Can anyone give me some advice for overcoming tension in the picking arm? Thanks
Yeah, you can only overcome UNNECESSARY tension, you can’t just become a floppy noodle.
Stand* and play and focus really intently on what is tense, what isn’t tense, what you can relax without stopping you from playing, what you CAN’T relax without stopping you from playing.
*Or sit, I suppose.
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Please be careful when doing this (don’t injure yourself), but sometimes I find that adding more tension and then relaxing from it allows you to feel the act of relaxing. As you gain more awareness of what it feels like, you can learn to relax even further and will not need to tense beforehand. I don’t know if anyone else has done this or if it is advisable, but it helped me. Trying to just relax when you have unwanted tension is like when you are angry and someone says ‘calm down’ - its just not gonna happen so you have a bit of a rant (add tension) and get it out of your system - then you can choose to relax…
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Don’t forget to try searching the forum too! I don’t recall off the top of my head which threads might best address this but I see there are a huge number that mention tension:
https://forum.troygrady.com/search?q=tensionThis is a very general comment FYI, not just for this particular topic; I don’t mean this as a critical comment at all. Discoverability of past conversations can be tricky as the forum grows, and the search feature isn’t super prominent, but I think it can be a really helpful starting point to see what may have been talked about already.