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Hi, my name is Dr. Terry Zachary and I'm here to talk today about hand muscle exercise and
how the hand muscles work in playing guitar. I have had unique perspective to be on both
sides of... I have been very interested in learning guitar myself. I have been learning
for about the last three or four years. And before that, I was very involved in seeing
guitar injuries. So I have been on both perspectives and understand what both people look at. In
designing the product that I designed -- which is the Handmaster Plus -- that we distribute
through GHS, that's our brand partner in the music business and an excellent brand partner.
We have discovered that all the things that we have learned in seeing what causes injuries
in musicians and also seeing what helps musicians play better based on the muscle patterns that
we are about to pick up - I'm showing you how we have been picking up for the last few
years.
We could see a real improvement in performance and also on injury prevention. What I'm going
to show you today. So, we collected information on how the muscle patterns fire. I believe
you know the best exercise for guitars and have a little improved when we are to observe,
study and prove how the musicians' muscles work. And that is what we are doing.
We are using an EMG (electromyogram). So basically, if you can look at my hand here, we have a
set of electrodes that is over the finger flexor muscles and then we also have as a
set of electrodes that's over the finger extensor muscle bellies. The reason why we study this
relationship is that we know that traditionally most musicians are very strong in the muscles
that close the hand and do the gripping, but they are very weak and in fact, very weak
and static in these extensor muscles that support anything that the fingers do.
So I'm going to show you how we collect that. Basically, I'm going to play a couple of chords
here and then I'll show you how the image looks in the computer. So all these information
is right here. It is going to be fed in the computer and we are going to get a pattern
and the indication of exactly how muscles fire and I'll show that next.
Okay, here is our screen with the EMG (electromyogram) in the computer and it will pick up my finger
motions. As I play the guitar, the green signal which is the top signal in this picture is
the finger extensor muscles and the red signal, which is the bottom signal in this picture
is the finger flexor muscles. So let's watch what happens as I play a guitar. And this
is the left hand, this is the cording hand.
So you can now see why it is so important that we strengthen all of the muscles of the
hand. You have nine muscles that close the hand and you also have nine muscles that open
and spread the hand. These muscles that open the hand are the ones that were in green during
the EMG Test. They are the ones that will support any action of the hands. If these
are weak, they are going to fatigue very quickly on these ones. Okay?
Everything that I want musicians to know especially guitarists is that the product that we use
is the same product that we use to strengthen the hands is the GHS Handmaster Plus. We also
use for warm up and cool down.
So let me show you a couple of exercises. It's really simply, our main exercise -- you
put the thumb on the base of the thumb, the finger loops on all of the fingers. Really
simply, you are just going to keep the wrist straight, you are going to close against resistance
of the ball. Your going to open against the resistance to the cords. So, close for one,
open and spread for one, close, open and spread. Continue to do that until you feel uncomfortable
fatigue. Okay? That should take you about thirty seconds to a minute. You can see that
as you do, you're going to get this fantastic feeling in your forearms, hands, fingers.
You'll see that we are taking hand through its full natural range of motion. so we also
know we are going to stimulate maximum blood flow.
So just by this one simple exercise, we strengthen all the muscles that close the hand in balance
with all of the muscles that open the hand. And we also get full maximum blood flow and
lymph drainage to the hands, joint surfaces and all of the tissues. It's a fantastic exercise.
The other exercise that we show our guitars and base players. Is to isolate the stabilizer
muscles. Those are those muscles in green. What we have them do here -- very simply squeeze
against the ball, keep the thumb on the ball, extend just the fingers and then extend the
wrist back. So three steps: squeeze for one, extend for two, extend the wrist for three.
Okay, squeeze, and when we extend, we get these finger extensor muscles. When we extend
the wrist, we get the wrist extensor muscles.
So all of the muscles that stabilizes the finger action gets done in that one exercise.
Okay? So the two exercise again. Close, open spread, close, open spread. The second exercise
-- squeeze, keep the thumb on the ball, extend just the fingers, extend the wrist back, squeeze,
extend, extend.
Those two exercises are going to be complete for the musician. And after a musician has
gone through a performance, I can tell you that, you've see it on the EMG, that the muscles
are so so active. So after muscle contraction you are going to have toxins in the tissues.
And you want to just take the ball again for thirty seconds -- close, open, close, open.
Okay. And that is going to be a nice warm down exercise.
I hope we have helped you a lot as far as your proper exercise and the reason why you
exercise the hand muscles properly. And, why you want to warm up and cool down. To get
the product, I want you to visit ghsstrings or doczac.com. That's w-w-w-dot-d-o-c-z-a-c-dot-com
and you could buy the product online and you get lots more information on each of those
websites.