Fixing Tension in the Pick Arm

As guitar players we know that we don’t want to have an unnecessary amount of tension in either arm, but knowing that and doing that are two very different things. Getting involuntary muscle tension under control can be quite challenging, but with this article hopefully you will be able to diagnose and resolve this problem.

It’s also important to quickly mention that we are always going to need some muscle tension, because we have to move our arms, hold our guitar and make our fingers play. What we are trying to diagnose and fix is excessive muscle tension that inhibits our guitar playing and makes it harder than it needs to be.

Why do we need to minimise muscle tension?

Before we look at how to minimise muscle tension, let’s quickly look at why we should minimise muscle tension.

Hold your hand in front of you, look at the back of your hand and wiggle all your fingers. Can you see all that “stuff” moving in the back of your hand?

When you have a lot of muscle tension in your arm, you make it harder for that “stuff” (which is tendons and tissue) to freely move, and allowing those tendons and tissues to free move makes it easier to play guitar.

There are also tendons and tissues in your arm, from your wrist to your shoulder that are used and need freedom to move.

Unnecessary tension can also lead to feeling fatigued very quickly when playing. In the best case scenario we are just making life harder for ourselves, in the worse case scenario excessive tension can lead to repetitive strain injuries (often abbreviated to RSI), which can require months of not playing guitar, or even being force to quit playing entirely.

Spotting muscle tension

We can get muscle tension anywhere in our body, but the main culprits are:

• Shoulder: When the shoulder ‘shoots’ up as if you’re shrugging. This can be one shoulder or both. This one was a nemesis of mine for a long time.
• Biceps: When the bicep is tense your arm feels stiff and difficult to move.
• Forearm: When the forearm is tense you grip your pick too hard.

Most guitar players will have difficulty with at least one of these muscle groups sooner or later.

The general process to solving this is to:

1. Recognise that it exists.
2. Practice some basic movement to learn and how it feels to be relaxed and to be tense, and to learn to control the tension.
3. Set aside a small amount of practice time to periodically check for tension, and release it if need be.

Sometimes it’s difficult to spot the tension, so let’s take a quick look at how we can check for muscle tension and common symptoms of excess tension in the pick arm:

Recognising tension in the shoulder

There are three common ways that muscle tension in the shoulder presents itself:

• One shoulder.
• Both shoulders.
• During a difficult section or all the time. It is quite common for a student to go into quite an aggressive shrug when getting to a challenging section in a piece of music.

The first thing to do is to check our ‘baseline’ for having relaxed shoulders, so we know what we are trying to achieve and compare against. Stand in-front of a mirror with your arms completely limp by your side. Look at your shoulders. This shoulder position is what we are trying to achieve while playing guitar. Then ‘shrug’ one shoulder up as far as you can and look at how unbalanced your shoulders look. Finally, ‘shrug’ both shoulders up as far as you can, relax them, and shrug them again. Look at how your shoulder position changes when you do this.

This is what we going to check for.

The easiest way to spot this when playing guitar is to use a mirror or make a short video of yourself practising a short piece of music with easy and difficult sections and watch it back.

First check for continuous muscle tension:

• Is one shoulder tense all the time?
• Are both shoulders tense all the time?

Seeing if one shoulder is continually tense is the easiest to spot, as they will obviously be at different heights.

Next look to see if both shoulders are continuously shrugging. If you are not sure, use a mirror to quickly check what your shoulders look like when shrugging and relaxed, then check your video to see if you are continuously shrugging.

Finally check what happens when you go from playing an easier section to a more difficult section. I would often find that some students would go into quite an aggressive shrug, sometimes visibly lurching forwards into a hunch when going into a difficult section, but you may find that you go into a partial shrug rather than an ‘full’ shrug.

Fixing muscle tension in your shoulder

Stand in-front of a mirror. Let your arm go completely limp and relaxed by your side. Now bend it at the elbow and slowly bring it up as if you’re about to play guitar, then gently bring it down to being completely limp and relaxed by your side.

Repeat this watching your shoulder. The goal is to be able to do the above motion with your shoulder staying in a relaxed and stationary position. If you can see your shoulder shrugging, or bouncing up and down, that means that you have a problem with muscle tension.

Now fixing this can seem like an impossible task, because you are not consciously doing this, it’s an involuntary movement and it can be very frustrating to not be able to control your body the way you want to.

However, if you just try, you will find that you eventually get the hang of it. Try, and be patient with yourself. This is the sort of exercise where if you just try it for a minute or two a day, you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

Recognising and fixing muscle tension in the biceps

If you find your arm feels very stiff when playing then there is probably excessive tension in your biceps. This one can be trickier to recognise as it probably feels ’normal’ to you and the bicep requires some tension in order to keep your forearm in the correct position to play guitar.

You can recognise if you have an excessive amount of tension in your biceps by holding your guitar and your pick, and bring your pick to the strings as if you were about to play the guitar. Next, keeping your arm in that position, try and tense your biceps up as if you are putting on a gun show. Are you able to increase the tension in your biceps, or are they already at maximum tension?

If they are already at maximum tension, then you have too much tension. If you are able to increase the tension in your biceps, then you probably have about as much tension as you need.

If you are finding that you have too much tension in bicep, then you would benefit from reducing it. We can reduce it in a similar way to how we reduce the tension in our shoulder.

Hang your arm completely limp and relaxed at your side. Try and ‘feel’ the lack of tension in the biceps - focus on the relaxed feeling in your bicep. Then, slowly bring the arm up trying to maintain that relaxed feeling. See if you can spot when you feel your arm tensing up. After bringing your arm up, tense and relax the bicep so that you can feel the difference between the tension needed to hold your arm in position and putting maximum tension into your bicep.

Recognising and fixing muscle tension in the forearm

Muscle tension in the forearm presents itself in how tight the pick is being gripped. I would find students would be equally split between gripping the pick too tight, due to a lot of tension in the forearm, and not gripping it tight enough, resulting in the pick bouncing around in their fingers.

A lack of tension is easy to spot as you’ll see the pick flicking from side to side while you are playing.

Spotting if you have too much tension takes an experiment - hold your pick and repeatedly pick a single note. While doing that, ever so slowly release your grip on the pick. At some point you will see the pick start to jiggle around. At the point where the pick starts to jiggle you have too little tension and the ideal amount of tension is a little more than this.

If you found the point at where the pick started to jiggle took a large reduction in the amount of tension you were using, then you are using too much tension to grip the pick. If you found it did not take a large reduction in the amount of tension to reach the ‘jiggle point’, then you are using an acceptable amount of tension.

Tension breaks

If you use the above exercises you should, with a little time, be able to gain some control over involuntary tension in your arm. However, while you will get better at doing the above exercises, you will probably still find that you get attacks of tension when you are playing. This will take longer to get under control.

An effective way to approach controlling this excessive tension is to choose a piece of music you are familiar with that you are going to play for five to ten minutes. Set a timer to go off every 40 to 60 seconds, and when it goes off, take a minute to think about your tension and if you are unnecessarily tensed up. If so, take a few seconds to try and relax the muscle group in question, maybe doing one of the above exercises to try and get rid of the tension.

Once you’re relaxed, reset the timer and go back to playing until it goes off again.

As mentioned, you only need to do this for five or ten minutes at the most, don’t do this for your entire practice session. If you do this for an entire practice session, your practice will not be very effective!

Expectations

Muscle tension is something that can take several weeks, or maybe even a few months to really get under control. Be patient with ourself.

You will find that by setting aside a little time to consistently and consciously focus on the problem, your body will learn how to be relaxed and it will slowly become a part of your playing and part of your subconscious.

The above exercises should only be done for a few minutes a day, but they need to be done everyday. It’s very much a case of little and often.