This Problem I Have

Hi all, so here is my problem right now. Right forearm muscles get tense. But!!! I know what you're thinking: wrong movement, no arch, no arm weight/balance, etc, etc, all the usual stuff... BUT! Here's the caveat: I have reasons to suspect that it's totally mental this time. Why? Well, I was bored the other day somewhere and I tried to imagine in my head myself playing on the piano - boom! Got my right forearm tense. No actual keys! Hey, the thing is: I already did get my movements nice, free and "archy" a while ago, and I've been playing freely for a while... until recently the right forearm started to annoy me out of the blue. To further prove to you that it's not simply a question of incorrect/correct movement, think about this - I just did this little test - away from the piano, I tried wiggling my fingers of BOTH hands randomly, not even thinking about the piano, just do some rapid haphazard movement - and boom again! - right forearm is tense, left forearm o.k. even though the movements were the same. How to get rid of it?? anyone? Even writing with a pencil or washing dishes is becoming annoying (I'm right-handed) because right forearm muscles tense up for no reason. And it's not even the obvious kind of tensing up - like the one you get in the gym doing actual forearm weights - no, it's somewhere deep inside and its small muscles, so it's freaking hard for me to give signal to relax. Left hand is totally awesome though. Damn!!

It sounds like you enetered a certain vicious cycle - you are afraid of the right forearm tensing, and this anxiety actually make it more tense. To break this cycle you need to do something different. I would suggest that you try this: 1) Play something with your right hand (or just imagine that you play). 2) Rate the forearm tension on a scale from 1 to 10. 3) Now try to play again and try to intentionally tense those same muscles even MORE. so if you had a tension level of 6, try to get to 8 this time, or even 10. 4) Now try playing agian and don't try to intentionally increase or decrease the tension. Just listen to your body and rate the tension again. I hope that eventually you will learn how to vary the degree of the tension and eventually reduce it to minimum. Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong about the cause of your tension and my proposed solution, my advice is just an idea that came to my mind as I was reading your post - it is not based on any actual experience. Still, I think it is worth a try. Zack

A valid possibility, Zack! But let me explain it a differently. Sometimes the neuromotor system learns a response and then generalizes it, applying it in cases even when it's not needed. It's not your anxiety about playing, I suspect it is a simple neuromotor mechanism having nothing to do with conscious thought actually. You were playing piano and somehow stressed those muscles out; they responded with tension. Now they respond in kind even when the initial tension-generating stress isn't present. How smart our neuromotor systems are! I would try to figure out the functional anomaly that caused the initial tension, the one to which your nervous system created a real and appropriate response. Then I would try to create the most elegant and effective possible 'functional antidote' to this anomalous action you did. If you do this 'functional antidote' really slowly, gently and sensitively, it should really evoke an 'alternate reality' in your nervous system, a tension-free one. I will be very curious to hear how it goes! AFF

This is a very out there kind of guess but through my practice I've noticed that when one hand/arm gains a new level of coordination aka greater technique...the opposite left hand/arm may start to get tense. In these situations I've found that the solution is to improve the technique of this opposite hand (whichever it may be at the time). Hope that makes some sort of sense. Oh also, maybe you are getting too focused on the fact that when you imagine playing you get tense. Imaging play and actually are pretty much the same thing. Alan, did anything I say make sense?

This is a very out there kind of guess but through my practice I've noticed that when one hand/arm gains a new level of coordination aka greater technique...the opposite left hand/arm may start to get tense. In these situations I've found that the solution is to improve the technique of this opposite hand (whichever it may be at the time). Imagining playing and actually playing are pretty much the same thing. Alan, did anything I say make sense? Yes indeed you make a lot of sense! When you imagine playing, fully 80% of the neuromotor activity of actual playing takes place. That means only 20% of the brain activity of playing is absent when you imagine. When one arm improves and the other gets tense, it may have been just as tense before but you may not have noticed. Now the improvement of the other arm brings the dysfunction of this one into clearer focus. And yes your solution is right on. The way to resolve this is through deep FI (Functional Integration)-style work that removes the focus from the 'problem' and focuses on improving the functioning of the whole mechanism. Believe it or not, I recently had success in this kind of work via Skype, working with a woman over 2000 miles and an ocean away! See my latest blog, oh shoot, I posted it on Feldyforum and not my blog... Let me go see if I can find it... AFF