Pain-free pianists use their backs

SAN DIEGO — A strong back may be the key to tickling the ivories pain-free. Highly skilled pianists suffering from playing-related pain use their back and neck muscles less frequently than do players without pain, a new study shows. The result, presented November 14 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, suggests a way for pianists to prevent injury by beefing up their backs.

Errold Reid of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and colleagues studied piano players who had been playing for at least 10 years. Eleven of the players experienced varying degrees of piano-related discomfort; 21 were pain-free.

No postural differences were evident in the two groups, but the players who were pain-free relied heavily on the strong trapezius muscles that snake from the lower neck while they played C octaves in the lab, the team found. Conversely, players who experienced pain used smaller muscles in their forearms more. Not using the strapping back muscles shifts the work to the smaller, more delicate muscles in the fingers and arms, said study coauthor Preeti Raghavan of New York University School of Medicine. “It’s too hard on those little muscles,” she said.

The same muscle shifts may be evident in other skilled, repetitive activities, such as typing, the researchers said. Reid and Raghavan would like to test whether muscle-training interventions can prevent pain. “Our goal is to develop an exercise program that all pianists can do,” Raghavan said. Ultimately, the data might be useful to piano instructors as they teach young players proper form.