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I play tennis every saturday morning... Is this a problem? Does this can disturb my playing?


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Depends on how you play laugh . If you're careful, I don't see it as an issue. Don't strain your arms, and don't injure them in some other way wink .


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When I was younger (12-16yo) I used to play a lot more (like 4h everyday)... Now (I'm 21) I just play for fun....


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The most common problem is "tennis elbow", although it's relatively rare and I think caused by faulty strokes or over use. This shouldn't be a problem with once a week playing. If anything starts to hurt just stop playing. Unless very severe, tennis elbow usually goes away with rest.

And I don't recommend jumping the net at the end the match.

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When I was a teenager, I practiced advanced pieces and technique every day for a few hours while taking lessons for my Gr. 9 RCM. That was the first summer where I was seriously practicing piano (I used to take "vacation" from lessons during school vacation), and when I started playing tennis for the summer, I developed tendonitis in my wrists. The chiropractor suggested it was because of the added strain. I had to take a hiatus from both for months, and it was not cool. So just be careful. If you start to notice any new pains, go see someone about it before it gets serious. I know that many people, I'm sure, can play tennis and piano, but I just happened to be a case that resulted in an injury. Just a heads-up! (Piano beats tennis anyday...)


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Chopin - Prelude in D-flat major Op. 28 No 15

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Originally Posted by Fleeting Visions
Depends on how you play laugh . If you're careful, I don't see it as an issue. Don't strain your arms, and don't injure them in some other way wink .


The main problem isn't strain related. Not muscular in nature, but neurological. Inflammation of the nerves, due to maybe something as simple as reaching out a little too far on an aggressive backhand, can cause a nerve entrapment that will not be noticeable as anything more than a little finger stiffness sometimes weeks later, which can easily get progressively worse and even become a chronic problem that will shut you right down at the keyboard, or any other activity, like typing, where fine manual/digital work is used.
Hand and elbow entrapments can shut you right down at the keyboard, and they can emanate from the brachial plexus (shoulder blade area, front and back), the shoulder, the elbow, or the wrists! The effect is the same with nerve entrapment as the nerves to the fingers/hands can become entrapped anywhere from the spine on down! Tennis opens the door for this type of injury because of the power exerted on the racket and the sometime overreaching/overstretching from an awkward, kinetically disadvantageous position.
Tennis, martial arts, and direct forearm workouts (for bodybuilders and casual exercise buffs, like wrist rollers, leverage bar holds, and devices like hand grippers and various finger exercise bands to develop grip) should all be avoided.
If you use heavy weights for pulling exercises, like rows, pulldowns, deadlifts, etc., always use straps to aid your hold on the bar and lessen the amount of force needed to grip the bar.
When pushing, as in bench presses, don't crank the wrists back or use a "false" thumbless grip. Put the steel in the middle of your hand, keep your wrists in a perfectly straight line with your forearm, and don't overgrip the bar more than just to hold it in place in the center of your hand, then punch the weight up. Cranking the hands backwards can damage the writs for piano work, and it's not the type of damage or pain/inflammation that would bother you just doing eveyday things with your hands. But something that you'd readily notice when trying to play in a relaxed manner ith any type of facility!

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At once per week, I doubt the effects of an occasional game of tennis would be terribly harmful, so long as you're not practicing 5 hours a day or something...

Years ago I switched over to racquetball and found it to be a little easier on my body overall than tennis.


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Originally Posted by terminaldegree
At once per week, I doubt the effects of an occasional game of tennis would be terribly harmful, so long as you're not practicing 5 hours a day or something...

Years ago I switched over to racquetball and found it to be a little easier on my body overall than tennis.


Depends on how you play that game once a week. If you're lobbing serves and your general play is half speed, it's posible you'll be OK, but let's face facts, the average physical conditioning of most pianists is below average, not above average.
Most musicians that I know are rather sedentary individuals, whether young , middle-aged, or old. For the individual without a rugged athletic prowess, tennis can put alot of stress on their physiology.
Whether once a week or not, if the body cannot fully adapt to the increased or constant physical demand put on it, systems start to fail.
Even in a relaxed weekly 30 minute game, one can get over-enthusiastic and rip into the ball with their maximum force. Under ideal circumstances, the joints not stretched or hyper-extended to their maximum, applying maximum force is not as dangerous to connective tissues and doing so in an awkward position, which is not conducive to applying the maximum force being made.
For instance, the body moving in one direction and stretching with the arm in an opposite direction as the movement of the body, thereby negating the asisting muscles that normally aid in the smooth production of a swing. With that type of effort, the tissues undergo extremely abnormal stress with high injury potential.
With tennis, not standing in a fixed position to execute a swing is the potentially detrimental factor.
Think about it. A bowler that had to be moving backwards, at a slight angle, while delivering the ball forward, might not be able to generate enough power for his ball to reach the pins! The body's momentum delivers the power as well as the swing. In this scenario, the bowler would have to impart more power from the arm, which done while moving backwards from an awkward position, could set the bowler up for injury.

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BJones:
I taught tennis for 20 years and often to unathletic adults. I can't remember any of them getting injured. I also coached a high school tennis team and don't remember any injuries there either. In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare.

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Originally Posted by pianoloverus
BJones:
I taught tennis for 20 years and often to unathletic adults. I can't remember any of them getting injured. I also coached a high school tennis team and don't remember any injuries there either. In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare.


Tennis injuries are rare, among tennis players. Matter of fact, I have no idea why medical professionals refer to "tennis elbow", as injuries are so rare that it couldn't possibly happen, let alone there be a layman's name for the malady that really doesn't exist, as you say.
Did you take a poll as to how many of your tennis tudents were pianists? If so, and they were all pianists who had no ill effects whatsoever with tennis compromising their keyboard dexterity, than I stand corrected and recommend a robust daily regime of tennis as a beneficially piano-safe form of exercise that will surely enhance piano technique.

Further, I highly recommend all exercise that torque the joints. The more ballistic, the better. All forms of full power martial arts blows, including board, ice, and tile breaking with knuckles, palm, and ridge hand, knuckle pushups with box freefalls from a foot or more, fingertip free fall pushups, rapid deadpull ballistic jerks on immovably weighted Olympic bars, all forms of wrist curls from each plane of motion, the more intense the joint trauma imparted, the better. laugh


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I'm a tennis player. Was playing and training close to 20 hours during the summer. I suffered a stress fracture in my back and now im still trying to fight it off. No more kick serve for me!

Matt

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I played competitive tennis for twenty years and used to be on the court for hours on end. A certain inflexibility used to creep into the dominant hand, constantly used to grip the racquet. However, it soon went away afterwards and I have suffered no loss of piano technique. I therefore agree with pianoloverus, but additionally, I want to enjoy many things in life and feeling fit and healthy is one of them. Piano playing is a supremely enjoyable activity, but beyond obvious common sense I am not going to constantly worry about how other things might affect it.



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Originally Posted by Ted
I played competitive tennis for twenty years and used to be on the court for hours on end. A certain inflexibility used to creep into the dominant hand, constantly used to grip the racquet. However, it soon went away afterwards and I have suffered no loss of piano technique. I therefore agree with pianoloverus, but additionally, I want to enjoy many things in life and feeling fit and healthy is one of them. Piano playing is a supremely enjoyable activity, but beyond obvious common sense I am not going to constantly worry about how other things might affect it.



I agree with him too. I now recommend a heavy course of rigorous manual labor, like stone masonry, jackhammering, etc., maybe even highly repetitive manual assembly line work, coupled with intense hand impact athletics, like handball, boxing, martial arts, etc. as being conducive to building world-class piano technique, the more intense the stress and trauma to the hands, the better! cool

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Originally Posted by Debussy20
I'm a tennis player. Was playing and training close to 20 hours during the summer. I suffered a stress fracture in my back and now im still trying to fight it off. No more kick serve for me!

Matt


That's impossible. Couldn't have been from tennis. According to someone who has been teaching tennis for 20 years, injuries are not possible.

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Originally Posted by pianoloverus
BJones:
I taught tennis for 20 years and often to unathletic adults. I can't remember any of them getting injured. I also coached a high school tennis team and don't remember any injuries there either. In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare.


There's 16 million hits on google for "tennis related injuries":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tennis+related+injuries&aq=0&oq=tennis+related

That's alot of unnecessary articles written for something that can't happen and doesn't exist, don't you agree? whistle

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Originally Posted by BJones
There's 16 million hits on google for "tennis related injuries"... That's alot of unnecessary articles written for something that can't happen and doesn't exist, don't you agree? whistle

Pianoloverus said "In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare". He didn't say injury from tennis "can't happen and doesn't exist".


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Originally Posted by currawong
Originally Posted by BJones
There's 16 million hits on google for "tennis related injuries"... That's alot of unnecessary articles written for something that can't happen and doesn't exist, don't you agree? whistle

Pianoloverus said "In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare". He didn't say injury from tennis "can't happen and doesn't exist".


What he actually said was that in 20 years as a professional tennis instructor, he's never had a student that incurred an injury and has never heard of anyone being injured as a result of tennis. What I asked was how many of his completely injury free students over that 20 year period were concert-level pianists. In making a wise choice, he never answered that question.

It's really a moot point. I'm now an advocate of high impact, high intensity hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder activity for pianists who wish to improve their technique, and agree with him. It makes perfect sense. crazy

I know a competitive Thai boxer whose fingers and hands are so misshapen from countless strikes, and doing free-fall, ballistic, depth knuckle pushups off of boxes to the floor, than back up to the boxes, that he can't even shuffle a deck of cards. I haven't seen him try to play the piano, but I'll bet he's a technical wizard! wink

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Originally Posted by BJones
What he actually said was that in 20 years as a professional tennis instructor, he's never had a student that incurred an injury and has never heard of anyone being injured as a result of tennis.

No, what he actually said was "I taught tennis for 20 years and often to unathletic adults. I can't remember any of them getting injured. I also coached a high school tennis team and don't remember any injuries there either. In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare." (italics mine in both of these quotes)

Look, I don't have any experience here, and no axe to grind. I'm not trying to be nitpicky, and I'm not advocating either playing tennis or not playing it. I gave up playing softball as a teenager because I was scared of finger injuries. I just don't like putting words into other's mouths, and I can't see that pianoloverus was denying injuries happen. Maybe he does think that, for all I know. But he wasn't actually saying it in this thread, which is all I have to go on.


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Might I respectfully suggest that there is more likelihood of
being run over by a herd of wildebeest than playing tennis.

Liberace might have taken out insurance on his hands ... but then, he had to entertain on a diamond-encrusted piano ... and good advertisement ... the rest of us ... continue to use our precious hands to do what we have to do ... quite untroubled by thoughts of high-flown protection.

My life-innings included bone-crunching rugby tackles, sloshing a cricket ball for 6, whamming a golf ball out of sight, scrambling up Table Mountain, winning a few tie-breakers at tennis, zapping a table tennis backhand smash, diving off the top board (only brave enough to 3m ... the 5m had my legs rattling) ... but always, so blessed in sharing a moment of sports action, to have unawares established a wiry physique and good heart ... to have kept me bright and bushy-tailed past seventy ... and I can still play most of the Chopin masterworks.

But chaps ... do watch out for that herd of wildebeest!!

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Originally Posted by BJones
Originally Posted by pianoloverus
BJones:
I taught tennis for 20 years and often to unathletic adults. I can't remember any of them getting injured. I also coached a high school tennis team and don't remember any injuries there either. In my experience tennis injuries are relatively rare.


Tennis injuries are rare, among tennis players. Matter of fact, I have no idea why medical professionals refer to "tennis elbow", as injuries are so rare that it couldn't possibly happen, let alone there be a layman's name for the malady that really doesn't exist, as you say.
Did you take a poll as to how many of your tennis tudents were pianists? If so, and they were all pianists who had no ill effects whatsoever with tennis compromising their keyboard dexterity, than I stand corrected and recommend a robust daily regime of tennis as a beneficially piano-safe form of exercise that will surely enhance piano technique.


Yes, tennis injuries are rare in my rather extensive experience, but as I said in my first post they do occur and tennis elbow is the most common. I never said tennis elbow doesn't exist. In fact, I first brought it up.

Why would it possibly be relevant to find out how many of my tennis pupils were pianists? My point was simply that few tennis players get injured.

Finally, just because few get injured doesn't imply tennis should be used to develop piano technique. Thus your last statment is not logical.



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