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Repetitive Strain Injuries - What We Can Learn From Musicians

© Robert Rickover

Before I became an Alexander Technique teacher, I assumed that the most impressive physical activities were performed by professional athletes. Their feats were regularly reported in the newspapers and on TV and radio and discussed by my friends and colleagues. So too were the all too frequent injuries that kept them out of play.

When I began my teaching practice, my studio was located a few blocks from Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto School of Music. From the very start of my teaching, almost half of my students were musicians. They came complaining of neck and shoulder pain, tense necks, back pain and a host of other stress-related ailments.

It quickly became apparent to me that these students had chosen a career that posed extreme physical challenges. I heard horror stories of promising musicians who were forced to give up music because their bodies just wouldn't cooperate: violists who would wake up one morning with absolutely no ability to move their bowing arm, singers whose voice would give out half way into a concert.

Less dramatic - but of equal concern - were the frequent tales of musicians who played in a more or less constant state of pain.

Since the widespread introduction of computer monitors and keyboards at work in recent years, terms like "repetitive stress injury" and "carpal tunnel syndrome" have entered our vocabulary.

But musicians have been dealing with these sorts of disabilities for generations. Consider the act of playing a violin. Professional violists, for example, typically practice for several hours a day, during which time their bowing arm moves through its range of movement thousands of times. And not just simple up and down movements, but movements that need to be very precise. Then they may have a two hour performance (in some cases TWO such performances - musicians playing in musicals, for example).

Add to that the stress of playing before an audience, sometimes in very uncomfortable chairs and cramped conditions and often having to share a music stand with another musician who may be much shorter or much taller so that the height of the stand has to be a compromise for both.

And as if that were not enough, there is also the pressure of working in a very competitive field where the quality of one's performance is right out there for everyone to hear and judge. If a musician makes a mistake, he or she can't just go back and fix it.