Tag Archives: compensatory movements

Yoga for Guitar Players

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This is an article I wrote last year for my friend, Josh Sager’s kick-ass guitar blog, Fretterverse.  I hope my Warrior Fitness readers enjoy it as well!

 Every guitar player knows that consistent practice is the key to becoming great.  But what happens when your daily practice is causing you daily aches and pains?  Give up?  No way.  Scale back your practice?  Not a chance.  Live with it?  Some do.  You shouldn’t have to.

Every activity that we repeat consistently causes an adaptation in the body.  The critical thing to note here is that it does not matter at all how we value this adaptation.  It can be something that we want like how healthy exercise increases lean muscle mass and burns excess fat, or it can be something we do not want like how eating junk food to an extreme causes our body to adapt by putting on weight.  Both of these are examples of activities that cause adaptations in the body.  Sitting and playing guitar for extended periods of time also causes specific adaptations in the body.  Some we value highly, like the enhanced neural connections in our nervous system that adapt to increase our skill level.  Others, like hunching over a classical guitar for example, may cause our body to adopt this rounded back, slumped shoulders posture while standing and performing activities other than practicing guitar.  In order to bring our bodies back to balance, while retaining the adaptations we value, ie the skill in playing that our practice is supposed to generate, we must compensate specifically for the typical posture used while shredding.

Yoga is designed to bring your body back to balance.   Don’t worry, I’m not about to ask you to jump into a Power Yoga class.  Not unless you want to, anyway.  What I am going to have you do is take about 10 minutes after your practice and use just a few simple yoga postures (illustrated below) to help bring your body back to balance and prevent, or relieve, the back and neck pain that tend to be associated with long term sitting, whether due to working on a computer, sitting in an office, or sitting while practicing guitar.  An added benefit is that we will also open up your chest and lungs to improve your breathing pattern and help reduce stress.

Note in the picture above how his back is rounded and his head looking down.  Over time, this will contribute to low back pain, neck pain, and hunched, rounded shoulders.  His posture is not optimal for breathing either.  The effect of rounding the back concaves the chest and compresses the lungs making it difficult to achieve a full, deep breath.

Postures

1.  Shoulder bridge

  • Lay on your back and bend your knees
  • Pull your heels in as close to your butt as possible
  • Exhale and lift your hips up, driving with the middle part of your feet
  • Squeeze your glutes and lift a little higher
  • Exhale and pull your belly to your spine
  • Hold for 20 to 30 seconds
  • Relax for a few breaths and then do it again
  • Bring your knees into your chest and squeeze them tight to release any excess tension
  • Straighten out your legs and then move onto the next posture

2.  Upward Facing Dog

  • From the end position of the last posture, laying on your back, roll over onto your stomach
  • Lift from the crown of your head and drive with the palm heels
  • Make sure your elbow pits are facing forward
  • Drop your shoulder down, so they are not up by your ears
  • Lift your hips and legs off the ground
  • Inhale, expanding the chest, lifting it up at a 45 degree angle
  • Hold for 20 to 30 seconds
  • Lay down flat on your stomach and rest for a few breaths
  • Repeat and then finish by moving into Sleeping Warrior

3.  Sleeping Warrior

  • From a kneeling position, exhale and pull your belly to your spine.
  • Fold your torso forward over your knees and place your forehead on the ground.
  • Extend your arms straight out in front of you.
  • As you extend and reach with the hands, draw the shoulder blades down so they are not coming out of joint.
  • Continue to extend and pull back to stretch and release the tension stored in your shoulders.
  • As you inhale, you will find it difficult to expand the abdomen and the chest due to the compression.  Try to find the free spaces on the sides and back where you can inhale into and expand slightly.
  • As you exhale, again pull belly to spine and contract your core moving deeper into the posture.

What About My Hands?

Although the following are not particularly yoga exercises, they can be of benefit to guitar player’s hands.  The repetitive motion of strumming and chord changing can cause problems similar to the repetitive keyboard typing of the desk jockey and thus special attention needs to be paid to the hands, wrists, and fingers.

Releasing the Wrists

  • Hold both hands in loose fists, make circles clockwise for 5 to 10 reps and counter-clockwise for 5 to 10 reps
  • Next, starting with left wrist, hold in fist as above, lift wrist up, to the outside, down, to the inside, reverse direction and repeat with right wrist for 5 to 10 reps each direction

Releasing the Fingers

  • Begin circling fingers with thumbs (5 times each) then continue with each additional finger
  • Circle fingers from pinkies back to the thumbs in the opposite direction

Shaking the Hands

  • Shake the hands vigorously keeping them very loose for about 10 to 20 seconds.  This has the effect of releasing residual tonus and relaxing the muscles.

The above exercises, if performed consistently, will act as compensation for long periods of sitting and help you to abate any type of chronic muscle tension and pain that comes as a result of your practice.  There are, of course, many other yoga postures that can be utilized with the same type of success to help compensate for any type of activity, including inactivity!  Hopefully this brief introduction on yoga for guitar players will enable you to practice longer and pain free – shred on!

About the Author:  Jon Haas is a NJ based fitness trainer, writer, and martial artist.  He can be reached at www.warriorfitness.org

Your Keys to Progress

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How many people do you know who rarely, if ever, get the results they are seeking from their exercise regimen?  You may be one of them!  The question is, why don’t you (they) get results?  These people may be “exercise nuts” or “gym rats” or even “exer-holics”, or they could just be fascinated with the idea of exercise, but never actually doing any.  The four points below summarize what I feel to be the most important keys to progress when it comes to getting results and achieving your health and fitness goals, whatever they may be.

1.  Joint mobility on a daily basis. 

Daily joint mobility is a requirement to keep your progress moving forward.  Not only does it provide nutrition and lubrication for every joint in your body, but it also aids in removing waste products and deposits that tend to form over time causing pain.  The mobility increases our range of motion and acts as a prehab for enabling us to avoid injuries.  Additionally, it is an excellent way to warm-up the body prior to exercise or to get ready for the day first thing in the morning by increasing local blood flow to muscles.

2.  Yoga asana as compensatory movement for post-exercise cool down work. 

Since every action we do, as in exercise, or don’t do, as in couch sitting, causes an adaptation in our body, movements need to be specifically unloaded to bring us back into balance.  Compensatory movements remove tension caused by exercise and leaving us with the beneficial effects.  These movements are generally used as a cool down right after exercise or as a low impact recovery workout in and of themselves.  The selection of yoga asana (postures) has to be paired with each exercise performed as the complementary functional opposite of the movement to have the maximum desired effect.  By effectively integrating compensatory movements into your program, you can accelerate your progress, avoid injury, and keep moving forward.

3.  An incremental approach. 

Incremental progression is what keeps us from doing too much too soon and causing an injury.  Often we find that our bravado outweighs our brain when it comes to exercises, especially in the beginning.  We tend to want to jump right into the deep end in order to “get results faster”, but often end up injured, exhausted, or both with this approach and are unable to sustain the effort.  Health is about the long haul, not the short term effort.  If your program is unsustainable then it really has no value nor will it aid you in achieving your goals. 

4.  A plan sewing together all of the above. 

Having a plan is what brings all the prior elements together in cohesive, useable manner.  There is a tendency among some people out there to avoid having a program and to simply do the type of exercise they feel like on a particular day.  They also change the selection constantly in order to avoid boredom or so they can be “ready for anything”.  On the surface, this seems logical, but in reality unpredictable exercise selection simply leads to unpredictable results.  That’s no way to make progress.