013: Violin fitness – staying healthy or playing hurt

As Kramer says in Seinfeld’s “The Wig Master” episode, “I don’t argue with the body, Jerry. It’s an argument you can’t win.”

Sooner or later, we all learn the truth of that statement, especially those of us who are forced to rely on little tiny muscles to do things like play the violin! In the picture above, you can see Nathan celebrating his twelfth birthday with two fingers taped together. His daily neighborhood basketball game was the culprit.

Nowadays, we’d think twice before playing that much basketball. Or a number of other activities. But we do hit the gym quite a lot. What makes an activity OK for violin playing, and what puts it out of bounds?

More than that, what can you do to prepare for your daily practicing and performing? Are there ways to play so that you stay injury-free? And what kind of music is the worst for the body?

We talk violin fitness here in episode 13, so join us for the discussion and leave your thoughts below!

Transcript

Nathan Cole: Hi, and welcome back to Stand Partners for Life. I’m Nathan.

Akiko Tarumoto: I’m Akiko.

Nathan Cole: And today’s episode is going to be all about injury, well more fitness, violin fitness, staying healthy, hopefully avoiding injury! But then also what to do when you’re hurt, how to work around it, and just to talk about the reality that everybody has aches and pains and sometimes worse. So, I know at this point in the LA Phil season, basically the last few weeks, we’re sort of like a hospital ward. At this point, I feel like everybody’s one step away from falling to pieces. Do you see that in our sections?

Akiko Tarumoto: I don’t know. I haven’t talked to too many people. We’ve lost one.

Nathan Cole: Right.

Akiko Tarumoto: But, yeah, and I’m kind of hobbling along here. My-

Nathan Cole: Oh, yeah. What do you-

Akiko Tarumoto: My wrist, and you got your shoulder … Okay, so that’s three of us that we know of, so maybe you’re right.

Nathan Cole: Well, and that’s understandable. I mean we always — jokingly a lot of the time, but we compare ourselves to sports teams, especially NBA. I watch a lot of basketball, so coming into the playoffs just about everybody is beat up. In basketball it’s literally one step away from some season-ending injury. We’re not quite as bad as that, but-

Akiko Tarumoto: But our season doesn’t really end, so we can’t really afford to … We don’t have four months off to …

Nathan Cole: No, but we do — We’ve got four weeks off from the orchestra coming up, which is something.

Akiko Tarumoto: Goes fast.

Nathan Cole: It does go fast but it is a chance to rest things, which in pretty much all endeavors, rest and recovery are the real keys if you’ve got an issue going on. And as the weeks go by during the season, yeah, I mean it’s hard to find even a 48-hour period when you’re not playing, and we like to play every day to stay in shape. Those are the issues we’ll be talking about. What do you have going on right now?

Akiko Tarumoto: Well, I mentioned my wrist, so, yeah, that’s hurting me.

Nathan Cole: And my right shoulder just a few days ago started up on me.

Akiko Tarumoto: Not coincidentally, probably, we’ve been going to the gym a lot, so we’ll see how that ties in…

Nathan Cole: Yeah. Well, we’re going to talk about that because I don’t intend to stop going to the gym and I’m sure you don’t either, but we’re going to talk about how to do it smart, smartly. Before we launch into it, I wanted to thank those of you who’ve gone to iTunes and given us a nice rating, and even better, a review, just a short little written review. What that does is it helps other people find the show, and we just really appreciate it so much.

Nathan Cole: As you probably heard in some other episodes, we read those and take them to heart and try to improve Stand Partners based on your feedback. So, if you can take a moment to go to iTunes and leave that rating and/or review, it’s amazing. I don’t do it enough to the shows I listen to. I always think, “Oh,