Care for your hands

[BoliverAllmon]

What do you do to take care of your hands? i.e. massage, stretches, anything else

Boliver Allmon

[la_carrenio2003]

I use cream for taking care of the skin, but maybe because I'm a woman.I also avoid abrupt temperature changes: once I got one finger inflamed because I washed my hands with very cold water after several hours of practicing, but it was just once. I think the most important care is not starting to play difficult things without appropriate warming -thrills or scales-. I had a friend in Conservatoire,a south korean girl who used to strength the spaces between the fingers all the time when she was not playing, she believed that it gave her more elasticity. I listened more advices about the care of the back: my teachers always said that swimming was the perfect exercise for a pianist. About massaging the hands I heard bad replies,and I that it's very dangerous in case of pain -that of course never has to occur-. For developing the reflexes there is a funny exercise: to bit lightly the back of a pencil quickly with the zone of the finger we use to play the key -the "throat" of the finger as my teacher used to say- changing the fingers very quickly in order, I mean 1,2,3,4,5 or back.  

I hope it was interesting for you  in some way, bye.

[xenon]

well...my hand tends to peel during competition season do to heavy-duty practicing, so i use Glycomed, a glycerin-based (aloe vera?) cream that helps my hands.  its really good and sells for $10 CAD.