Warming up the whole body
It is not pleasant to injure your arm. Not only does it cause a lot of pain, it also eliminates you from the game. Most often it happens when you cannot afford it. So what to do to protect yourself from injury?
The basic and preventive activity that protects us from injury is warm-up. It has two functions. One is to maintain fitness and fitness in playing (long-term perspective), the other is to prepare the body and mind for further work on our workshop on a given day (short-term perspective). Warming up is so important in our work that we should always do it first. It is better to spend 30 minutes a day doing basic exercises (including a decent warm-up) during the whole week, rather than working four hours in one day. I know from practice that it is not easy to be consistent, everyone has had ups and downs in this topic, but you cannot give up.
In my case, the warm-up consists of 4 parts. Depending on the amount of time available, I try to spend 5 to 15 minutes on each part. We need 20 to 60 minutes to complete the entire set of exercises.
– Warming up the whole body
– Warm-up of the right hand
– Left hand warm-up
– Final warm-up combined with scale and scale exercises
In this post, we will deal with the first point, which is warming up the whole body. You are probably wondering why you need her. I’m already translating.
Reading the entries of Kasia, Szymon, Michał, Mateusz and mine, you can notice the frequent appearance of the word “relax”. It is not accidental, because each of us noticed how important this factor is in his game. You can meet mental slack, physical slack, musical slack (flow, feeling), etc. Warming up the body is actually putting it into a state of physical slack. While playing, no matter what instrument, we engage the whole body, not only the arms and legs. Therefore, along with the principle of “from general to particular”, our warm-up should begin with exercises of the whole body.
For the good start
In order to wake up our body a bit at the beginning, we do the following as in PE lessons:
- Circulation of the hips left and right,
- Left and right torso circulation,
- 10 squats.
If you feel the need for more exercise (legs, back, etc.), I refer you to the bodybuilding.pl website where you will find professional advice with photos. And now we’re going on …
Stretching hands
The next step is to stretch your arms. We stand on straightened legs, join hands, bend and straighten, stretching out our arms as high as possible. The range of subsequent exercises is free, anything that warms you up and stretches your arms is good. For my part, I recommend exercises 2 to 4a from the above-mentioned website klubystyka.pl (photo 2 to 4a)
Shoulders
Once, I would have said, “What do the shoulders have to do with my bass performance?” Today I know that they have a big one. Exactly from a medical point of view, I am not able to say what it looks like, but somehow the shoulder is connected with the elbow by tendons, and the elbow with the wrist. When we slouch or have a bad posture, the shoulder is in a different place than it should be. This can make the tendon in the elbow jump (a bloody unpleasant feeling and also pain). And this is not the end, because the wrist reduces its flexibility, causing the hand to suffer. Unfortunately, I have been struggling with this problem for some time and it affects the game quite strongly. But don’t be hysterical, I just wanted to point out to you that it’s worth paying attention to.
Ok, but then how to exercise the shoulders?
Probably the easiest way is to go to the gym and the swimming pool, as I mentioned in Everything Begins In Your Head. In the case of the warm-up itself, I refer again to the website klubystyka.pl and to photo 5, where everything is perfectly described.
Wrist
For wrists, I have two very simple, but effective exercises for me:
- loosening the wrists – loosely lower the hands and shake them several times
- wrist circulation – we clasp our hands together and make a circular motion to the left and right
If we devote two or three minutes to the above-mentioned exercises, it will be enough. In the next post, we will focus on stretching the fingers and hands. These will be exercises mainly with bass, but also without it. Coming back to today’s post, remember to share your experiences with us in a comment!
