Body Mapping: preventing and addressing musicians’ injuries

How does one reconcile the age-old notion that music has the power to heal us with the fact that between 70% and 90% of today’s professional musicians are playing while injured? Because musicians’ injuries do not receive the same media attention as injuries sustained in professional sports, it is not widely known that musicians routinely lose their careers from workplace injury. Injury is endemic in the world of musicians, but there are solutions.

Body Mapping, a method discovered by William and Barbara Conable (and then developed extensively by Barbara), teaches musicians how to move according to the true anatomical design of the body in order to prevent injury and enhance facility and artistry.

In explaining Body Mapping, it is useful to draw a parallel with someone who buys a new mechanical toy and is so impatient to put it together that he doesn't read the instruction manual first. He might get it mostly right, but if he doesn't fully understand the design of the toy before starting, he may end up jamming certain bits into wrong relationships with other bits. The toy may even work pretty well at first, but it will never work optimally until every piece is fitting exactly the way it was designed. Once restored to its design, it will move more easily and more smoothly. Clearly, we don't have to assemble our bodies in this same way, but if we do not ‘read the instruction manual’ by understanding how our bones are shaped to fit together to move optimally at our joints, our own movement will be compromised and eventually the strain can lead to injury.

During their years as Alexander Technique teachers, Bill and Barbara Conable had the opportunity to work with a lot of injured musicians. They realized that when musicians have misconceptions about how their bodies are meant to move, they will fail to move according to their true anatomical design, and this failure is often at the root of a musician’s injury. Barbara began writing her books on Body Mapping in the 1990’s to begin addressing this problem. She then developed the material further by creating an organization called Andover Educators (now called Association for Body Mapping Education or ABME) to teach the six-hour course she called What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body (WEM).

In this course, musicians learn about the most common misconceptions both in music pedagogy and also in our culture that lead to ‘mismappings’. Mismappings about a particular joint or region of the body occur when the maps in the brain that represent the body in movement deviate from the body’s true design. The maps start to align with the way the musician thinks they are designed to move and the mistaken notion about our design leads to the initial poor movement. Regular doses of that poor movement (which happen during our daily practice sessions) reinforce the mismapping in the brain. The longer we persist in moving with the mismapping, the deeper the movement map’s neural pathways get, taking us into a vicious cycle which leads to injury.

‘Keeping the shoulders down’ is a common misconception in music pedagogy that leads to unnecessary and habitual muscular work in the upper torso and neck and impedes free movement of the arms. After a musician has practiced hours upon hours while consciously holding their shoulders down, the brain’s new neural pathways become more deeply entrenched causing this kind of movement to feel ‘right’ and familiar to the player even though it results in discomfort and pain. The musician has become mismapped. (Cultural myths such as ‘Sit up!’ or ‘Shoulders back!’ also contribute to musicians thinking that ‘good posture’ means shoulders stay back and down all the time.)

In order to re-map, the musician will have to study the relationships of the bones one to another and also the function that the design of those bones dictates. In this particular case, after studying their own structure with the guidance of a Body Mapping Educator, the musician will discover that the collarbone and shoulder blade unit (what we colloquially call a ‘shoulder’) is a hugely important part of a whole arm and must be allowed to move when the rest of the arm moves. This is because the socket for the ball of the upper arm is contained right within the structure of the shoulder blade itself. If the shoulder blade does not follow the movement of the humerus, it sets up a ‘tug-of-war’ - the humerus trying to move up to take the bow to the violin’s G-string, or to move the trombone slide forward - while the socket is being pulled in a different direction.

Once the logic of the arm’s design is apparent, retraining a healthy whole arm movement can be practiced in activities as simple as reaching for the salt shaker.

In addition to retraining movement, the WEM course also delves into the importance of training musicians to develop both their senses and their quality of awareness. The kinesthetic sense, which tells us about the quality of our movement, is barely trained when compared to the hours musicians spend consciously training their ‘ear’ (auditory sense.) Awareness needs to be retrained because when awareness narrows, as in ‘concentration’, muscles in the body also tend to ‘narrow’ or tighten. We all know if we even imagine trying to play our cello or flute in a phone booth, our muscles begin to constrict to ‘fit us’ into the cramped space. The reverse is also true - when we cultivate an awareness of a much larger space like the one we'll be performing in, our bodies move more freely within that perceived space.

Much can be learned by studying anatomical images and models and examining your own reactions to this information. If you feel surprised by the size, number or shapes of the bones you're looking at, it's likely you are carrying a misconception about how you're supposed to move at that joint and therefore you may be moving against the design of your body. More often than not, this is what is causing the pain or the chronic tension. Correcting this takes patience, but musicians are often very motivated by how much better they feel and sound, sometimes immediately, when they start moving according to the laws of their own body.

Having said all that, a Licensed Body Mapping Educator will always make sure the student has seen a medical professional to rule out the possibility that the pain is being caused by some form of disease. Consulting medical professionals for a diagnosis is an essential step in a musician’s recovery from injury. Sometimes, however, musicians become dependent on medications to numb the pain instead of getting to the root of the problem. Hands-on therapists like highly trained osteopaths and massage therapists are also very important members of a musician’s recovery team, but we will only experience temporary relief if we don’t take responsibility for changing our habitual movement patterns when we play or sing.

The most basic and empowering piece of information musicians need to know about Body Mapping is that through accurate mapping work, we can gain a measure of independence in addressing and managing much of the pain or discomfort we might experience when we play. 

Over the last several decades, thousands of musicians have recovered from injury and enhanced their own careers by learning how to move according to the true design of their bodies as they practise and perform.

Anyone wishing to know more about Body Mapping, find reading materials, or locate a Body Mapping Educator can access the Body Mapping website.

Jennifer Johnson

Jennifer Johnson, violinist, presents Body Mapping workshops internationally teaching musicians to enhance their musical ability and to prevent injury through a clear understanding of how their bodies are designed to move. She has presented at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, was the keynote speaker at the Australian String Teachers’ Association in Brisbane, Australia in 2015 and was a regular faculty member for the New York Philharmonic’s Zarin Mehta Fellowship Program from 2014-2018. She was a guest on Juilliard’s The Bullet-Proof Musician (host Noa Kageyama) in the fall of 2019. She also presents regularly for music schools and conferences across North America and Europe. Jennifer has written three books on Body Mapping: What Every Violinist Needs to Know about the Body, Teaching Body Mapping to Children, and Musician, Heal Thyself: Free Your Shoulders Through Body Mapping. Jennifer is presently a Sponsoring Teacher for ABME and routinely teaches Body Mapping for online platforms such as the InsideOutMusician.