Returning after fifteen years off. I went from about thirty minutes a day to three hours over roughly six weeks because I finally have the time, and I have been working mostly on scales and one Chopin etude. Now my forearms are tight by the second hour and my right thumb feels sore the next morning. Nothing sharp, nothing that stops me, but it is new and it is not going away on rest days.
Film your hands from above for ten minutes of the etude and watch it back with the sound off. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest diagnostic available to you tonight.
Structure it like any other physical training and the question answers itself. Three hours in one block is a bad idea for anybody at any level. Two blocks of fifty minutes with a real break, or three blocks of forty, gets you the same volume with much less accumulated tension. Also: five minutes of slow, easy playing at the start, exactly like a warm-up set. I resisted this for years because it felt like wasting practice time.
Disagreeing with the framing slightly. Plenty of people practise three hours a day for years without any of this, so the issue almost certainly is not the number of hours, it is tension — gripping the key bed, holding the shoulder up, not releasing between notes. An etude will amplify whatever you are already doing wrong, which is what they are for. Three hours of tense playing hurts. Three hours of relaxed playing is a normal conservatoire day.
That lines up with the fact that it is worst in the etude and basically absent in slow repertoire. I had assumed the etude was just harder, not that it was showing me something.
The volume is not really the problem, the ramp is — you roughly sextupled your load in six weeks and picked an etude, which is the most repetitive thing you could have chosen. That said, I am not a clinician and neither is anyone else here, and soreness that persists through rest days is the point where I would stop guessing and see a physiotherapist who works with musicians. Mine cost about the same as two lessons and spent most of the session on my shoulder and forearm rather than my hand, which was not what I expected at all.
Worth adding that a physio who works with musicians is a different creature from a general one. The first general physio I saw told me to rest for six weeks, which does nothing about the technique that caused it and costs you six weeks.
Same experience. The useful session was almost entirely about how I sit, where the bench was, and how much my shoulders were doing. Nobody had ever looked at that.
One dull practical thing: check your bench height and distance. I had mine two inches too low for a year and blamed the repertoire for my forearms. Sitting higher, further back, fixed a problem I had been treating as a technique flaw.
@drip_dana · 2mo ago
I pushed through exactly this and lost eight months, so here is my expensive lesson. It went from tightness to a dull ache to not being able to hold a kettle, and by the time I took it seriously it needed proper assessment and a long slow return. The thing that actually fixed it was not rest, it was changing how I was playing — but I only found that out by getting someone qualified to look. Do not let a forum, including this answer, be the thing that decides for you.
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