Piano Pain-Prevention Tips

By Howard Richman

Simple changes in keyboard technique will prevent injury for keyboard players. These helpful free tips are offered from Sound Feelings. If your piano playing is not pain-free, constant, automatic and effortless, you are doing something wrong. This free information explains how-to improve biomechanical efficiency, relaxation, avoid tension by making a few small changes to your approach to the instrument. These suggestions provide necessary injury-retraining support to performing arts medicine treatments to insure that the pain will not return.

Pain-Free Playing Should Be Effortless.

Pain-free playing should be constant, automatic and effortless. Unfortunately, the way piano is often taught, pain-free playing becomes rare, deliberate and difficult. There are many reasons why this is so.

Combining Two Methods Offers Greatest Advantage.

I feel grateful that my own training included top teachers of both the “Russian School” and the “German School” of piano technique. Generally, the Russian School teaches how to play with gravity and relaxation. The German School teaches how to play with hand placement and fingering efficiency. There are other piano “schools” but these are usually just a combination of the two main ones described above. Each approach has good and bad aspects. In my own playing and teaching, I have incorporated the good aspects of each and have discarded the bad. The result is a blueprint for biomechanical efficiency.

Strive for Preparation and Relaxation.

Essentially, pain-free keyboard playing depends on two primary elements: 1) preparation and 2) relaxation. People who strictly follow the German approach are great at preparation of the hand position, playing close to the keys, but neglect to relax the hand at regular intervals. The problem is that tension builds up and leads to injuries. People who strictly follow the Russian approach are initially great at relaxation, but often make many mistakes because their hands simply are not prepared, being further from the keys. This indirectly leads to anxiety and tension in the long run, which also leads to pain and injury.

Learn the B Scale First!

From the beginning of piano training a mistake is often made. Most teachers teach the C major scale on the very first lesson. It is true that this scale is the easiest on an intellectual level because of the absence of accidentals. However, it is actually the hardest to play from a physical standpoint because the distance the thumb must cross from ‘E’ to ‘F’ is much greater than its counterpart in the B scale (which I like to teach first.) This is setting the student up for a lifetime of bad habits because it encourages the very worst qualities from both schools. Right from the beginning, the student learns how to angle the hand to position the thumb, instead of crossing the thumb under a non-moving hand. Also, with the obligatory “curved fingers,” there is absolutely no room for acquiring a natural sense of relaxation. It would be better to first teach thumb-stretching and hand-relaxation drills.

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