Finger strength is impossible? A soundbite debunked plus the role of the hand in octaves

As the main part of this post, we'll be looking at the nature of the healthy hand motion used by Martha Argerich- to play powerful octaves with extreme freedom and minimal physical impact. In a short video lecture, I'll show why an attitude of trying to reduce the hand movement (that she greatly exaggerates) could actually subject the hand to far more stress, than movement with intent. First though... 

"Fingers don't have muscles and cannot be strengthened. Your hands already have all the strength they need." 

Like myself, I'm sure that many readers will have seen many slight variations on those words, repeated all over online piano forums. I was reminded of that when I stumbled across a photo of Bruce Lee doing a press up on a single finger and thumb of one hand. It turns out that there is also video footage. 

If any of us teachers should choose to repeat that phrase to a student (to keep them from some truly extremist finger strength ideas), what will happen if they ever find out about this? Might they assume that, seeing as fingers "cannot be strengthened", they could reasonably have a casual go at it? After all, the statement says it would have been impossible that Bruce Lee first strengthened his finger to bear load, via gradually paced training. Will they then assume that everyone is likely born with hands that are already "strong enough"- thus severely injuring themselves? Maybe they'll even try some one finger pull-ups? 

More likely, they'll recognise that they have been fooled by misdirection. They could also lose trust in the value/good faith of their teacher's words, more generally. Does it matter if the teacher feels serving up false information is for some "greater good"? Perhaps they'll find out about Wolff's law, which states that all bones can gradually increase in strength and density due to minute micro-fractures during training? Perhaps they'll realise that the idea that fingers don't "have" muscles doesn't particularly even work on a technicality? Does anyone try to argue that they don't "have" the money that's in their bank account? If it's time for their round at the bar, then maybe- although nobody seems to insist that Bill Gates doesn't "have" billions of dollars, just because it's not all sat in his wallet. We may reasonably talk about the external location of either. However, if one body part does rightfully "own" muscles that exist to control the fingers, it is logically those fingers. So it is reasonable to say fingers "have" muscles- that exist in the forearm, to act upon their joints (via a pull on tendons).

Most importantly, human brains always map movement and perception of strength at the joints, rather than from the strict location of the muscle. This is why it feels as if your arm "squashes" your bicep when curling a dumbbell, when your bicep is actually the root cause of a pull. Our brains sense from where the useful effect is, because that's easier to work with. Bruce Lee developed unusual strength in the forearm muscles that would act upon his finger joints, for sure. We can add background detail, but there is no argument that finger joints won't be stronger merely because the muscles are in the forearm. It would be like insisting that your arms can't develop a stronger ability to pull, because the lats are actually in your back. So what? Your arms still pull more strongly if you develop the external muscles. Muscle and bone alike can be strengthened to make more functional finger strength. Both would certainly need to be, before performing rare feats of extreme finger stabilisation (not that I recommend trying them anyway, of course!). In fact, even tendons and connective tissues are able to grow in strength to some degree, via conditioning. There is literally no point to be found that holds any value- only the very weak illusion that a point has been made, via a catchy (yet meaningless) soundbite. 

For piano teachers, shall we now lobby to have the Internet censored, in order to prevent students finding out an inconvenient truth via Bruce Lee? Or shall we recognise that a person of moderate intelligence might see through the sham, regardless? Do we want students who feel weak to secretly turn to extremist schools of finger strength? If someone discovers that the "strength is impossible" claim was just hot air, then don't be surprised if they look for the truth elsewhere. You shouldn't grab any old weak argument, merely because it supports what you think others ought to believe. An argument that is full of holes only puts the conclusion into greater doubt. Maybe we'd look more trustworthy if we built a meaningful case around the truth?

On such lines, while the most old-fashioned ideas of finger strength really can cause significant problems, the role of hand strength is not zero either. It's would be a silly world in which everyone who doesn't value immense muscular exertion is then required to dismiss all strength as wholly irrelevant. It's not true that every last notion of hand strength is always dangerous, nor that it should always be aggressively smeared. Reality is more nuanced. Look at Argerich's hands when she plays octaves (particularly from the angle starting at 1:20). 

Is there really an argument that anyone is just born with visibly strong hands that engage so powerfully and deliberately- compared not only to amateurs, but also to most other professionals? Or that any average hand already exists in a form that could attempt the same- without a paced process of physical development? It's almost as dangerous to imply there would be no need to pace strength development in pianism, as with a one finger press up. Pro-strength and anti-strength extremists tend to offer equally flawed and misleading simplifications. To make any sense out of what is plain for anyone to see, we will need to try to define a difference between healthy and safe employment of hand strength, vs generic straining (of the "no pain, no gain" style). I'd suggest:

It is healthy to gradually develop some "strength" of the hand in relation to movements (both explosive and gradual) that buy ease and freedom. Specifically, the grasping motion that helps support the palm up and and out of the keys via a hand arch (as we see in Argerich's octaves). This has little in common with the level of extreme finger strength that would be required to stabilise a large amount of static mass, as in the one finger pull up or press up. Think more of the type of "strength" that might be required for an explosively high jump by a martial artist. Or even low intensity use of muscular strength, to maintain an alert standing posture (as opposed to a lazy slump). It's generally less healthy to use sustained muscle tension to brace against downward forces from the arm. This is especially problematic if the bridge of the hand gives way under the arm pressure. Useful hand strength produces movement that relieves effort. Bad use of strength chiefly braces against unwanted movement. 

Let's think about this in practice- starting from a common idea which is meant to prevent any need for hand strength. We are often told that if we use the hand merely to transfer arm energy (with little or no hand movement), you can reduce the effort for the hand. The following video demonstrates why this is a somewhat wishful ideal, that cannot adequately explain success. Rather than write text for the video, there is a detailed spoken commentary. However, I'll just add one thing. When the hand successfully resists collapse under arm energy, I point out that this is strenuous. However, I was perhaps a little too dismissive. I should also recognise that there would be some value in using it as an preliminary exercise (provided that the same approach is not used as a basis to play fast). More on that after the video... 

I don't wish to tar all opposition to finger/hand strength ideas with one brush. Other words can be used to encourage the hand to move. I very rarely use the word strength myself, outside of this post. However, I have noticed that people frequently say that arm energy is a way to avoid a need for hand strength. Many say to minimise or literally avoid movement in the hand. Others simply fail to reference any need for it, while greatly emphasising the idea of arm energy. As I show in the video, losing out on the basic hand movement can make for real problems. 

Yes, a model in which the hand aims to move the least, in the name of trying to work less, easily causes it to work at its hardest! It's a little like countries with such titles as "The Democratic Republic of...". Just because it's there in the description, it doesn't mean it actually works out that way. Anything that only mentions special hand alignments or positions to join the hand to the arm is incomplete.  Real ease needs active clarification of essential internal hand movement. A static position is an initial way to help cut out genuinely irrelevant hand movements, or collapsing joints. However, if you don't then start to add the useful hand movement, you cannot possibly avoid having to lock your hand into unnecessary tension. Go fast and (unless your instincts provide the balancing hand movement) you're left with higher effort bracing. There can also be bad alignments and better ones. But there aren't alignments that are quite so magical, that the value of hand movement suddenly goes away. You can only try to minimise the necessary part of such a movement, after you have first learned to actually use it! 

The reason I believe so many people are drawn to (genuinely) extreme ideas about needing to build enormous hand strength, is because opposing camps have so severely downplayed the role of movement in the hand, outright. This leads the hand to collapse and then brace in a disadvantaged position. The less you try to do with your hand, the harder the compensations tend to be. Approaches that encourage a passive hand may easily help to create the conditions in which a hand is most likely to feel weak, overworked and underpowered. It's not  surprising that anyone feeling this might be enticed to an opposite idea- of developing enormous hand strength through high effort exercises. What if the only way to solve such a problem is a sensible middle ground? We need to create conditions in which the hand can act both safely and confidently, without fear. Even if we do argue against strength, we should at least concentrate on how to apply confident hand movement. 

The reason we pluck upward and out of the keys, is to create conditions in which a clear hand activation could not possibly jam downward. When a hand is overworked by the grasp, it's typically because the arm doesn't make room for the hand to move freely. Once you can respond up and out of the keys, it should soon end the strain that gives a feeling of muscular weakness. It may be true that your hand is already strong enough for most things, or it may be that some strength really would need to be developed gently, over a period of time. However, unless your hand can do the basic movement with ease, the most urgent issue is probably the need to get out of its way. The strength you wouldn't want is the kind where the hand tries to move while being blocked by the pressure of the arm. 

The ideal arm is not just generically heavy. Hand and arm should not have to be "connected" by a braced wrist. Both wrist and forearm alike need to be able to be very loose for the arm to respond freely to a good hand action. If you feel like it would currently be risky to apply movement of the hand, it's a fairly sure sign that you need to learn to lighten your arm. Ability to merely pile arm weight/pressure into a rather neutral hand isn't sufficient for technique. The up forces generated by hand motion are what keep a hand comfortably open, rather than always straining to survive a depressed slump.  Arm weight should never go beyond what the arch of your hand can comfortably stand back up against. Although Argerich's hand is clearly stronger than average, the chief reason she can use a powerful hand movement is that her arm doesn't constantly weigh down heavily. 

Don't think simplistically that all arm energy is always a positive or that internal hand energy is always dangerous and wrong! The goal of the hand is not merely to do the barest minimum to be able to pass on some huge arm energy. It's a trade off-  between having the lightness to move your hand with freedom, vs the value of adding a little downward arm pressure. Too much arm and the hand cannot safely play it's part. In spite of becoming more cautious, it actually ends up working even harder. Most of us concentrate significantly on what comes from the arm, while easily overlooking the benefit of leaving enough room to be able to safely move the hand. A lucky few get this purely by instinct. Unfortunately, many others are likely to continue feeling that their hands are extremely weak- unless they learn to make room for some healthy internal hand movement.

Why sightreading doesn't necessarily improve your sightreading- a widely overlooked foundation skill that typically has more benefit

I've already written a previous post on this topic. However, it's such a major issue that I decided to make another breakdown of some primary issues, in a slightly more concise post. So, do you want to be a good sightreader? If so, to understand the main foundation behind the skill, let's start with a simple indisputable truth.

The level of your sightreading (which we usually define strictly as a first ever attempt at new material) will always fall somewhere beneath what you could achieve by learning a piece over a long period. That is just obvious and reveals nothing. However, far more useful is to consider that it will ALSO fall short of your ability after  "quickstudy" of a piece (which we'll define here as up to three or so short practise sessions). Your quickstudy level is typically the main yardstick in getting a realistic sense of your current potential sightreading level- especially so, if you consider sightreading to be an area of weakness.

If what you achieve in a handful of practice sessions does not reach a reasonable degree of comfortable fluency (which is commonly true of those who also struggle at sightreading), how could there be a chance of success when that little preparation is replaced by absolutely none at all? Also, consider now what traditional sightreading practice is supposed to be focused upon- ie playing brand new material only once, without ever stopping to resolve errors or uncertainties. Is there any meaningful reason to imagine that this could be an effective way to develop an initial foundation of quickstudy skills? Someone who is capable of good quickstudy will most likely do fine when given a single attempt. For others, however, it can create conditions in which sightreading is guaranteed to feel like an extremely unpleasant struggle, from which almost nothing seems to be gained. It's not surprising that they might thus feel inclined to avoid it.

Anyway, to summarise an important truth in rather blunt terms- if a pianist does not raise their capacity for quickstudy to at least the level they would hope to sightread at (and preferably a good deal higher), it follows that their sightreading skill can only be worse still! If you want the results of sightreading to even be adequate, your potential for quickstudy would first have to rise notably above that level. 

At this point, I suspect that some will raise an eyebrow at the rather coldly direct language, so let's lighten the tone a little! I would certainly aim to find positives when personally addressing any individual and their skill level. However, the abstract working here is not criticising any actual person. The point is just to highlight a universal truth, for the sake of demonstrating a clear way forwards. Only when small amounts of preparation can be expected to give good results, can half-decent results start to arise in wholly unprepared scenarios. If most repertoire is exclusively based on weeks (or even months) of gradual preparation, to then attempt something only once ignores a gaping wide middle ground. It's not helpful to behave as if we have a dial with merely two settings- which move between very many hours of preparation or absolute zero. It is solely an issue of language that "sightreading" refers to a first attempt. It's easy to carry this over and imagine that these are the only circumstances in which it is possible to gain skill. However, that would be like assuming golf can only be improved by playing a round of eighteen holes. No. There are driving ranges and putting greens, before you have to test the overall product to the full. It's widely true in just about any field, that you don't best practice towards something by working exclusively within the exact narrow circumstances of the end product. That's only part of a good method.

So, if you want to be better at sightreading but are not currently good at quickstudy, there is a realistic route to real improvement. Don't try to obey the traditional sightreading advice and don't worry exactly what counts as sightreading. Develop quickstudy skills (by playing around with a wide range of moderate preparation times) and you'll have a real foundation, which you can later use towards greater focus on first time sightreading.

As an example, here's a film of myself playing an arrangement of Barber's adagio. 

I'm a pretty good sightreader, but what this demonstrates is the product of some quickstudy (if you wanted to see some first time sightreading of Bach and Rachmaninoff, I included some in my other post on this topic). I found the score on the same day as the playthrough- which came after reading through two or three times (with only small amounts of practice to resolve a few errors at source). Is it perfect? No, I had a couple of slight slips in the notes (and didn't properly voice a couple of notes of an inner line). However, it was largely fairly close to what I intended, via just small amounts of time. There had been a few more errors on my first playthrough. I gained far more by going back to briefly repair them, than I would have by walking away.

It's often good to commit to finishing a piece once through, no matter how many errors. But you learn far more if you then go back and take control over those moments. It doesn't matter in the least that this is no longer strictly "sightreading". I don't memorise quickly (either in terms of developing muscle memory or a mental image of the notes) so I still have to process written notes if I want them be correct for the second or third time. Although there will be some expectations due to familiarity, to play again doesn't instantly stop using most of the same foundational skills. The reality is of another sliding scale of change. Also, we particularly need to consider anything that didn't actually work first time. When you feed your system with corrections, it greatly increases the chance of coping with similar demands, in the future. You don't learn much from something you have neither processed correctly, nor executed correctly, except when you take a little time to at least figure out how you could have. 

When repeating something over and over, the benefits obviously do start to drop off. After some point, repetitions do little (if anything at all) for reading skills. Different people develop memories at different speeds, so there's no simple rule as to how much you can repeat before the main value has passed. However, what I'd say for sure is that you will never realistically lose the majority after only a single playthrough. In fact, I'd suggest that the second attempt of any passage is typically MORE valuable than the first, with regard to building your skill set- especially when you didn't get it right the first time. The sole exception would be where something was so easily within your level that there are simply no issues to go back over.

Although good sightreaders have to do some creative faking, it's important to remember that this is only the icing on the cake. To stretch the analogy a little, you could smooth over a few minor dents in the surface of a slightly imperfect cake. However, you can't expect to take a random blob of formless sponge, and then ice it over so skillfully as to give the impression of a flawless artisan wedding cake. On the same note, you can't simply fake your way around so severely as to survive without a basic ability to accurately process the primary foundations of a score. You don't get notably better at that by painstakingly spending six months learning a work, one note at a time. But neither do you get there by gritting your teeth to play to the end of a piece at any cost, and then walking away for good- regardless of how the result was. You may learn some mental resilience, but not the skills to translate a future score into a more accurate result. The best development comes when you figure something out efficiently and then walk away. If you can't do that in one session yet, do it over two or three, or lower the level of difficulty until you find music where this is possible. And keep repeating this kind of process until you expect to be able to learn pieces within a single sitting.

The time for a strictly traditional sightreading mindset is when someone can get good results from quickstudy, but has a specific struggle to avoid stopping and starting during their first attempt. That would be a sure sign that they should concentrate chiefly on a little more faking/guessing, in order to get past moments of uncertainty without stopping the flow. You can adapt the foundation of a quickstudy skill set into a sightreading mindset, by simply slightly loosening your expectations of accuracy and prioritising rhythm. Approximation can fill a few gaps. However, what you can't do is to take someone who has the skillset to process only a small minority of the information in real time, and expect a radical level of guesswork to magically fill in for the absent foundational skills. It doesn't give good results in the short term and it certainly doesn't cause any long term improvement of processing skill. Traditional sightreading ideals only complement primary background skills, while doing nothing to help generate those that are missing. These foundations are much better cemented by getting something right on a second or third or pass, than by getting something wrong on the only pass ever made.

Sightreading should not even be seen as an altogether different thing to quickstudy, but simply as the most advanced version, on the end of that scale. It's quickstudy with quite so little preparation, that there isn't actually any at all. However, if we say faking makes up ten percent of the whole here, the other ninety percent is simply seeing the information, picturing the meaning and acting correctly upon it. Would you expect to improve at maths by turning up for a test, guessing more than half of the questions and being told you got a mark of less than thirty percent? For any long term positives to follow, you couldn't simply book another test and hope resilience might eventually win out. You'd want to get the paper back, and practice going over those questions that you'd had to guess at. 

Let's take the analogy a little further. Say that a child had to prepare for a speed mental arithmetic test with ten questions that allow five seconds each. First, you'd probably want to ensure that they could score 9 or 10 with thirty seconds per question. Then you could start pushing them to try answering questions in just a few seconds and see how their instincts fare. If they now got a few more wrong, it likely wouldn't ruin their existing foundations. But what it a child typically scored 4 or 5 with thirty seconds per question? Would anyone think it would be useful to now push them to answer more directly and instinctively? Would seeing them fall to a score of 1 or so achieve anything? As a one time thing you could (possibly) argue that it might give them a sense of what they will be practising towards, as a future goal. However, if they were made to take the pressured tests over and over, that would be truly deranged as a learning method. It would be more likely to muddle and weaken their foundational skills further, than to improve them. As a famous quote (wrongly attributed to Einstein) says, madness is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Unfortunately, the traditional sightreading advice of simply ploughing through brand new material is almost perfectly analogous. It forces panicked responses, due to overstretching of foundations. We sometimes need to test ourselves, and do what we can to make it through. However, an excess sense of struggle is both mentally unpleasant and confusing. Deep progress also needs underlying skills to be advanced, via (slightly) more comfortable timescales that allow for corrections. When we recognise that true sightreading is only the most extreme end of the wide spectrum in which we can practise, we are much more likely to get results.

One further thought- I think part of the problem with sightreading advice is that it was usually given in the past by teachers who had students play numerous short exercises by the likes of Czerny etc, or at least plenty of sonatinas and easy duets etc. Whatever you might think about the physicality of exercises, this certainly meant a lot of quickstudy and thus plenty of foundations to bring into sightreading. Today, it is not so common. Exam focused students often tend to learn just three pieces per year- without having plenty of easier projects to dip into on the side. Something that is very popular today is also self-learners- who often jump straight to more advanced repertoire and try to painstakingly build it by a detail at a time. Such learners may never have spent any significant time on easy pieces, never mind got used to learning them efficiently. If sightreading feels like some kind of special outside thing (that is done solely in relation to sightreading exercises), you almost certainly need to view it in a whole different light. The best sightreaders never typically had to practice it as a special project. They just learned a wide range of pieces over a wide variety of timescales.