Avoid Injuries with Body Mapping
Perhaps you don’t understand your body as well as you think. The way you hold your guitar or press the keys on the keyboard is simply a matter of habit. You never thought much about why you move your arms the way you do, or whether or not your posture or breathing is correct when playing an instrument. Body mapping, an offshoot of the Alexander Technique, is the perception and understanding of your own body-shape and size, how and where your joints move, and how the body functions. If your body map is incorrect, there is an inconsistency between your perception and your actual body, resulting in awkward, tense movement, misuse, and injury.
William Conable, a professor of cello at the Ohio State University School of Music, first used body mapping in the 1970s. Conable noticed that many of his students had a false notion of how their bodies were designed to move and he created body mapping as a way to correct these misconceptions.
One of the most common mismappings is our cultural notion that one should sit up straight to achieve good posture,” says Jennifer Johnson, a violinist and Andover educator from New Foundland, who teaches a course on body mapping.
"This leads people to overarch the lumbar region of the spine and pull the shoulders back in a military position; this is not what we are speaking of when someone is on balance.” Johnson explains that the right kind of posture is balancing the body’s weight centered on the hip joints by positioning the torso slightly forward when sitting or standing.
An integral part of body mapping is understanding the body’s core and how large the actual spine is. “Many people are unaware that the spine is so large and so deeply set into the center of the body,” says Johnson. “If you don’t use it for support, you can end up with a posture disease or relaxation slump, where the spine is in a C-shaped curve.”
Problems are common for musicians who have to lift their arms to play, like violinists and woodwind players. Johnson says these types of musicians tend to raise arms with a tilt in the spine, or strain their spine for the movement. "Lifting the arms independent from the spine is liberating and a lot of back pain disappears,” say Johnson.
For pianists and guitarists, a common problem is the way they turn their hands from palm up to palm down. Johnson says one cause of elbow or wrist pain is that many people use the bones on the pinky side of the arm to turn from palm up to palm down, when they should use the radial bone, on the thumb side. “When someone turns palm down with the incorrect bone, the ulna, it leads to the hand being caught off to the side in an unnatural way,” says Johnson. With months of persistence in changing this technique, many of Johnson’s students have cleared up tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.
A common mismapping for drummers and percussionists is what Johnson refers to as the “relaxation disease.” Slouching causes the spine to curve so the balance is not focused on the core.
"A music teacher may say a percussionist is too tense and that she should relax, which can lead to hunching the shoulders andslouching,” says Johnson. “It’s all a matter of balancing our bony structure and mapping the spine correctly to see how large and long it is and how it supports and lengthens us.”
The benefits of body mapping can be instantaneous. Johnson performs demonstrations at chamber music festivals where she brings musicians onstage and has them play a portion of a piece before and after they learn about their body map. "We get them more balanced around the core of the spine and almost immediately, two or three people experience bigger sound because their arms are released from chronic contraction,” says Johnson. “The balance will extend the arms’ length putting more weight into the instrument, which translates into a change in the amount of depth and tone and the audience can hear.”
Body mapping also helps people who have other musical limitations that they are resigned to live with. “Maybe they weren’t able to move through a difficult passage because they were trying to turn the wrong bone or creating tension,” says Johnson. “Although body mapping helps provide freedom from pain and injury, it can also lift those limitations.”
To find a teacher or body mapping course , visit the website www.bodymap.org/teachers. Books like What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body (Andover Pres, 2000) by Barbara and Benjamin Conable, are helpful resources . There are other titles for specific types of musicians at www.andoverpressonline .com.
