Musical Saw Stretches and Warmups

Playing the Musical Saw can be painful, particularly if you stay at it for hours at a time. The key stress areas are: thumb and finger (unless you use a cheat), your left arm, and your thighs. Even your bow arm can get tired after awhile. We contort our bodies in an asymmetrical way to play the saw, resulting in muscle imbalances. You could end up twisting your torso to such an extant as to distort your neck and compress vertebra as well. A big culprit is repetitive motion injury (both hands) as well as carpal tunnel issues to the saw hand (a cheat will really help alleviate this)We risk injury from repetitive motion and we tend to build tension in our necks, arms and hands with extended practice.

In latter articles, I’ll talk about exercises, however, here are two important things you can do:

1. Warm up (as noted previously, this is something I’ll discuss later on) At this point, you can make up your own exercises – just keep in mind, the goal is to loosen up your muscles and joints so they will come under lesser stress whilst playing.
2. Number two: Take a break every 20 minutes or so and don’t just sit and relax, the purpose of the break is to once again, stretch out and relax muscles and joints.

We’ll come back to this topic sometime in the future. – In the meantime, play well!