Unexpected Lessons in Music through Knee Surgery Rehab
In February 2022, I had a freak accident where I completely tore the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) in my left knee.
It was a slow recovery of a few months to heal from the initial injury, but after that came the surgery to reconstruct the ligament, enabling me to live normally in the future. My surgery happened in January of 2023. The rehabilitation process has gone quite well, thankfully. It also, unexpectedly, has taught me so much about learning music! The processes are actually quite similar (though at first glance may seem different ) because they both involve consistent, conscious exercises with increasing complexity to master precise movements.
At the time of writing this, it is 8 months after my reconstruction surgery, and I’ve learned a list of lessons I thought I’d share with you.
Consistency is key. This is obvious as a general concept, but less so until you experience the progress in your own body. When I started my rehabilitation process, I could barely lift my left leg. For 2 weeks, I would struggle through 10 simple, seated leg lifts, sometimes to the point of tears from the pain and effort. Then all of a sudden, sometime in the third week, I could get through those 10 leg lifts easily, in what felt like an overnight change. I couldn’t see the muscle forming underneath my skin, but it was. Slow, consistent effort is really the only way to learn anything in muscle training. That leads me to my second point:
Mapping your progress is the best learning tool. I think as artists, we tend to shy away from a more typically “scientifically-minded” approach to gathering data, but keeping a log is a good way to keep yourself intimately familiar with your progress. It also keeps your mind mindful of and present in the tasks you are currently working on. This is especially important in injury prevention, particularly in the repetitive movements involved in playing a small string instrument.
Strength training is just a macro version of instrument playing. Strength training teaches you to use your big muscles, to tone and refine them, and to gain control over them. But ultimately, all it is is a process of targeted exercises designed to increase both the physical strength of a muscle and the complexity of neural control over that muscle. The more you work on an exercise in strength training, the more the neural networks between the brain and muscle are strengthened and quickened, leading to precise control over that section of your body. This is exactly what you are doing when you practice, for example, a difficult shift in a passage of violin music. Through a controlled (and focused) amount of repetition of that task (i.e., the shift), a neural network is created to provide and maintain mastery of the motion executing the shift in question. It is, in effect, a micro version of strength training, because you are training much smaller muscles in your fingers and arm than, say, your quadriceps, but the principle is the same.
Broadly speaking, playing the violin is high-precision athletics (as my ELDOA teacher so profoundly put it). This is not meant to diminish the extreme beauty, complexity, art, and je-ne-sais-quoi of the noble act of making music. Ultimately, of course making music is about creating art, music and connection; however, the specific ways that art and connection ar created is through precise, controlled movement. That’s also what the root of athletics involves: precise, controlled movement accomplished by intense, purposeful training. To effectively play the violin - that is, to be able to express all of the nuances, humanity, and emotional elements - you have to develop a complex and well-oiled neural network and, by extension, movements.
So much so, in fact, that ultimately you want your instrument to feel like an extension of your body. Mastery of an instrument really begins when you feel so comfortable with it that it functions as an extension of yourself.
Gaining that much control requires specialized training through technique exercises, scales, bow arm coordination, open strings, left-hand isolations… you name it. This specialized training is also just a micro version of strength training. As mentioned before, I started out doing 10 leg lifts. Once I mastered that, I did my first squat (assisted). Then I did squats (unassisted) and calf raises. Then I did squats with weights and calf raises with a jump. I slowly started increasing the complexity and strength required of the exercises as I mastered the basics and developed muscle. It is the same with scales: you start out with an easy 2-octave scale in first position. Then you increase to an easy scale with one straightforward shift. Then you increase to 3-octave scales. Then you increase to 4-octave scales, also while incorporating speed into all of these variations.
This specialized training is ultimately just a micro version of strength training. The ultimate goal might be different: strength training in the gym to get your left knee back to normal functioning capacity is not quite the same end result as being able to play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto flawlessly. However, the approach and the mindset are exactly the same.
And it is so motivating to see your progress!
The biggest difference between macro strength training and learning an instrument is that your progress is much easier to see for yourself, because the movements themselves, and the range of motion they require, are so much bigger. Because the muscle groups are bigger and you’re dealing with bigger movements in general, it’s a lot easier to see your progress in 1 week of strength training vs 1 week of violin playing. This clear progress creates a positive feedback cycle that I am taking back into my violin practice, and is one that I hope I can inspire others to cultivate too. The confidence I now feel in my ability to execute an exercise and trust my progress is amazing, whether it’s in a squat with a barbell or in a complicated fast passage in a violin work. The approach and mental patterns are the same.