No pain, no gain?

[faa2010]

I have heard that expression many times, but times change and the focus is subjective in the end.

Example, your teacher tells you have to do Hanon or Czerny as warming exercises, after a time, your fingers hurt like your body muscles after an ardous aerobics exercise and your teacher says that's fine because your fingers are getting "fit", but another can tell you that you have to stop doing those exercises because you are damaging your fingers.

As a pianist, where can you apply the expression "no pain, no gain"?

[sordel]

Nerves and joints don't usually improve with exercise, so if you're getting pain in either you should probably change your approach. Mobility and muscles can improve with exercise, so general "aching" is probably worth tolerating. In general, though, you should always try to avoid pain because pain is not of itself a sign of improvement: there's usually a way that you can get the same improvement with less discomfort.

Also, bear in mind that your body can take a lot of punishment before it hits suffers permanent damage; the idea is to prevent the damage that will ultimately result in more serious injury.

[mcdiddy1]

In my opinion there should never be physical pain in a practice session. There may be mental pain of forcing yourself to practice even when you do not want to and working hard to figure out a difficult technical passage. I think in that area you will gain benefit from going through "pain" because when you are introduced to that similar problem again, it will be less stressful and much easier to solve.

As far as practicing till a body part is in pain, is not effective because music making particular piano playing is an exercise of the small muscles and can be overloaded when doing things in an inefficient way ( bad technique). Working hard with bad technique only reinforces they physical faults, hurts the body, and ultimately is less musically satisfying. So in this situation you can have all the pain you want, but you will see little gain.

What you would want to do is practice smarter not physically harder. When you practice and things become easier to do and efficient, you do not need to continue to do it over and over again for results. In my opinion once you can do the first couple of exercise of Hanon, you can and should leave it alone and get on to repertoire. Once you have achieve a level of hand coordination there is no need to practice it for years.