Journal · Technique
On hand injuries, hidden tension, and the one spot that tells you the truth — the difference between a long playing life and a forced vacation from it.
There is one spot in the hand that never lies about tension. Learn to keep it soft, and you buy yourself years of playing.
One of the things musicians fear most is injury. Tendinitis, an inflamed joint, a tendon that will not settle — and with it the worst part: a forced vacation from playing, for a length of time nobody can tell you. It might be a week. It might be a month. It might be three years. You simply do not know, and that not-knowing is its own kind of torment. I have seen all of it in students over the years, and I have lived through it myself, more than once or twice. It is horrible, and it is frustrating — and most of it is avoidable.
Almost all of these injuries come from the same place: repetitive motion performed with muscles and tendons that are not relaxed. Not the repetition alone — we repeat motions all day without harm — but repetition married to stiffness. That combination, over enough hours, is what quietly breaks a hand down.
Over the years I found something that changed how I play and how I teach. There is an area in the hand that reports, with real precision, whether there is stiffness anywhere — in the wrist, the fingers, the forearm. It never lies. It is the palm itself.
Try it now. Let your hand relax completely — rest it on your thigh, or just let it hang at your side. Now feel the palm from the inside: the fingers, the flesh, even the skin. You will notice a particular softness there. Hold on to that feeling. Now stiffen your forearm and feel the palm again — the softness is gone, because the wrist has locked. Let go, find the softness, and this time stiffen only your thumb. Gone again. Every locking of every muscle in the chain — all the way up to the shoulder — registers in the palm. Whatever tension you are holding, anywhere in the arm, the palm shows it back to you.
The palm is a mirror — whatever tension you hold, anywhere in the arm, it shows you back.
So here is the whole practice: keep that softness in the palm while you play. Every technique, every stroke, every roll — return to it, check it, protect it. At first you will lose it constantly; that is fine, just keep coming back. And as you learn to hold it, something opens. Air starts to enter your technique. Your speed improves almost on its own, because the stiffness that was capping it is gone. And the pain and the injuries — the forced vacations — begin to fade.
A soft palm is not a finishing touch. It is how you get to keep playing for the rest of your life.
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