How Learning to Play the Piano is Similar to Getting Rid of Pain

How Learning to Play the Piano is Similar to Getting Rid of Pain

January 2010.

I was back on campus for my final semester of college. “Senior Spring” as it’s referred to.

After almost four years of college, I didn’t exactly want this semester to be the most difficult of my academic career. Graduation was four months away and I was ready to move on.

I believe the formal physical therapy diagnosis for this is “Senioritis.”

Luckily, I had room in my schedule for some electives. Or, in my mind at the time, opportunities to decrease my workload and have a little more fun.

The semester before, during class registration, my roommate and I scrolled through the list of available electives. There it was: Piano Workshop.

We immediately added it to our class schedule.

I’d never played piano before (well, if you don’t count messing around on the piano at my grandmother’s house when I was a kid), but how hard could it be?

I’d be playing Chopin in no time.

Back to January 2010: it was the first day of Piano Workshop. My roommate and I sat next to each other, unaware of what we’d gotten ourselves into.

The class met for 1 hour and 15 minutes, and I felt every second of it that day.

I walked out of class feeling completely overwhelmed. This wasn’t going to be a breeze like I’d thought.

It was clear that I was going to have to practice, and actually study. Imagine that!

What I’d failed to consider is that playing the piano is a skill. And like any other skill, it requires practice and repetition to get better.

A colleague of ours, Dr. Zac Cupples, recently said, “Moving without pain is a skill that must be practiced and performed over time.”

Movement is a skill, too.

When we started playing basic scales in my piano class, I realized that I couldn’t learn each scale by just playing it a few times. I had to practice them regularly to get them to stick.

The same goes for movement. If you’re feeling pain when you move, you may need to learn to move in a new way.

Learning to move without pain is like learning a piano scale for the first time: it’s a process.

But with practice comes improvement. And the more your movement improves, the less likely it is that pain will hold you back.

Do you need to figure out how to move without pain? Let us do it for you.

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