One thing I realised early on last year was that my dominant/picking hand/arm was underdeveloped in terms of raw musculature. I’m a skinny guy, and I’ve never really lifted. Anyways - when I discovered that my dominant arm was weaker than my fretting hand, it also occurred to me how much slower my dominant side was when it came to engaging any and all motion mechanics: be it supination, pronation, flexion, extension and etc… My preferred mechanic has always been rotation, and in terms of speed, I can hit ~225 BPM maximum playing sixteenth notes (loosely, without tension). My left hand, on the the other hand (pun not intended), can rotate at a whopping 260+ BPM playing sixteenths (though I can’t play leftie…sadly). It’s as if there is some magical dexterity my left arm has that my right doesn’t. I can’t be the only one here… …am I? I may pick up weights just for the sake of making my picking arm more capable technique-wise.
My (amateur, perhaps totally unfounded) opinion/guess is that raw muscular strength is probably irrelevant, but you might see improvements from developing muscular control/mind-muscle connection type of stuff through lifting weights.
You do see a bit of crossover from people who are fast guitar players and people who lift weights as it tends to appeal to the same “gradually watching the numbers go up” kind of mindset. As well as the “did this one thing obsessively until I injured myself severely” mindset.
Fast twitch fibers is the answer.
I would second this. There might be general health benefits from lifting which should in theory be beneficial to any physical activity. But will there be real noticable improvement in guitarplaying ? Most likely not.
I started 5 years ago and from my non-representative point of view, there was zero correlations between chops and gains.
If musclemass or strength would help, we would also see classical musicians obsessively lifting, which would propably be great. If i could watch a juiced up orchestra perform Beethoven, my life would be complete. Rowdy teens would all want to learn the violin or something.
Ok, jokes aside. Though there are a lot of players who seem to suggest that there is a correlation between BPM and biceps, we know that kids and women can reach the 250 BPM threshold just as easily, which is a strong counterindicator, imo.
That seems a bit oversimplified.
One more thing: Its impressive that your fretting hand can do any picking at all. Did you practice that? Because my left hand is a 99% total noob at picking anything. Getting strong MAB vibes, congratulations.
Do some hammer curls for awhile and see as an experiment. See if it helps. Don’t over do it of course. 3 sets of 10 reps should do the trick.
I suspect if you are goal oriented and patient enough to be more fit than the average person, you are likely predisposed to have a similar approach to gaining chops (goal+time and patience). Not exclusively obviously…just a general personality thing. Lots of great players with chops that are not fitness obsessive
I didn’t practice with my left hand at all, but it’s my go-to for air guitar!
Back to the topic; I’m not certain muscle has to do anything with speed, but I can’t help but think that perhaps there’s a maximum strength one can reach that allows one’s nervous system to twitch the arm to it’s full speed potential. Perhaps this is relevant for hyper-pickers. I only started thinking about all of this muscle-speed stuff upon revisiting Jason Becker’s music after a number of years. Jason went from being insanely dexterous on the guitar, to his muscles atrophying due to ALS, consequentially leaving him unable to walk, speak, move, play guitar etc… Because of his tragedy, it makes sense to think that muscle has at least some impact on playing. I will attempt to gain some strength in my right arm to balance the strength in accordance to my left arm. I’ll update later on if I do in fact get results.
I do think that weightlifting has helped with injury prevention. I used to have a devil of a time with tendonitis in my hands and wrists; consistent, smart strength training has really helped.
I don’t think it particularly helped with picking speed, though. And if you look at a list of very fast pickers, quite a few of them aren’t particularly muscular or strong, to put it politely. Doubly so when you consider that a lot of these players got their chops together when they were teenagers.
I agree with the posters above that the same obsessive, goal-oriented mindset that lends itself to improving guitar technique transfers very nicely to weightlifting as well, so it makes sense that you see some crossover.
Even before ALS, Jason Becker was a super skinny ectomorph without a lot of muscle growth. Obviously he was able to achieve top-level picking speed and accuracy without a ton of “arm strength”. He’s a perfect example of the fact that neuro-muscular control combined with efficient mechanics is the key to fast movements, not pure muscular strength.
What your’re seeing is that a more systemic inflammation due to the stress of lifting the weights is facilitating the recovery of localized inflammation due to your guitar playing. You’re also causing an adaptive response in your tendons and ligaments that over time toughens them and makes them more resilient.
Well, it’s really a combination. Picking a string is the product of several very, very, very submaximal muscle contractions. How submaximal? 1,000RM? 10,000RM? Very hard to tell. It stands to reason that by training to increase that maximal limit, you make any submaximal movement easier because they become a smaller percentage of the now larger total. Strong weightlifters with bad technique will always have a better total than a weaker competitor with perfect technique. Making each stroke feel lighter, or easier, reduces fatigue and a reduction of fatigue reduces the incidence of form breakdown. Limiting form breakdown has the effect of improving accuracy, what we’re after, because you have more time under your hands to be performing the movement correctly.
That being said, the fact that a pickstroke is so submaximal, the margin of improvement is likely so large that it’s almost invisible. This is probably why you have all these instances of lithe, skinny guitar players with monster technique.
Yeah, and while it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, the whole strength/speed subject always makes me think of examples from nature where “weak” animals make extremely fast movements (where the amount of resistance is small).
I don’t think it matters even slightly. Paul Gilbert is one example. MAB, who was what, 130-135 lbs in his heyday as he states in the 2017 interview with Troy? Anton Oparin at 11 years old playing faster and more accurately than Paul Gilbert ever did. Roy Marchbank thin as a rail in his Sogdiana clip on YouTube.
These sorts of discussions tend towards people looking for the answer to be anything other than “Practice”.
The problem with that is that those are different people, and I don’t know if there’s some genetic advantage one might have over the other; I’m certainly not a scientist. I think next to all of us practice here, but even with the most efficient practice possible, you will still hit a limit - that much is certain. The whole discussion was raised with “is there a way to surpass that limit” in mind. We’re humans, we vary person to person as do those limits.
That’s a fair point. Maybe at the extremes there is something to be said.