Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Building Finger SPEED (Power) - NOT STRENGTH!

Yes, I read a few posts over there. I saw someone posting about grip strength in gymnastics and rock climbing so I just share what I used to do; I know it's a bit off from what you are after. But to have power/speed/agility in piano playing, I think there is no need to do anything else but practice and practice on the piano. My OLD piano teacher often said I played like a little girl because she could produce much bigger sound than I could on the same piano, and she could also play a fast technical piece much faster than I could. And all she did was playing piano.

Until I started doing Dohnanyi holding exercises I never had an idea what a huge difference there was between doing dedicated individual finger-strength building exercises and just playing and playing. This from someone who's been playing for over 42 years, including, by the way, hours and hours spent practicing etudes. I think you may be surprised yourself if you give it a try, LisztAddict. Playing pieces just doesn't target weaknesses with enough sustained focus and suffers from the same deficiency of all etudes and hanon-like exercises - they do not ISOLATE the individual fingers, forcing them to be developed WITHOUT the aid ("contamination") of weight transference and rotation. Mind you, when one actually plays pieces there is nothing wrong with using weight and rotation where they serve artistic and technical purposes.

I find it interesting to read so many different experiences. It just goes to show you that what works for one may not work for someone else. I came to exercise late in life (long after piano). I found that exercise was very beneficial to my playing, but it was about the same time I discovered the secrets of dedicated practice. I would like to respond to some of the comments in this thread.

To Betty: you mentioned students who had no energy after sports meets, well DUH! Of course they'll have no energy. Did they even bother to have a lesson because you weren't willing to reschedule? Competitive meets are extremely strenuous, everyone's trying to win! They give it everything they've got and I'd be disappointed if any of them had anything left for a piano lesson. Why not reschedule around meets if you want your students best? Any significantly strenuous exercise will negatively impact any subsequent piano playing that day.

For those who believe that speed is correlated to strength I'd say yes and no. Speed is correlated to the strength fast twitch muscle fibers. Some have lots of them, some don't, weight training does tend to build the fast twitch fibers especially if one concentrates on speed when training, i.e. working the weight quickly rather than slowly.

However, all of this is ancillary to work at the piano. Dohnanyi is great stuff for finger independance. Probably the most important thing is to take your time warming up and being thorough about it (especially during the winter). It takes me 20 minutes to a half an hour before I feel like I can play my hardest pieces and when I try to rush the process I just play them badly. However, your mileage may vary.

The real benefit of exercise is overall health and strength. During a recent medical procedure my resting pulse was 46 (normal is 72). There is no substitute for good health and that means eating well and exercise. The benefits accrue to all aspects of life, including piano.

Very interesting, Steve - a corroboration of what I learned on the bodybuilder thread - raw strength vs. power.

It takes very little strength to depress a piano key, but lots of agility and control to play anything but the most rudimentary beginner pieces.

From reading the Piano Tuners & Technicians forum, it takes about 55 grams to depress a piano key, if I remember correctly. 55 grams is slightly less than two ounces...not a lot of weight.

Perhaps there are those who have such weak hands and fingers that "strengthening" is appropriate...but I would exhaust completely the traditional avenues of technique (such as Hanon for warm-up and basic agility, and Pishna and Joseffy for strength derived from isolated finger movements while other fingers are held down) before even thinking about pumping iron with my precious fingers!

Yes - a point I make in my original post in the discussion. This fact is used frequently as a rationale for dismissing the need to develop finger strength at all, but I think that's a faulty conclusion. The power one needs to develop seems to have more to do with the power to move each finger with great speed than with the strength needed to overcome the resistance of the key. Again, this apparently is explained by the difference between training for power vs. raw strength.


I agree - I just wanted to know how to go about it in the most efficient and effective way. [Edit: Actually, I like to keep an open mind about untraditional methods of achieving my goals with maximum efficiency (with a healthy dose of caution), but I don't think it's necessary.]

Strength and speed is very different properties.

Compare a tractor to a sports car. Or a brewery horse to a quarter horse!

What you develop with bench pressing and many body working tools etc. is static muscle strength, not necessarily speed.

And the perfect control of all fingers and the sensitivity for pianissimo playing you will not gain with eccessive muscle training, only by playing excercises and listening to the result.

Playing scales pianissimo without and with accents on every 5th, 6 th or 8th note is very good for the control of the dynamics

Piano playing is more like ballet dancing, not log lifting.

Drumour, I know that breaking strings isn't "good" playing. But it was interesting playing, back when I did it. As I said, I don't do it anymore, because even without a teacher, I learned how to not go there.

Jan-Erik - I wonder if you read the discussion I linked to or are mainly responding to the topic of this thread. There is a whole discussion about developing different KINDS of strength - the one you describe, bench pressing, would be "raw strength," not the main goal for pianists. If you do your bench presses with less weight but by lifting FASTER, then you are developing "power." To use your analogy, just as a sportscar has more horsepower and therefore can go faster and accelerate quicker, having the ability to move my fingers quicker and with more force does allows me to play not just faster, but faster with far greater ease. I want each of my fingers to be sportscars, not tractors. Anyway, you have a perfect right to disagree with me, but I would encourage you to try it before dismissing the whole premise. Even the work I've done in this area without all the new knowledge I've learned has given me astonishing results.

Do I need a 4-5 trill? Actually, whether I need one or not, it seems to be coming along nicely. And yes, I think I could break a string with my fourth finger in isolation, since it's attached to the same arm and wrist and body that moves the other fingers that broke strings (one of which was a fifth finger in isolation).

Again, I think we're possibly having a semantic difference here, rather than a real one. I'd never think of that Chopin etude as being about finger strength for the weak fingers. I think of it as being about agility, touch, and finger independence. And I think how to get those qualities is mainly through practicing. But if you can find another, better, more efficient and safe way, more power to you.

As a Physical Therapist, with Certifications in Hand Therapy, Sports Medicine, Orthopedics, Vestibular and Cardiac Rehab, the thought of going to a website where bodybuilders chat to find out how to better improve function and strength of the hands and fingers for playing the piano defies logic. When I walk into the gym and watch most body builders train, I know by what they are doing and how they are doing it that they will some day be my patients. I would be VERY cautious about taking advice from people who believe they know more than they really do. It is also possible to attain results while simultaneously setting oneself up for future injury. I do not mean, by this post, to demean bodybuilders, as I am one myself, but, sometimes a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.

Double post

Your comments are well taken. For me the key word is "cautious." Again, one can injure oneself doing any kind of sport or athletic in an unhealthy way and I don't doubt that many body-builders wind up with health issues as a result of their sport. However, I can assure you that I have a VERY healthy dose of caution when I am exercising and playing at the keyboard and I take great pains to inform myself about how to reach my goals safely (two of my original questions on the bodybiulders' forum related to the issue). I think any conservatory musician would be shocked at how much I limit the amount of time I spend on exercises - rarely more than 30 minutes, often closer to 20, and almost never more than 5 days a week. I agree with you that a bodybuilders' website was a very unlikely place to seek advice about improving my abilities at the piano, but personally i think most of the information I got was terrific.

Actually, the more I think about it, CC2 and WR, the more I think the decision to seek information from a bodybuilder's forum was not such a bad one. Most areas of athletics have benefited greatly from sports science, especially those involoved in competition. Piano pedagogy, on the other hand, amounts to a hodgepodge of hand-me down traditions with little or no real scientific scrutiny, at least nothing comparable.

Jerry,
Sports science is not something people come up with by trial and error while preparing for competitions. The people who develop the experiments in exercise science and physiology that wind up changing the face of sports are very careful to prove their work using scientific methodology. There is a huge difference between a somewhat knowledgeable athlete and a highly trained medical professional or scientist. We are talking about people's bodies and well being here. Even so called "personal trainers", can get certified as such by simply attending a weekend course and then passing an exam. It took me seven years to get my degree, so maybe that explains my discomfort with your choice of advisors. Please note that I did not advise you to go to a piano teacher for information about this particular topic.

CC2 = interesting posts

Do you know if there are muscles in the fingers or only tendons - what do 'finger exercises' actually do?

"For a long time we have been acting against nature by training our fingers to be all equally powerful. As each finger is differently formed, it's better not to destroy the particular charm of each one's touch but on the contrary to develop it. Each finger's power is determined by its shape: the thumb having the most power, being the broadest, shortest and freest; the fifth as the other extremity of the hand; the third as the middle and the pivot; then the second (), and then the fourth, the weakest one, the Siamese twin of the third, bound to it by a common ligament, and which people insist on trying to separate from the third - which is impossible, and, fortunately, unnecessary. As many different sounds as there are fingers." Fryderyk Chopin

Look, I'm not going to try to talk you out of this, or argue about it. Do whatever you want, and I hope it works out well for you. But don't expect me to agree that it's a good idea, because although I do agree that pianists may have something to learn from sports science and medicine, I don't agree that an internet bodybuilding forum is a good filter through which to obtain that information.

Allow me once again to applaud your quest. Exercises away from the keyboard have been a holy grail for at least 150 years.

I have come to the conclusion though that kinesthetic memory/response in piano playing is far more diverse. Every work you study is a distinct path through a jungle of body/key resistance. i.e. playing the piano does not involve anything like the number of repetitive actions as sports.

Isn't it more like billiards (something Mozart was good at)? Is any shot ever the same as another? Repetitive actions, and I have seen this many times, could well have a dulling effect on performance.