Learning to relax
Note: pretty much everything in this post applies to typing (and probably mousing) tension as well as piano-playing tension. Also note: I’m not an expert in any of this, and could well be completely wrong about the physiology, but it does seem to line up with my experience well enough.
I’m a pianist. I’ve taken piano lessons since I was six years old. I was very serious about piano for a few years in high school, but then decided to pursue programming instead of music as a profession. Since then I haven’t played nearly as much.
One of the reasons I decided not to pursue music was that my technique had a major problem—I tensed up my wrists and shoulders when playing. (I still do this.) Tension, in piano playing, is defined as any contraction of a muscle that’s more than what’s necessary to complete the desired movement. In shoulders, tension is just keeping them raised. In the arms and wrists, tension is when both the extending muscle (e.g. triceps) and the flexing muscle (e.g. biceps) contract at the same time. The muscles’ forces cancel each other, and a lot of energy is wasted. Thus, tension when playing leads to wrists and hands quickly becoming tired. It slows you down, too, so that you can’t play pieces as difficult as you could otherwise. Tension can also lead to various repetetive stress injuries, which are long term, sometimes crippling problems.
Let me start with a little demonstration. Hold an arm out from your body. Tense your arm like a bodybuilder (lower arm straight up, biceps and triceps tensed). While keeping it tense (but not as tense as you can possibly make it) straighten your arm out. This might feel a bit strange, and your arm might shake a bit. Now, trying extending and curling your forearm without any tension in your biceps or triceps. It feels effortless in comparison, right?
Now, imagine playing the piano with tension.
OK, that still might be a bit of a stretch (unless you play the piano yourself), but you might imagine how tiring and difficult it could be.
So why not just stop playing with tension? Well, first, the habit has been ingrained over many thousands of hours of practice. Second, the line between tension and relaxation is an extremely, extremely thin line. Let’s continue the demonstration: bring your arm back out to your side. Keeping your elbow stationary, bring your fist towards your head and then back (a few inches of movement is enough), without tension. Pretty easy, right? Now do it faster. Now faster. Any tension yet? I can move my fist back and fourth about 4.5 times a second before I start getting tense. I can move it about 9 times a second as fast as I can go. The problem is that muscles take time to relax, and when you start going fast, your bicep will still be in the process of relaxing when your tricep needs to start tensing. So to actually move your hand, your tricep has to contract harder to overcome the force of the relaxing-but-
Now, there’s not much in piano technique that requires you reach the speeds where muscle relaxation time is an issue. (Trills, fast runs, and octave scales come to mind. Oh, and the third movement of Rachmoninoff’s second piano concerto.) But there’s another muscle relaxation phenomenon that comes into play here. After an counscious contraction, a muscle will tend to remain in a higher state of tension than before the contraction; I.e., its tone raises. I’ll call this kind of tension tonal tension. (Muscles never completely relax. The nervous system is always sending low-level contraction signals to all muscles.) This effect, small as it is, acts in concert with the other effect as a very powerful accumulator of tension.
First, the pianist uses a little oppositional tension in a difficult or emotional or unfamiliar section of a piece (due to bad habit). This stresses the muscles and raises tonal tension much more than good technique would. (Any contraction of a muscle increases tonal tension.) The growing tonal tension makes it so the muscles require stronger contractions to overcome it, and that in turn feeds the increasing tonal tension. A feedback loop is created between them. A very tense pianist playing a difficult song can, in about ten minutes of practice, accumulate enough tension so that the resting muscle tone is halfway between completely relaxed (i.e. the tone they had before practicing) and completely tense. At that point, practicing is about 10 times harder and 100 times more worthless.
Once this feedback loop is started, there’s nothing you can do to stop it except to stop playing and let your muscle tone go back down. That can take hours or days. In the heightened-tension state, even a perfect technique can’t avoid escalating tension—that is, once the tension exceeds a critical point. There’s a threshold of tonal tension that can’t be passed. Below that threshold, tension doesn’t accumulate and the pianist can practice for hours without tiring physically. Above that threshold, and one can wear out in half an hour and cause serious physical damage (if one persists over months). A pianist with tension problems could practice for two hours without accumulating any tension (or accumulating it very slowly) and then suddenly pass the threshold (perhaps when practing a difficult passage). And what makes this problem so difficult to solve is that that, while it’s very easy to feel when one is in a high-tension state (because of soreness, tiredness, and difficulty playing), the threshold is actually quite low—very close to a completely relaxed state. It can be many minutes after one passes the threshold before noticable physical signs arise. And by that point, it’s much too late to continue practicing.
So what’s the solution? Well, I’m not entirely sure. (I still play with tension.) But my best guess is that you need to look for the early-warning signs of tension. When you’re paying attention (and attention is an extremely scarce resource when playing the piano) you can directly feel tension in your wrist and hand. So a regimen whereby one ceaselessly monitors one’s hands for any sign of tension, and practices in very small blocks until one can play each passage without any tension, and where one stops the moment one feels the muscle tone rising above the baseline and holds off for at least six hours, could possibly do the trick after a month or two. Of course, if one loses track and only notices the tension after it’s gotten really bad, one obviously needs to stop immediately. (You might be able to see why I haven’t undertaken this yet.) A further complication is that in a high-tension state, typing or mousing can fuel the tension enough to keep it critical (above the threshold), so if you have to do anything with your hands after a tense practice session, that just prolongs the time you have to wait before you can fruitfully practice again.
Were any readers bothered by my constant switching between “you”, “one”, and “I”? I hate the active voice in exposition with a hypothetical subject. The passive voice is wished to be nicer to use (by me). I think it is nicer in Spanish.
