Yesterday I had the wonderful privilege of getting to present a 2-hour workshop to the students and faculty at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Special thanks to Dr. Heather Small for organizing this event. We had a great turnout and lots of class participation. It was amazing to see how almost everyone had an ache, a pain, an injury previous or ongoing and lots of questions to go with it. I gave out assessments in front of the class and we were all able to learn what to look for when it comes to muscle imbalances in ourselves and our fellow musicians.
We did some body awareness training, corrected some erroneous body maps, learned some self-myofascial release techniques for the chest, neck, calves and TFL and then engaged in some sample exercises. I mentioned a few articles in the workshop, the direct links to them are here if you would like to read them:
- Sleeping Booty: Anterior Pelvic Tilt and Sleeping Butt Symdrome Part I
- Sleeping Booty: Anterior Pelvic Tilt and Sleeping Butt Syndrome Part II
- Taking the Pain Out of the Piccolo
- Foam Rolling
- Thoracic Exercises and Activating the Lower Traps
- Stretching Adequately Before, During and After Playing
- Shoulder Health
There are many more covering what I talked about more in depth – if you just type in what you are looking for in the search box at the bottom of the page (or click on the tag in the cloud to the right) they should come up.
If you are interested in purchasing some of the equipment we used, you can get that here:
I really would have liked to have had a bit more time to go through the exercises and done some assessments with people with their instruments, there would have been room for this in the 3-hour presentation, but we do what we can, right? If you’d like an assessment from me (with or without your instrument) we can still set that up via Skype – it’s free and just takes a few minutes. From there I can tell you your possible muscle imbalances and what you should and should not focus on when it comes to strength training and stretching.
I’ve got a few more workshops upcoming – would you like yours to be on the list for next year? Plans are tentatively being made to visit TX, GA and MI, I would love to add you to the schedule! Email me if you’re interested and you can get more information on the workshop page.