Your hands and their relationship to playing

[Fergie Fulton]

This post is for you to consider some of the aspects of what you do when you play and why. It is long because this subject needs to be explained and understood.


Lets look at technique from an anatomical point of view, lets take out the passion of technique, music, influence, instrument, etc, and look at this from a physical point of view. Our bodies are not designed to play instruments, our hands have developed an opposable thumb and with it the ability of two functions, dexterity and power. Dexterity comes from the thumb, fore and middle fingers, power from the little, ring and middle finger. These two functions have two specific muscle groups, each with there own nerve routes and endings. So when working the fretting hand you have two groups to deal with to help perfect you playing technique. On the plucking hand if you use two fingers or a pick you will use the dexterity part of the hand (thumb, fore and middle finger). If you add the ring or little finger to the plucking technique you now are using the two groups and as a result the little finger and ring finger will be slow to respond because dexterity is not what they are designed for. Put some coins on a table and pick them up, notice how your power side fingers goes into your palm to allow the dexterity side to work efficiently. Now pick up you bass, you will notice that the power side fingers take the majority of the strain and even the relaxing of the dexterity fingers does not really loosen the hold, the grip is in the palm of the hand, not the thumb or forefinger.

The fingers in order to function on a bass guitar have to overcome this problem to work as one unit…..the hand. The hand has no muscles as such just tendons and ligaments with associated joints that respond to stimulus from nerve endings to produce movement. The muscles that control this movement is in the forearms. Since muscles only pull , we need opposite pairs to perform movement. In the hand for example one set pulls the hand open and another on the opposite side pulls it closed. So what you have is a voluntary reaction, one you have made happen. Your brain is the start of all this, you think the movement, nerves carry the impulse to the muscle groups and they contract to produce the required movement. As one muscle is contracting ( shortening ) the opposite one is relaxing ( lengthening ) so this is how movement occurs at a basic level clean and simple.

But what we want to do is not clean and simple, we want to mix up the power and dexterity functions, with reaction to sensory, visual and auditory functions. This is more movement and control than the hand was ever designed to do. The hand in the last 10-15 years has had it’s work load more that trebled by modern life. In the past, for a child growing up the most dextrous of tasks was to write, draw or colour in a book. One off tasks as tying shoe laces or a tie would be learnt, but they did not consume vast amounts of singular time in these pursuits. Now we have keyboards, computer game controllers, remote controls, mouse controllers, sports that require us to work with bats, clubs, racquets, as well as writing and drawing etc. The hand does so much more now, but it has had no time to develop, to adapt to these changes in it’s use. It took us thousands on thousands of years just to get the opposable thumb that gave us an advantage among other mammals and that design is not perfected still.
The human body was designed to last about 35-50 years with a quality of control if it remained free of injury and disease . With modern medicine that has been extended, but the parts still wear down and need replacing. We do it with joints, teeth, organs, etc, we help the eyes, ears, legs etc with outside aids to make their function better or easier. Regardless of how much you train or practice at any one thing that is no guarantee of success. We all work in slightly different ways, that’s why we are all slightly unique, that is why what affects one does not necessary affect the next. It is a mechanisms that stops disease, and injuries from wiping us out as each one of us will not react to certain things in the same way. Think why are there right and left handed people in this world? Would we insist that left handed people do everything right handed? Well they have to a certain degree in the past, and it is testament to their ability that they got success. But now we understand the requirements of being left handed, it is easy to accommodate it, rather than just “let them get on with it” Playing bass is no different, it is a physical work out, the movement controlled by the brain, its not a reaction, it’s controlled by the brain via nerve endings. Each one of us will deal with it in our own way depending on the bodies ability to supply all the available movement at it‘s disposal.. It is the targeting of such conditions that will help us play better, as in the example of giving a left hander a left handed bass designed for his purpose.

If you are ill or not feeling well, you lose the basic of functions, things that are so easy for a healthy person like stand up and walk become harder if not impossible. If you are tired or run down you lose co-ordination, again simple things become complicated. It is the same in playing the bass, if you are not fit you will not function correctly, more importantly if your hands are not healthy they will not function properly.
The hands as said do so much these days, so you have to look at your own case specifics to understand what your hands are capable of and what they are not.

Without a bass in your hands take the position of playing, now move your fingers as if you playing,
That is a physical activity as far as you body is concerned, take the passion of music and instrument out and that is a physical activity, so the laws of anatomy apply. The blood must flow to give the muscles oxygen, the blood need to be oxygenated, the muscle needs nerve stimulus, the joints must be supple, the ligaments need to be healthy, all this needs energy from water and diet, vitamins and minerals must be correct in the right balance, waste product like lactic acid , carbon dioxide, sweat etc must be carried away, its goes on and on.. I say this to show that JUST PLAYING WILL MAKE YOU BETTER is a false statement. Make you better at what ? Playing the bass, it will make it easier through repetitive familiarity, muscle tone in one plain, and a certain dexterity in one plain. But what of the long term damage? Miss-use and over use cause more damage to muscles and in particular the hands. What if we can do it better away from the bass and save that wear and tear? What will make you a better player is making the brain work better and that can be done away from the bass, by reading, listening or watching, so why not the physical side? Why can’t the physical side of playing the bass guitar be taken away from the bass? What will make you a better player in the sense is targeting muscle groups p for a specific purpose, rather than just using all groups regardless and let time sort them out if it can is a false economy.


The best bass player have the best minds. If you cannot think it, you cannot play it. You are what you play, what you play is a series of decisions, when you play good you have made good decisions, when you play bad, you made bad decisions. It’s not about knowledge, but the application of what you have learnt, what you know, what you have understood.

That brings us back to the hands, what do you know about your hands and what is best for them to carry out what you‘re asking….expecting them to do?

If you spend 5-10 mins. a day looking after your hands you will become a better player because you hands can do more for you. Your hands will react to what you thinking better, the joints will have a different plain of movement to consider so will be more supple, the muscles in you forearms will learn to work better and efficient and as result the correct muscle groups will be developed. You can target specific muscle groups with out affecting other muscle groups. This is one of the developments in athletes training in recent years, the targeting of slow twitch and fast twitch response of muscle groups.
These responses are linked very closely to playing bass guitar, because of the way the muscles are used.

So lets look at the two together, bass playing and muscle exercise.

In exercise we do repetitions to build and train muscles. Whether this is bench work, push ups, pull ups, side bends, sit ups etc, we do them in repetition or sets/reps as they are known. The function of this is to target muscle groups. If you play scales over and over you are performing reps, if you play the same song over and over you are performing reps. In other words if you use your hands the same way every day you are as good as going to a gym and starting a workout. You might not see it that way but your muscles do. It’s your brain that is getting in the way and justifying what you’re doing, to your muscles it is physical use and because it is repetitious it may as well be exercise.
Hold out and curl your forefinger back and forward. That is a sit up for you finger on a smaller scale. As far as the body is concerned the muscles work in the same way. Now play a scale. As far as your fretting hand is concerned this is a push up, again on a smaller scale as it uses the same principal, you are pushing against the string. On the plucking hand if you play with your fingers you are doing pull ups as you play the strings. If you use a pick you have to hold the pick so that requires measured tension from the dexterity side of the hand and movement from the one or more main muscle groups depending on how you move this action. This is like a bicep curl with a weight, you have to hold the weight and move it through a series of reps to tone the bicep but because you are holding a weight, the hands, wrist, and forearms are involved. They have no choice it is an overlapping function. Once again remove all the elements of playing bass and it is a physical work out as far as your muscles are concerned, to hold a chord is the same as holding a weight, it is a contraction of the muscles in the forearms that close the hand, the fact there is something in the way (the fretboard) to stop the hand from closing has nothing to do with this movement.

Slow twitch and fast twitch response in muscles.

Ever wonder why a Cheetah and a Lion are so different physically? They share the same environment, food, climate, and they are both cats. The main difference is in their muscle make-up, Cheetahs exploit fast twitch response in favour of slow twitch and the Lion slow twitch response in favour of fast twitch.
Slow twitch muscle fibres are responsible for the strength and endurance of a muscle not its speed or reflex, fast twitch muscle fibres deal with this and as such can be targeted. That’s why athletes can train so hard and long and all be different shape. Look at a Rugby or American Football teams, they are one unit, parts of that unit are power and strength and others speed and reaction. Like the Lion and the Cheetah they each developed a specific type of movement.

So how do I know which muscle groups and responses I am developing?

In short it is….. in short. Any thing over 10-15 minutes or so is a slow twitch response and is developing power and strength not speed. That is why what starts out as a fast twitch exercise if done for to long or to much in a session turns in to a slow twitch response. Remember miss-use and over use well it applies here as well to muscles. Ask your self these questions;

Does my practise have repetition as its main part? ( Repetition can cause fatigue and therefore become a slow twitch response that works on giving the muscle stamina)

Does it take longer than 10 -15 mins.? ( again anything longer than this is for endurance and stamina, power and strength)

Do my hands feel tired and fatigued after it ( so they are more tired finishing than they were when you started).

If you answer yes to these questions your practice is developing power, stamina and endurance not speed and dexterity. All your efforts in what you do will never give you speed, response and dexterity. So once again the “just playing will make you better” statement fails as it cannot be sure what the specifics are for you in developing your hand/arm muscles. The hands two functions of power and dexterity can be targeted ensuring that fast twitch response is targeting the little and ring finger of the fretting hand (remember that that side of the hand is for power) to improve its relationship with the other fingers in the hand. Even if necessary a single finger can be targeted for either stamina/ power or speed/dexterity.

Diet and hydration will be more effective to a healthy hand than an un-healthy hands, injuries will be less, as will fatigue, you will have your playing move on and stay will you into later life, in all you will be better for it. Find one doctor, physician , surgeon, trainer, who ever has a medical opinion that will say other wise that exercise is bad for the body.

The hand suffers injury from two main sources, over use and miss-use, which one are you?

Every week on forums around the web people are talking about injuries, fear of injury, and the operations they have went through. If you have a pain or physical problem when you play that’s your body saying …stop. If you don’t the body shouts stop…with more pain or a cramp, if you still persist it will spasm to make you stop and if you continue then the damage it was trying to protect itself from will be done, maybe a tear, joint or ligament damage or worse. Playing the bass may show these symptoms not necessarily be the cause. Why? Because we were never designed to play instruments, so the body cannot take this action into consideration. If you work on an assembly line doing fine manipulation work, play computer games, type on a keyboard, then take up bass, if you start to have problems in your hands it is not the bass that is doing this, it is your work and lifestyle, the bass is only highlighting it, not causing the problem. Not everyone can play the bass, some will need more help than others just to be mediocre, some will get it straight away, it is case specific how well you do.

So if your hands are weak , then yes a grip strengthening exercise will work till its time to stop, and that’s the problem when to stop or change exercises before they start to have the opposite effect.
If you have a hand physical job then the chances are you need to negate the impact it has on the hands before playing. Remember your hands don’t differentiate physical use, playing, gamming , it’s all physical use to the body and the anatomical rules apply. If you let the passion in of instrument, music, the greats of the past, technique, etc. then you move away from the problem, which is still, we were never designed to play instruments.

There are many great links and posts on the web on these points I have put forward, many myself to players that have problems with their hands with good results for them, it’s more of a change in the way of their thinking than anything else.

[makanudo]

Very good post i liked it, very informative.

One question though, if i want to train for speed what should i do?

[Billnc]

Many thanks for the well thought out post. Somehow I feel a bit smarter now!

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by makanudo

Very good post i liked it, very informative.

One question though, if i want to train for speed what should i do?

This all depends on the person, these things are case specific to the person. If for example you drive all day for a living the advice to follow would be different than say desk job

Think on how you use your hands in day to day life. Is this under use or over use, evaluate how the work for you and what you ask of them. If you over use them then playing bass is going to up that strain, if you under-use then then they will not handle the strain. This may seem like a cope out but this is the fact of what you ask and that i cannot answer, no one can unless they know your hands history or you explain it all in its detail to someone,(please not me)

So here is how i done myself at one stage.
Work out what fingers need attention, relate that to the hand, then to the target group of muscles in the forearm.

I had just had an accident with a chisel, i sliced one of the tendons in my front left wrist under the thumb. The resulting treatment which was to stitch it together left me with tendon shortened, so i could not extend my fingers. Problem was the muscles attached to this tendon if i tried to extend my fingers would rip it apart so time was the healer. When i became strong enough problem one was to make it stretch to its full capacity again. Gentle stretching saw to that but there was a weakness in the little finger side, the ring finger sat piggy back on it.
So for me little finger on the ulnar side of the hand, which is the muscle group of extensor carpi ulnaris, and extensor carpi digitorum, which are located in the back of my forearm.

Extensor carpi ulnaris, extends my wrist so i need this to support the extensor carpi digitorum, which extend my fingers.
I simply put my hand on a table and lifted my fingers of one by one as high as i could for about 5 secs each. I used a ruler to measure how high each finger could lift and sustain the lift and documented it. I also lifted up and down the little finger as fast as i could over 10 sec. then the ring finger the same to give them a bit more than the rest of my fingers. Improvement came everyday in the form of the height attained and the amount of lifts i could perfom in the 10 sec., till i decided that after a couple of weeks i need to see how it performed with the bass. I must stress at no point did i try and play the bass, this was done away from the instrument. After a few minutes of some scales i realised the finger was good at lifting( extending, the motion that was weak) but had some flicking issues going on the fretboard.

Now it is a flexor problem in the little finger only( closing the finger toward the palm) so i took a squash ball to sort that out. I held the ball in the fingertips so only the little finger was free. This gave all my fingers and thumb something to do so they could not interact with the little finger. I gently curled it forward on itself, letting it drop so it touched the base of where it started leaving the palm of my hand. This was quite hard to start with but with practise it became easier. Then i reached over and tried to touch the pad at the base of my thumb. This too was hard to do but as the little finger got more use of this motion so it became easier. This took a couple of 10 minute sessions to sort out a day over a week. Then back to the scales and with all seeming good back to playing. This whole proccess for me was about 6 weeks from the time of the accident. Then i done some fast twitch exercises for me to increase the return of the speed.
I have posted this before so here it is again.

Fast twitch response(do a search on that phrase) is the targeting of muscles for speed not power.
So after some stretching and warm up get a watch and time how fast you can fully open with extention the close with contraction you fingers over 15 secs. You will feel this in your forearms, as it tires so the fingers tire. give it 5-10 mins, enough time for your arms to recover and repeat. What you will find is the second time you will do a few more in the 15 secs. than the first time. Then the leave it till the next session, two sessions of 2x15 secs is enough. But the human reasoning is to increase the time or do more, to get more benifit, do not as this turns it into a different exercise targeting a different response set of muscles. You will find if you can do say 35 in that first session after a week or so you will come near to doubling that.
That exercise will work for any healthy hand, again i don't know the history of your hands. Remenber to warm down this is another good way to treat your muscles.
But you must look after your hands and read the signs, you need a benchmark warm up which is another way of gauging your hand ability. For me this is warming up with some stretches, and some scales and fingerings i can do with reletive ease. Because i am so comfortable with this routine, if something does not feel right when i do it, then something is wrong. If i struggle to carry it out something is wrong. It give me a bench mark on my abilities at that giving point, so i might do something easier for my practice, or just warm up, stretch, warm down and stop there.

[KPAX]

TLDNR

[5string5fingers]

This is a great thread. I used to be into weight lifting and knew just about everything you talked about but never thought about applying the techniques and knowledge to my hands. Great stuff.

[makanudo]

I see, i will try those streches out, thank you very much, and im sorrya bout your accident =)

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by makanudo

I see, i will try those streches out, thank you very much, and im sorrya bout your accident =)

No probs the incident with the chisel was about 7 years ago and all healed up great.

[makanudo]

Oh i thought it was recent

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by makanudo

Oh i thought it was recent

Thanks and sorry but no it was 2001, so 8 years even lol
I used it as an example because i know how my own body works.
I am a carpenter by trade so hand accidents are part of the lot. Because i don't do that much of it, my hands are not accustomed to the stresses and routines of that job anymore. I never combined the two as such, i was either a carpenter or a bass player.
The senario of working all day then playing a gig was for me only about a 10 year period in the 35+ yrs. i have been playing. If i had gig that night, i did not work during the day. I used that time to get my hands from being a carpenters hands to a bass players hands. That was a luxury i could afford myself as money was not a problem.

[jnuts1]

In the past, for a child growing up the most dextrous of tasks was to write, draw or colour in a book. One off tasks as tying shoe laces or a tie would be learnt, but they did not consume vast amounts of singular time in these pursuits. Now we have keyboards, computer game controllers, remote controls, mouse controllers, sports that require us to work with bats, clubs, racquets, as well as writing and drawing etc. The hand does so much more now, "

this statement is pretty outlandish if you ask me. hands have always been very dextrous. look at watch makers, jewelers & all sorts of other fine artists/craftsmen of the past. & their kids apprenticed very young i would suspect.

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by jnuts1

In the past, for a child growing up the most dextrous of tasks was to write, draw or colour in a book. One off tasks as tying shoe laces or a tie would be learnt, but they did not consume vast amounts of singular time in these pursuits. Now we have keyboards, computer game controllers, remote controls, mouse controllers, sports that require us to work with bats, clubs, racquets, as well as writing and drawing etc. The hand does so much more now, "

this statement is pretty outlandish if you ask me. hands have always been very dextrous. look at watch makers, jewelers & all sorts of other fine artists/craftsmen of the past. & their kids apprenticed very young i would suspect.

Well depends on how you view it. If in the past every child was a watchmaker, jeweler, fine artist or craft apprentice in the making, then it is a foolish statement to make.
How many of these children did you, your parents or grandparents have in school when growing up?

I for one had no TV remote, computer game, computer keyboard, computer mouse, calculator or mobile phone, neither did any of my friends or any of the kids in my town.
But now, on just what i listed is the norm for any pre-teen kid in the modern world. Pre-teen means not fully developed so muscles, joints etc are still developing so not ready for the stresses and strains of say a fully grown adult.

Hand injuries are becoming common in teenagers, the doctors treating them say numbers have risen "dramaticly" due to the over use of the thumb, in particular texting and game controllers and the over use of force used to work them.
This problem is not reflected in countries that are under developed, the problems we used to have of malutrition, injuries from over work, health etc are still present for large groups of children. Different injuries, same problem...over-use and miss-use from an early age, but for very different reasons, survival not leisure.

[Evil Undead]

Great info, thanks

[TortillaChip520]

Great posts, really makes me look at practice and hand coordination differently now. I don't care how long it was, I read every word