Doing exercise generally will not increase risk of damage to your body.
https://www.abc.net.au/health/talkinghealth/factbuster/stories/2012/06/12/3523522.htmStaying completely at rest is detrimental to our health, why coma patients require exercise done for them?
https://easyphamax2u.wordpress.com/tag/physiotherapy-for-comatose-patients/Playing the piano should not be hand in hand with pain imho. I experienced discomfort when playing early on as a child, my hands were small I had to expand much more than adult hands, physically weaker, going through the many stages of learning how to play comfortably with less effort etc etc. Even in those early days I didn't push myself into the pain zone for extended periods of time, a small amount of lactic acid burn in the muscles was ok but it was always followed by recovery period. My hands now are quite strong compared to my childhood, i have developed muscles on my entire arms, forearm and fingers which all help the efficiency of my playing. I disagree that muscles do not help your playing mechanism, otheriwse a 90 year old could play piano at full force, the more efficient your muscles are the more this can help you playing mechanism too and help you avoid injury.
If something hurts you must stop and reassess your approach. I still may experience some discomfort when practicing difficult technical passages I am trying to solve but I won't be stupid and do the inefficient movements for hours on end in hope that it will solve itself. This is another reason why brute force mindless repetition is silly, extra physical exertion (often with bad technical control) which can increase the chance of injury. I have a good enough practice method to train it without experiencing pain, there is simply no need to hurt yourself, in this case "no pain is much gain!" If you experience pain that is because you are going about training yourself in an unhealthy manner, it may produce results yes but if you are going to push yourself into pain then you may indeed have to pay the consequences some time later down the track. If you have the appropriate technique what you play should feel predominantly soft and easy on your hands if not you need a strategy to acquire it not just repeat repeat repeat.
Injury tends to be due to poor movement, i.e. a "technique" that is harmful.
Yes and this also extends to practice method, a student who is used to brute force repetitive practice risks injury also because they do not have the tools to learn a passage without playing it a billion times.
Now, if a student is being properly guided, but chooses to ignore that guidance and maybe chooses to rush ahead to things he hasn't been taught to do, then yes, that is the student's fault.
Yes. It is a good experience to play not so well then compare it to a better methodology. If a student hurts themselves then perhaps they should treat this as a lesson into listening to their body a bit more carefully and perhaps listening to some of their teachers advice! Though you will find many teachers simply don't tell their students how to practice but rather what to practice. So these students end up practicing inefficiently and hurting themselves, that is the teachers fault.
But if he is not being guided, or worse, is mistaught in regards to efficient movement, then it is that teacher's fault, not the student's. In other words, the teaching and thus learning of efficient movement is important. I think from all that I've read in the past, that you stress doing this as a teacher - am I correct?
A students cannot magically do the correct movements just because they understand how to do it and demonstrate it in a lesson with a teacher. When alone of course they are not always going to be able to reproduce it exactly during their practice sessions. This is where practice methodology needs to come under the microscope and a real reason why many mediocre teachers fail at helping their students. They tell them "what" to practice but not "how" to do it on their own. Also if a teacher gives them a piece which causes them injury then they probably have overstepped the mark in terms of piece difficulty! I'm sure my students practice wrong all the time (as well as correct when they put their minds to it and read our lesson notes!) without me guiding them but they don't injure themselves!! You need a special type of student, one who practice stubbornly a whole lot every day AND practices until they are in pain.
Those in your music circles are probably professional musicians, not poorly taught or wilful students - they have learned how to move properly in their development on their way to becoming professional pianists.
Many students of all levels in my music circle it's not just my professional circle. Injury is a very rare thing to see because of piano playing, I just can't remember off the top of my head of anyone I know personally who has injury from piano playing. Those with injury I know have acquired it from other activities. If it hurts stop, it's pretty simple, if you follow this rule you can't hurt yourself playing piano. When I teach early beginners yes I see tension in their playing but we don't let them hurt themselves, always ask how they feel and when they say they feel tired we give them a break and let them know that is ok to stop and rest. Beginners will play with tension its unavoidable but that doesn't cause them injury when playing piano, you simply don't choose to hurt yourself by pushing past pain barrier stupidly.
The whole "issue" with Hanon is probably due to how it is done physically, rather than those series of notes. For example, if someone does Hanon in an old fashioned outdated way, keeping the hands so still that you could balance a pencil on it, lifting individual fingers high and slamming them down while keeping the wrist rigid, focusing on "strong" fingers - injury is likely.
Maybe its just because I taught a lot of Aussies and we are a tough breed hahaha. Injury is not likely if you play with terrible technique only if you really start to feel pain while doing it and put up with the pain while playing for long periods of time. An early beginner will play with poor technique that is fine, you can't copy paste ideas of mastery into their hands it must form over time. I don't want to explain the process as it would be pages long but just because you play with poor technique doesn't mean that you will injure yourself. I rarely see perfect technique anyway even at the higher levels, everyone has some kind of inefficiency to their playing we are not perfect beings, but you don't see injury from this because imperfect technique does not always cause pain that will lead to injury.
Poor movement is highly likely to lead to injury, yes.
.... Correct movement can do it too.
Any movement can cause injury if you are stupid enough to repeat so many times that you wear yourself down and start feeling pain. Though even the most technically demanding movements on the piano can be made somewhat soft and efficient in the hands, there are really difficult fingerings which cause some type of tension but they exist only for a small fraction of time, some obsessed pianist might focus in on this difficult point and repeat upon it desperate for solution. This may cause damage I am sure, but it is a poor practice method, relying on brute force, this is their downfall, they might have great technique but their approach is failing.
Topic: Hanon and Other Excerises are VERY IMPORTANT