in my palm (and basically all over my whole body as well, see below).

This was at least some logical explanation (remember, the doctors did not explain anything at all). Within the next sessions he also pointed out to me that such a disbalance results to more disbalance, even at distant locations of the body: it changes the position of the shoulders, which again has an effect on the back and the neck, this again leads to a different body posture, which again means you are standing differently, and so on. See the body as a physical model of your skeleton, and your muscles as springs that are attached to the bones. As long all muscle tensions are balanced, everything is alright, but as soon as only one single muscle has an increased tension, all other muscles – or springs in this model – change their position a little bit to compensate the changed forces.

What to do against contracted muscles?

The remedy was easy: moving the arm. I simply had to move it as much as possible, in all directions, every muscle of the arm should be moving. By the way, this was the opposite of what the doctor ordered: he said I should rest my arm in a slope  – which I first did, but when this did not help and I felt I could’n stand it anymore, I ended this therapy. It gave me a bad feel and the pain got even worse.

The important thing about moving the arm is not to use any force, moving without the smallest hint of force. This is because the muscles are often even cramped, and it doesn’t make sense to pull on the cramped muscle, you rather had to let go instead of ‘doing’ something. It is similar to That Chi, the ancient Chinese art of moving (basically of fighting, but you are doing fighting movements in slow motion so to say). Here the key is also to reduce muscle tension (which enables you to move as fast as a lightning in a combat).

The second thing was stretching: with the help of some exercises the contracted muscles were carefully stretched, but again, it is important to release the muscle tension.

And thirdly, the antagonist muscles (those used for extension) had to be strengthened, again with some exercises.

In my case my arm was better very soon, and the pain never came back up to today – seven years later. I admit I did not really do much of the strengthening exercises, it was rather the idea of moving the arm without any force which loosened the cramps it seems.

I also got two Qigong balls – two iron balls of about 1.5″ diameter which you simply circulate around each other in your palm. This flow-like motion of all your finger joints made the hand muscles feel much smoother again – and they cost just a few dollars.

After this experience I was much more sensitized for such muscle contractions, and I suddenly managed to feel them at many places of my body. I did the same, moving these areas without any force. I even tried out That Chi and Qigong exercises, and they had a wonderful effect. Besides playing guitar, another hobby of mine is playing football (=soccer), and suddenly it happend that I could play like never before in my life. I was in a ‘total flow’, and also mentally never felt better.

I might cover some more details – like the stretching exercises – in a coming part of this article series.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• How to avoid RSI, carpal tunnel syndrome, wrist pain etc. when playing guitar extensively (part 1)
• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• The Tai Chi of guitar playing
• Guitar refinishing – nitro vs poly and how to remove a polyester finish
• Recommended artist: Chris Rea – some rare video clips

RSI – the nightmare of musicians, even a Mark Knopfler got RSI problems on a tour a few years ago.

RSI is a relatively new expression for a relatively new kind of health problem. RSI stands for ‘repetetive strain injury’, which means “any of a loose group of conditions resulting from overuse of a tool, such as a computer keyboard or musical instrument or other activity that requires repeated movements. It is a syndrome that affects muscles, tendons and nerves in the hands, arms and upper back.” (from Wikipedia)

Repeated movements are nothing really new, I guess a smith did repeated movements quite a lot when hammering on a piece of steel, even hundreds of years ago. I think the reason why a smith can do so without big trouble is that these movements require a lot of strength which comes from groups of rather big muscles. Muscles can be trained, and in a way they like it to work because this is what they were made for.

What however seems new to me are repeated movements that don’t require much force but a rather subtle control of small muscles. A good example might be clicking your computer mouse. Have you ever asked yourself how many clicks you might do when working or playing on the computer for some hours? Clicking once in a few seconds seems realistic to me, so let’s say there are maybe 6 clicks a minute, which means 360 per hour, or maybe about 1,500 when you spend some hours on a late night computer session (and we haven’t even talked about double-clicks yet).

And here exactly is the problem, going 1,500 steps is probably no problem for man, but our body is not designed to move one single finger a few thousand times within a short time.

What exactly happens to our body when overusing single muscles? Since muscles can only do one particular action, which is to contract (they cannot ‘push’, for these opposite movements we have a coresponding  antagonist muscle), overuse results in a contracted muscle state, in other words, the muscle does not relax to its full length after the job but remains slightly contracted – or cramped, a bit shorter than it was before. This contraction disturbs the balance of different muscles, and as our body is an ultra-complex system which means everything works together in some way, other parts of the body can become effected as a consequence, e.g. a contracted muscle causes a higher tension on the tendons, and this leads to a higher friction which results in a possible inflammation, and so on.

Nevertheless, there are people who work on the PC or play guitar all day without getting these problems, while others do.

And this is my message: there is hope – it is not an unavoidable problem, even if you decide to do nothing  but playing guitar all day long. I am convinced that the real problem is not the repetetive movement itself, but the way we use our body and our mind ( !! ) while doing these movements. More details and what this means exactly will be covered in one (or more) of the next article(s), also what to do for prevention or as a therapy to recover. Stay tuned.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2
• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• The Tai Chi of guitar playing
• Guitar refinishing – nitro vs poly and how to remove a polyester finish
• Recommended artist: Chris Rea – some rare video clips