Piano Video Lesson: The Ultimate Wrist Exercise for Piano

The quick wrist action. So I've got a very simple exercise that, it's how you do the exercise that makes all the difference. Hi, welcome to LivingPianist.com. I'm Robert Astrid with the ultimate wrist exercise for your piano technique. Wrists are so important in piano playing, it's unbelievable. Now everybody knows that you need to use your fingers in order to play the piano, but the fingers don't do you much good when there's chords, when there's octaves. You know, it's very hard to play octaves with your fingers, isn't it? Where do the fingers go? I mean, there's a certain amount you can do with legato octaves, but when something's There's no way the fingers can do that. You have to use the wrist.

You notice if you use the arm, it's cumbersome. You can't go fast enough. The wrists are also incredibly important for chord technique. Now there's some chord technique that's slower and bigger where you can use your arms, but you see in something like this, the wrists must be utilized because the arms are too big and slow. It doesn't work, does it? So how do you develop the wrist? First of all, just developing the independence of the wrist so you use them separate from the arm is a major difficulty for some people. Some people it comes quite naturally, other people struggle to be able to not utilize the arm with the wrist because if you do that, once again, it's too much mass. You can't get that quick, you know, the quick wrist action. So I've got a very simple exercise that's how you do the exercise that makes all the difference. The arm only utilizes the second and fourth fingers in both hands and it just goes up on white keys starting on C and E in both hands. Very simple. And you just go eight times on C and E, then you go up eight times on D and F and you can get up as high as you want and then come back down again, eight times in each. And you do this with a metronome and notice how my arms are not going to go up and down at all, only the wrists will, but the arms are very important in that they must guide the hands over the right keys. So after the eighth time C and E plays, the arms move over right over D and F. Watch how it works. Little explainer there. If you've never done this before, the first time you do it, you're going to feel it in here because they're muscles you don't ordinarily use. If you are a tennis player, you might have very well developed wrists, but other than that, there's not a lot of times you use your wrists independent from your arms. Now, the tendencies that you may have when you play this the first time is one of them is not identifying the wrist separate from the arm and having both of them work together like this. That doesn't do much to strengthen your wrists because you're using the arms.

Another problem or tendency is not to make it a sudden motion like this, but making it go back down. Now, you might think there's nothing wrong with that. Why not go down? Well, it's because this is a hyper slowed down version of what you need to be able to accomplish later and there isn't time to go back down. You must strike from above. Not it's got to be one motion and your wrists are up here the entire time except when they play for the brief moment. Tendency to watch out for is you're playing and everything is going fine. You have your wrists raised, but then your arms get lazy and you start lowering. Before you know it, you're playing down like this and you're in this terribly uncomfortable position bent way back and even when you're playing the notes, you're still bent. This isn't good and it could be destructive as a matter of fact because you don't want to flex this too far because you've got nerves in here that can be stressed. So it's a gentle slope of the wrist that straightens when it plays. Notice when you're actually playing, the wrists are straight. So don't let this happen. Keep your arms high enough right over the keys you're going to be playing. Make it a sudden motion. Go through that once every day and you'll be amazed at the independence of your wrist, the strength, the speed you develop, which is a whole host of techniques, as I said, from octaves to chord technique. Not just that, but also staccatos to delineate staccatos of the wrist. The beginning of Clementi Sonatina in C major, Opus 36, number one. You notice the staccatos, you get a crisp sound. If you were to use your arms, you'd get this sound. Compared to... You could hear the difference. So the wrists play an incredibly important part in piano playing and this exercise can help you develop the independence and strength of your wrists. You can leave comments here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource, or on YouTube. Thanks so much for joining me and all you subscribers. Bringing me to well over 100,000 subscribers is a milestone that I really appreciate each and every one of you. Look forward to seeing you next time here at Living Pianos. Thanks again.

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