Shoulder/neck Pain

Dear Alan First of all may I congratulate you on a fine DVD. I am a teacher over in the UK but still do a lot of playing, however, it has become impossible recently due to pain/irritation in my right shoulder and up into my neck. I am so frustrated as whatever i try to do to correct it, play with a looser feeling, loose arms etc, it seems to not improve but worsen. I studied at music college for 4 years but never had the problem then! Do you have any idea on why this is happening and any possible remedies. I guess total rest may be one? If you are ever over in the UK I would be very interested on having a lesson. Andrew Palmer

Hello Andrew, thanks for your kind words. I get to the UK less and less often these days but will let you know when something comes up. As for your pain, generally that kind of pain results from structural weakness in the hand. The over contraction in the shoulder and neck is trying to compensate for something the hand should be doing but isn't. Try to begin to sense the connection between these two areas. Try some of my exercises to improve the hand's structural function, and see if you can detect a resulting change in sensation around the neck and shoulder. Depending on where you live, there might be a Feldenkrais practitioner nearby who could help relieve the immediate aggravation and also help in developing the kind of sensitivity I talk about above... Good luck and let me know what happens! AFF

Dear Alan First of all may I congratulate you on a fine DVD. I am a teacher over in the UK but still do a lot of playing, however, it has become impossible recently due to pain/irritation in my right shoulder and up into my neck. I am so frustrated as whatever i try to do to correct it, play with a looser feeling, loose arms etc, it seems to not improve but worsen. I studied at music college for 4 years but never had the problem then! Do you have any idea on why this is happening and any possible remedies. I guess total rest may be one? If you are ever over in the UK I would be very interested on having a lesson. Andrew Palmer Hey, is that Andy who used to go to the Conservatoire in Birmingham? Sorry to hear that it's got that bad. I'm certainly no master of technique still, but I've made a huge improvement since I first started to grip the keys using the final joints of my fingers. It was only last Christmas that I first started to use those muscles at all- instead of getting the solidity by locking the arm. In the past my upper body used to get tired very quickly. Since I got my hands working, I've often been doing 4-6 hours a day though but my shoulders and neck have felt fine. I'd tried overholding and overlapping exercises before, but it's only since I started to grip the keys properly, that my hand has started to become supportive enough for me to relax further back. I'd made progress from aspects of the book before, but it was only after I began gripping more consistently at the key itself that a a large number of the ideas started to fall into place and make a big difference. One thing I'd always done was to think in terms of slackening the hand, to 'relax' after having struck a chord. I'm sure now that it was actually just placing a big workload on my shoulders, as soon as the hand stopped supporting. I sometimes wonder if I'm in danger of overgripping a little at times, but I'm no longer thinking in terms of tension and release but more in terms of finding a balanced level of hand grip that's not severe enough that you would need to relax from it. I'm certainly no Alan Fraser, but if you're interested I could show you some of the exercises that have helped me the most over the past few months. I've been doing loads of ultra-slow practise on overholding while listening to podcasts- to avoid making it too unbearable to endure such slow work. It's already made more of a difference than I would have thought possible. The only place where I tend to feel any tiredness these days is in my hands themselves, now that I'm starting to involve the muscles for the first time. In the simplest terms, I think the big difference is that I've finally found out how to rest upon my fingers, rather than 'hold' my arms over the keys. Andrew

This is a great description of one possible line of work to relieve shoulder tension. Everything Andrew is doing activates his hand, making it more potent and capable, and relieveing the shoulders of a job that wasn't theirs to begin with. Although I don't have any pain problems, as I refine my own playing ever further (there's no limit to improvement), I discover ever more clearly these hand-neck-shoulder connections and how refining the alignment and function of my hand to even more precise levels offers an even deeper release 'up above.' But remember, although this may be a great solution for the majority of pianists, it is not necessarily so for all. I have come across pianists whose hands were so locked into a chronic gripping pattern that further gripping would only worsen the problem. The opposite approach, loosening the hand and releasing it from that habitual state of contraction, sometimes for an extended period of time, was needed prior to activating the grasping function in an empowering way. There was even a case earlier on where I hadn't realized this, and encouraged the pianist to grip, with the result that she got a pretty bad case of golfer's elbow. This has now resolved itself but there's an important lesson to be learned: BE CAREFUL! AFF