relaxation program

• Start in horse stance, put both hands over your lower abdomen.


• Shift your weight onto your right foot, lift your left foot and bring it into meet your right and then back out to step to a point just in front of where it was in the horse stance but pointing out at about 45.


• Only when your foot is down shift your weight forward on to your left foot. Your pelvis needs to be at the same height as you shift your weight so adjust the amount of flexion in your knees so that you don’t bob up and down.

When you feel comfortable with the walk move on to this one. The palm strike illustrates most of the essential principles of tai chi and is also relevant for guitar players. The aim of the technique is to transfer the force generated by pushing into the floor with your leg through the rest of your body to the palm of your hand. Learning this exercise will develop:

This exercise resembles the motion of the hammers on a Tibetan hand drum. It's another one that adds movement to the basic horse stance albeit a little more vigorous than the previous. The emphasis here is on allowing the movement that originates from the pelvis to find its way to the hands without being impeded by any tension in the pelvis, the upper body or the arm and shoulder.

This is another breathing exercise that you’ll do standing up. We use it in tai chi practice to make fine adjustments to posture. Traditionally it is used to enhance the flow of chi in the upper body, the practitioner allows the chi to flow through the arms and across the chest in a circle. Whether or not we are impressed with these ancient ideas at the end of the day it works and these theories simply explain our experience. We can take another perspective on what is happening.

The postural stability of the horse stance takes away the need for a lot of the upper body adaptations that can affect the neck and shoulders. Combined with an efficient breathing pattern that doesn’t load your secondary respiratory muscles it’ll allow you to lose a lot of the myofascial tension in your upper body.

In horse stance your lower body is stable and it’s easier to bring your breath down into your lower abdomen:

You’ll need to find a playing position where you can maintain the relaxed, grounded sensation you achieved with the progressive relaxation and focused awareness exercises. The first step is to get a solid stance that will allow your upper body to relax. This stance is called ‘horse stance’ because it resembles the position you take when riding a horse. The aim is to create a posture in which your legs take the weight of your upper body, allowing it to relax:

Stress

Some stress we need and some we don't. The tensile stress in your guitar strings is a good thing. When muscles shorten they generate a tensile stress in the tendons and the contractile forces are converted into movement, that's a good thing.

Focused awareness is a term that I use to describe an essential component of the rest of the relaxation program. Martial artists and practiced meditators know it intuitively but they had to learn it too. Essentially it means that you can focus on a particular part of your body and allow it to relax. This is a good exercise to get started:

The technique

Relaxation exercises tend to be classified as either mental or physical. Mental relaxation techniques generally involve visualisation and are commonly used in therapeutical situations and even many spiritual traditions.

Musicians tend to spend enough time in their heads so I prefer physical exercises such as this one. Importantly for the rest of the program it begins the process of focusing on specific areas of your body.