Piano Video Lesson: How Do You Get Back in Shape on the Piano?

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. You're watching LivingPianos.com and today the question is, how do you get back in shape on the piano? If any of you have ever gone for vacation and come back and wonder how can you get your fingers back in shape, most importantly without hurting yourself, I have an issue with my thumb of my right hand where if I'm out of shape and I just sail into music, particularly big chords and octaves, I can get a little bit of a pain right at this joint.

Yet, if I build up the muscles, I have enough to overcome and I don't have any problems at all. So I have to be really careful if I take any time away from the piano how to slowly get back into shape.

And the most taxing things that are on the piano are those with reaches because when you're out like this, there's a tremendous amount of stress that you have in your fingers. Whereas if you have something that's right under your fingers like this and you're not reaching with big chords and octaves, it's much, much less taxing on the piano.

So the ideal music on the piano for getting back into shape are Bach two -part inventions.

Why? Because you never or rarely have more than one note at a time in each hand and yet you have a lot of notes, you have clarity, you have musical lines. It's the perfect way to get back in shape. And for this I'm going to demonstrate with the very first Bach invention in C major. So you can see how ergonomic it all is falling right under the fingers and no reaches that are going to in any way tax your hands. Play through some Bach inventions and this is a great way to get back in shape.

Let's give it a try for you.

And you know virtually all the two -part inventions are like this right under your fingertips.

Bach in general works very nicely for getting back in shape because it rarely has massive chords and the biggest chord you'll find maybe like the beginning of the Italian concerto .

So even in the Italian concerto which does have a number of chords, it never exceeds in octaves. It's still not that taxing but man those two -part inventions are ideal for getting back into shape. So look for music that doesn't have more than one note in each hand and you can let your fingers gradually grow stronger so you can handle more taxing music. And that's the best way I found to get into shape.

Share your ideas here at LivingPianos .com and YouTube. Again Robert Estrin, thanks so much for joining me and all your subscribers out there. We'll see you next time here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-do-you-get-back-in-shape-on-the-piano/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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