How Does Playing Guitar Affect The Body? Physical Considerations

Physical Considerations

Some amazing things have been accomplished by guitarists suffering from physical setbacks. For instance, consider Tony Iommi, the man who wrote all of those demonic-sounding Black Sabbath riffs. The man lost his fretting-hand fingertips in an industrial accident, which would have made many guitarists seriously question the future of their playing careers. Tony, however, decided to make himself some prosthetic leather fingertips, switched to a lighter string gauge and carried on making great music.

Or take Les Paul, that Leonardo da Vinci of the guitar community who pretty much invented multitrack recording and the solid-body electric guitar, not to mention conquering the pop charts of his day and designing the classic Gibson guitar that bears his name. Les’s guitar playing has often been overshadowed by his other contributions in the field of music, but if you check out his instrumental recordings from the 1950s, you’ll hear a guitarist with great technique, an impish sense of humour and some ideas that were decades ahead of their time. The story goes that, when Les once broke his right arm in a car accident, medical experts told him that his playing days were over. Undeterred, he insisted on having his arm set at a right angle so that the plaster cast would permanently hold his picking hand in a playing position, and he carried on quite happily!

Then, of course, there’s the case of Django Reinhardt, who, along with Stephane Grappelli, was one of the leading exponents of the gipsy jazz style and whose fiery acoustic work continues to inspire legions of imitators to this day. Django was caught in a caravan fire that left two of his fretting-hand fingers withered and virtually unusable, except to form a few chord shapes, and yet if you listen to any of his recordings he sounds more dexterous than most guitarists with their full quota of digits intact.

The point is that all sorts of things are possible if you’re committed enough to your music. However, I should add that the above-mentioned players were exceptional. They all had the imagination and vision to come up with something unique in their musical output, and they all felt compelled to carry on sharing these new sounds with the rest of the world, regardless of the obstacles that they encountered. People like that are a rare breed, and indeed most of us find that our playing can be severely hampered by injuries far more trivial than the unpleasant ones described above. In other words, playing is a more enjoyable experience if you can just take care of yourself. What follows is a selection of basic self­ maintenance advice.

Fingertip Injuries

The most familiar form of pain to most guitarists is surely Sore Fingertip Syndrome. This rather spurious­ sounding medical condition (and yes, I did invent it myself) is the result of too much practice, causing your fingertips to feel so tender that it hurts just to touch a string, let alone perform a four-fret bend.

Bear in mind that an experienced guitarist has spent years building up the calluses (areas of abnormally hard skin) on his fingertips. If you subject your own fingers to the regimen of slight but constant abuse that is guitar playing, they will normally respond by toughening up, becoming a little bit more leathery, more impervious to pain and texturally more like the stuff you’d normally expect to find on the soles of your feet. However, if you make excessive demands of them, they can’t always keep up, and the result is sore, shiny red fingertips with the outer layers of skin missing and maybe even a blister or two thrown in for good measure. This can put you out of commission for quite a while and is obviously worth avoiding. Yes, there are rock martyrs out there like Ted Nugent, who claims to have spent every night of his teenage years practising until his fingers bled, and it’s a moving story, but really, bleeding fingers are not good things. Blisters are not good things – they cause you unnecessary pain, they make you sound worse and nobody’s going to feel sorry for you. If you feel any injuries of this nature coming on, you should stop playing for a day or so to give your digits the recovery time they need. If you push things too far, it could take weeks to get yourself back in working order, by which time you’ll have missed enough playing time to cancel out the benefits of that initial, fateful practice session.

The conventional way of protecting your fingertips, by the way, is by dipping them in surgical spirit, which should toughen them up quicker than the old-fashioned just-keep-playing approach.
Following on from this theme of ‘prevention is better than cure, I’d like to mention a couple of other things pertinent to the issue of callus maintenance. Firstly, it’s a bad idea to pick up a guitar immediately after your hands have been in the water. After a shower or a hearty bout of washing up, your calluses are at their softest, and five minutes of normal playing can tear them to ribbons. When they dry out, you’ll find that flakes of skin are dangling from your fingers. Sadly, those flakes of skin used to be your calluses. Not good.

Secondly, be careful if you’re thinking of raising your action or increasing your string gauge. There are some very good reasons why you’d want to do this, as you’ll see in the next section, but it does increase the amount of wear and tear suffered by your fingertips and means that they have to toughen up to a new level of resilience. Remember, slowly does it – even if you’ve been playing for years, jumping up from .009- gauge strings to a set of .013s can play havoc with your hands.

Thirdly, it helps to change your strings from time to time and also to wipe them clean after playing. Old strings get rusty and abrasive, making sliding up and down them a more painful experience than performing the same movements on a new set.

Fourthly, once your fingers have developed the calluses they need to cope with your playing style, your job is to keep them there. Playing regularly is obviously a good plan, but I admit that there are always going to be times when this isn’t possible – anything from the pleasant prospect of a holiday to the decidedly less pleasant prospect of an increased workload can interfere with your best-laid plans. If you find months cropping up in your calendar in which you know you won’t get as much time to practise as you usually do, you might want to invest in a cheap acoustic. The cheaper and more unplayable it is, the better, as playing a real dog of an instrument for two minutes can keep your fingertips in shape as efficiently as playing your favourite shred machine for an hour. (Like 98 per cent of my statistics, that one was clearly made up, but you get my drift.)

Finally, if you’re in an Indian restaurant and the waiter brings over your order on one of those sizzling metal skillets that come on wooden bases, you’d better believe him when he warns you not to touch it. I’ve known a player to have such good calluses that he unconsciously picked up one of those things with his fingers, quite happily poured some food onto his plate and felt no pain until the moment he put the container back onto the table and attempted to remove his hand from it. As you’ve probably guessed, his calluses had stuck to the hot metal (you can wince now if you like) and it took him a long time to grow them back.

If you’re playing the guitar for a living, slightly different rules might apply. Your duty as a professional musician is to get the show done, no matter what. After all, people have paid hard-earned shekels to come and see you, and whatever problems you might be experiencing, your audience doesn’t need to know about them. This philosophy explains such horrific-sounding tales as Buddy Guy sticking pins in his fingertips to accelerate the regeneration of hard callus material (I’m not sure how good an idea this is, to be honest, but it works for Buddy)or Stevie Ray Vaughan’s infamous DIY skin graft.

In case you haven’t heard this one before. here’s a quick bit of background. Stevie’s top E string was normally a .0 13, and it’s been suggested that he sometimes went as heavy as a .018 (although admittedly this would have been tuned a little lower than concert pitch). Being a Texan blues kind of guy, Stevie used a lot of wide bends in his playing style, and you can imagine how his fingertips reacted to this insensitive treatment: occasionally, they simply couldn’t cope. Stevie’s solution was to stick his left­ hand fingertips onto his right forearm with Superglue. wait for it to dry and then rip! I guess the idea was to borrow some epidermis from a part of his body that didn’t need it so much and transfer it to his fingertips, which needed all the skin they could get. (Incidentally, I believe that Superglue was invented during one of the World Wars as a quick way of sticking damaged soldiers back together in situations where there was no access to proper surgical know-how or materials. Stevie’s use of the stuff doesn’t sound half as grotesque when you look at it from that perspective. Still, it’s a little extreme for most people.)

Moving onto a different example, anyone who remembers the music shops of the 1980s will recall that most bass-playing patrons would make an instant beeline for any bass with no headstock, pick the thing up, adjust the strap so that it resided just below chin­ level and then commence furiously slapping it with their thumb. This was almost entirely due to the inspirational work of the bass-playing frontman of Level 42, Mark King, who took slap-bass playing to new heights of popularity and technical excellence. (Check out the live album A Physical Presence if you don’t believe me.) Constantly pummelling the low E string on bass with the side of your thumb is about as good for your skin as playing violent blues on a guitar strung with .013s. and Mr King found that the callus on his thumb was prone to cracking open from time to time. His solution was to wrap electrical tape around the area in question. After this, not only did his thumb stop hurting but he actually found that he preferred the sound – the tape added a little click to the start of each note, giving his tone a percussive quality that nicely complemented his slap-intensive playing style. Now, there’s a happy ending!

All of the above applies to minor fingertip injuries which will generally heal themselves if you just pamper them a little bit. However, there’s another kind of problem that you might encounter that’s far more serious and harder to remedy. I’m referring to tendon troubles.