Can Ergonomics Actually Improve Your Guitar Technique?

The first thing guitar teacher and author Jaimie Andreas said to me was, “I don’t think there's more fertile ground for reducing RSIs than the guitar.” Jaimie had been teaching guitar in Las Vegas for 30 years before she developed the system described in her book The Principles Of Correct Practice For Guitar. In her own playing, she asked herself what prevents me from being the best musician I can be? Then find ways to make that easier. She soon found how she held micro tensions in her body that were barriers not only to her technique, but also to her musicality. She noticed the same pattern in her students: each had been playing for years and yet was still below their level. So Jaime went back to the drawing board.

Guitar pedagogy has always begun with the first fret, where your arm is maximally extended.  “No beginner can do that without tensing their entire body,” says Jaimie. The muscle memory of that first lesson gets programmed into the body, preventing the player from getting better. Yet the only reason to start with the first fret is because of the logic of the instrument, not the body. Jaimie now begins with just sitting and holding the guitar instead.

But Jaimie adds, “emphasizing relaxation is a mistake, it's not some flaccid state where you’re dead.” Jaimie describes playing guitar like being a tight ropewalker. You press on the string, the string presses back and you hold that tension until the next note. That requires a balance of forces. “It's truer with the guitar than any other instrument.”

Our muscles work the same way and when this balance of tension goes awry it turns into RSIs such as carpal tunnel syndrome or focal dystonia in musicians. From my experience, it's also by working with this tension that you can begin to tease out the problem of chronic muscle contractions. Teaching students to pay attention to this tension isn’t as easy as it sounds. It depends on a lot of non-physical factors. Desire, she finds, is as important as awareness. We generally withdraw our attention from any discomfort we feel, so to pay attention to this unease is counter-intuitive. Jaimie makes her students sit with their tension, to get to know that tension, and then it melts. With the newfound ease, players find their technique improves, as well as their musicality.

Jaime is now working on another book, The Yoga of Guitar, about the union of body, guitar and music. You can learn more from her website at http://www.guitarprinciples.com.

@JillGambaro is the author of The Truth About Carpal Tunnel Syndrome . She advocates healthy playing for musicians through her Blog, Facebook and Twitter. Look for her upcoming documentary Icky Fingers.