Playing guitar, motor skills and stress

Posted on | | No Comments

One aspect of learning to play guitar not often found in online guitar lessons is the role of stress in aquiring new motor skills. The wish to be a guitarist is what sits us down to practice, but at that point it can be useful to drop the desire to succeed at what we are doing and carry out our guitar practice with relaxed muscles. Of course you can’t play the guitar with hands and arms like dead fish but you can return to the question of how much tension do I need to put into my playing at THIS MOMENT? Your playing distracts you from remembering your muscular tension but you can start looking at it again every time you remember. After you’ve tried this a few times you’ll know whether it’s worthwhile continuing or if it’s nothing that holds your interest. Here’s a little quote on this subject from 360 Degree Success.com
“Many people think one thing while feeling and doing another. How often do we find ourselves doing just that? Upset about a previous argument, or worried about an upcoming event, we perform our daily tasks without really being involved in what we are doing. Furthermore, with our minds and hearts elsewhere, we divide ourselves even more by trying to increase efficiency through “multitasking”. In fact, many studies have shown that juggling between many different tasks can actually give you less ability to successfully perform each task and can take you more time overall to complete them all than if you had completed one task at a time. Therefore, contrary to what we may think, multitasking makes us less efficient, less effective, and more stressed out (draining our precious energy).
Many times we do things reluctantly and with the inner wish that we didn’t have to do them, complaining the entire time either vocally or in our heads. This is like driving with your feet on the gas pedal and on the brake at the same time — and the results are the same — burning up many times more energy than is necessary to achieve the desired result.”

Technorati Tags: learning to play guitar, online guitar lessons