Fatigue And Recovery On The Guitar

Have you ever had a few days off from practicing only to return feeling like you could play everything you’re working on flawlessly that day? But the following day the exact opposite happens. You feel like throwing the guitar out the window. Your hands feel slow, your mind feels slow, and nothing seems to connect. Working with amateur and professional guitarists over the years taught me that most, if not all, never think about fatigue and recovery on the guitar.

Correlation Between Fatigue and Intensity

Let’s first establish where I am getting this idea from in the first place. It comes from the athletic world. I am an amateur triathlete. But I treat the training I do for the sport similar to the training I do for the guitar. There are definite similarities and differences. Both, however, use muscles and train muscles to execute the movements necessary for success.

“When training load increases, you can surmise that fitness is increasing. We can also assume that fatigue is increasing.”^[1]Friel, J. (2016). Basic Training Concepts. In The Triathlete’s Training Bible: The World’s most comprehensive training guide (p. 37). essay, Velopress. In other words, if you run a mile you’ll accumulate a certain amount of fatigue depending on your fitness level and intensity during the run. If you keep the same intensity and run 3 miles, then you can take it to the bank that you’ll be more fatigued the following day than the day after the 1-mile run.

Depending on how fatigued you become and your ability to recover, you might not be able to train as hard again for two or three days. Obviously, as your fitness level rises over time through careful training, the more intensity and endurance you can handle with less recovery time. This is to some extent because some elements of recovery are held within individual genes.

Another key point to make concerning fatigue is that it always appears before fitness. Your body needs to repair/recover itself and get stronger before it is able to accomplish higher levels of fitness without as much fatigue. Fortunately, for athletes and guitarists, fitness changes slowly in either direction. If you taper your training for a race, then your fitness level drops a little while you recover from fatigue but not so much that it changes your performance in the race.

Fatigue and Recovery For Two Types Of Guitarists

Now, how does all of this relate to guitarists? I like to say that guitarists are athletes from the shoulder down. You might not have thought of it this way, but everything we do requires the movement of muscles. Though there usually isn’t the same amount of lactic acid build-up as seen in athletics, the fatigue from practicing happens much the same.

Before launching into the idea of fatigue and recovery on guitar, let’s differentiate two groups that need to be taken into consideration. The first group is professionals and those that want to be professional guitarists. The second is the amateur who, much like myself in triathlon, wants to improve as much as possible but is constrained by many other obligations in life. The former will be committing much more time and will be able to achieve higher levels of fitness on the guitar than those of the latter group. This is due to many differences including, age beginning guitar, other musical training, years of practicing, the time allowed for practicing, genes, and many other differences. Both, however, usually do not take into account the effects of fatigue and recovery on their progress in playing the guitar.

The Amateur Guitarist

Let’s hit up the amateur first. This will undoubtedly be the majority of the audience reading or listening to this information. From informal surveys and notes I’ve taken over the years, the average amateur gets 3 to 4 days of practice every week. The amount of time in each practice differs greatly depending on the available amount of dedicated time and material needed to be worked on. Overall, 30 to 45 minutes tends to be a good number. In a perfect world, the spacing between practice sessions would be different depending on the focus of each session. Remember, in the hypothetical situation we are constructing, we are not currently taking into account the mental fatigue and mental organizing that takes place when memorizing new movements. I am only concerned currently with the physical fatigue and rest that may occur.

Duration and Fatigue Accumulation

What types of practice create fatigue in our fingers and arms? To relate it to sports again, I propose frequency, duration, and intensity. For most amateurs, the frequency will be the least flexible due to other commitments in life. However, some students find time to practice in the mornings and evenings on certain days. This will definitely contribute to fatigue accumulation.

Duration does not mean the amount of time sitting in the chair with a guitar in our hands. Duration is the amount of time the muscles and joints of the hand can continue a certain action without getting tired. For beginning guitarists struggling to play a G, C, and D progression for an entire song is too demanding. Others find it a struggle to make it through the entirety of a single-note solo of the same song. A fingerstyle player might have easy pieces that are not taxing on the hands but find more difficult pieces that include multiple barre chords too tiring to play entirely.

This duration continues in how one might practice each of those challenges. How long can you accurately practice the barre chord without tiring too much and building up fatigue? If scale practice is a part of the playing, the number of repetitions becomes the duration factor. Duration is not as easily transferred over to practicing guitar as it is in running, swimming, or cycling. There are many different skills that can be practiced for a specific duration rather than only the three when considering the triathlon. I am aware that I am oversimplifying the triathlon training, but this is about guitar, not about athletics. The key is to be observant of how the duration of each skill you are working on affects your fatigue in any given practice session.

Intensity and Fatigue Accumulation

Intensity typically relates to pace or tempo. Playing a sixteenth-note three-octave scale at 120 bpm is high intensity for most guitarists, even professionals. So is playing a song that uses hand movements that tire your muscles (read has a lot of barre chords or stretches). Repeating highly intense movements and tempos creates fatigue in our muscles.

Furthermore, the muscles that move the fingers are intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic muscles are inside the hand and extrinsic muscles are in the forearm. The forearm muscles open and close the fingers for the majority of the movement we use to play the guitar. I like to think of the intrinsic muscles as the fine tuners of the forearm muscles. They are smaller and give precise execution and strength to the larger movements. They also allow for the movement vertically from string to string.

The problem with intrinsic muscles is their size. They are small and tire quickly. The extrinsic muscles are larger and have more endurance. This is important when determining the intensity and duration of a practice session. When the smaller muscles begin to fatigue the fingers rely more heavily on the larger muscles. This has, usually, a negative effect on our technique. It is sometimes difficult to know when one is sacrificing technique because the smaller muscles are fatigued. Experience and observation is the best teacher. I’ve never heard a student say their forearms are tired. They always refer to the tiredness in their hands. This is the tiring of the small intrinsic muscles.

Awareness And Adjustment Of Practice Sessions Concerning Fatigue And Recovery

What do we do with this new knowledge of fatigue? Our practice sessions should take into account this understanding so that we are as recovered as possible upon beginning the next session. I am a huge fan of planning my practice before the week begins. This not only allows me to make room for recovery but also eliminates the wasted time of deciding what to practice during my practice sessions.

In deciding my sessions, using an 80/20 rule has always been helpful. On a side note, we see this in endurance running from the great Kenyan athletes. They spend 80% of their time running at very low intensity and only 20% at higher more fatiguing intensities.^[2]https://8020endurance.com Back to guitar, using the rule above, plan your practice sessions around low-intensity work. This usually includes slow accuracy practice throughout. It also limits tougher sessions of barre chord and stretch work. Most fatigue happens in the fretting hand but keeps in mind the picking and/or strumming hand.

Let’s say you have four days of practice scheduled. Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. Monday and Thursday have two days between sessions. This can sometimes create difficulty when you are learning new movements. But that is mostly due to the way the brain processes new information. Again, let’s stick to the physical aspect of playing. Saturday through Monday are sequential. Therefore, putting highly intense practice on Saturday would lower the improvement for Sunday and Monday because no time for recovery exists for an intense session. I’d place my most intense session on Monday. This would include full play-throughs of difficult pieces, higher tempo sessions of scales and arpeggios, and any other high-intensity activity that will greatly fatigue my hands.

Then, on Saturday and Sunday, I’d place my low-intensity practice like accuracy and memory work. Memory work is slow but intense for the mind but not the muscles. This type of organization will help ensure that I have two good days of light work followed by a very intense day on Monday. Then, I would have a two-day break until Thursday to resume. I might make Thursday another intense day of practice due to the day off on Friday.

Taking too long in-between sessions causes our finger fitness to diminish creating another session not intended to be fatiguing. After 96 hours, the improvement in muscle fitness begins to decline. Therefore, be careful to get a practice session at least every 3 days.

The above is just one scenario of how the idea of fatigue and recovery might play out in a practice week. Also, keep in mind the recovery before the day of your lesson. Many students show up unknowingly fatigued to their lesson and do not perform at their peak. It may be difficult to think this way in the beginning. However, the rewards for the planning and execution of such ideas are a consistent improvement from week to week in almost every area of your guitar playing.

How Do Fatigue And Recovery Affect The Professional Guitarist?

Everything, so far, has been focused on the amateur. There are many more amateurs playing guitar than there are professionals. The professional or aspiring professional should take the ideas presented much more seriously. This is especially true for planning the fatigue level at upcoming concerts, shows, and recitals.

In sports, the idea of tapering is when you pull back the intensity to recover before a big race. The same should hold true for professional musicians. Depending on the difficulty of the music, the tapering needs to be considered for practice sessions usually a week out. Speed and tempo work would cease to be worked on in the final week or two with a larger portion focused on accuracy. However, this does not mean that songs should not be played at tempo. As a matter of fact, the closer to the performance the more the practice sessions should resemble the performance.

For instance, a full recital play-through might take place on Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday might focus on accuracy and memory. Then, Thursday might focus on only the pieces that give the most trouble up to tempo and accuracy for everything else. Friday might include a lot of visualization work leading up to a Saturday afternoon recital. This might also be spaced out over the course of two weeks depending on the event, the songs, and the difficulty level. Similar thoughts in preparation would apply to guitarists in any genre including jazz, bluegrass, and rock guitarists.

Rigidity Is Not Helpful

Above all, practicing needs to be dynamic and flexible. Attention must be paid by the player to the amount of fatigue the hands are building up during any given practice session. An unforeseen amount of fatigue in playing may necessitate the adjustment of the pre-planned practice for the week. I know from my own experience, and my students, that fatigue and recovery are just as real in playing a musical instrument as they are in athletics. Knowing how to identify fatigue and recover properly will only increase the amount of development you desire from day to day and week to week.