Body Mapping: Moving in Concert with Your Body

December 1, 2024

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Musicians move for a living, but how they move when playing their instruments is not typically part of their training. A body map is literally a picture of your body imprinted on your brain. When the body map accurately represents the true design of the body, we look and feel free, easy, and balanced. Conversely, when the body map is inaccurate, movement is stiff, awkward, and injury-prone.

Effective and healthy practice is achieved by working smarter not harder. Instead of looking for a musical solution, success may be as simple as making a change in the way we move our bodies. Body mapping helps to accurately tune information into movement so that, over time, poor and inefficient movement is replaced with elegant, direct, and powerful movement that conforms with your body’s true design.

What Science Says

Everyone has a body map. Our personal body map tells us about our structure, function, and size. Even if the map is incorrect, we will move according to that map. And this is how injuries occur. However, body maps can be corrected through the study of body mapping.

Neuroscience tells us that we are hardwired from the beginning of life to build and adjust our body maps, and it is these body maps that allow us to learn how to move as adults. The body maps of healthy toddlers are normally extremely accurate. A two-year-old has not yet had time to deviate from their natural poise and balance. Unfortunately, children quickly alter how they move their bodies by modeling adults in their world, who don’t always model the best movements. More often than not, this causes pain or chronic tension.

Cellist William Conable is credited with the practical discovery of the body map in his teaching studio in the 1970s. He observed that students move according to how they believe they are structured and not according to how they are actually structured. His wife, Barbara Conable, went on to train others in body mapping and founded the Association for Body Mapping Education. Her book, What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body, has been reprinted many times.

Recalibrating the body map largely occurs through kinesthesia or sensory perception in the muscles and connective tissue. The brain’s neuroplasticity, or ability to form new neural connections, enables us to change movement patterns and recover from injuries. This is central to body mapping and to correcting our own body map.

In Harmony with Your Body’s Design

Musicians have been taught that the more hours they practice and the harder they work, the better they will play. When they feel pain, most think that the problem is muscular. Some musicians seek solutions that treat the muscles in an isolated manner through physical therapy or gym workouts. However, these conventional approaches only exacerbate the problem. As heroic as it seems, the no pain, no gain approach is, at best, counterproductive and, at worst, can lead to more serious problems.The habit of keeping the shoulders down, for example, is a common mistake that leads to unnecessary and habitual muscular work in the upper torso and neck, and impedes free movement of the arms. When muscles are required to hold your shoulders down, the movement, as inaccurate as it is, becomes imprinted on your brain. To the player, it feels right and familiar, even though it’s causing discomfort and pain. This is mismapping.

Naturally, free movers are not conscious of how accurate their maps are, but when questioned, they intuitively reveal a great deal about structure and mechanics. Conversely, tense players are unaware of faulty maps. The body mapping curriculum applies these concepts in a masterclass setting. Many body mapping teachers descend from the Alexander Technique practitioners, integrating body mapping into their programs. A common theme is seeking anatomical truth so that students work with their bodies, not against them.

A course in body mapping is comprehensive. Instructors, books, mirrors, anatomical models, and other tools are used to reveal the truth about structure, function, and size. You learn to recognize the source of inefficient or harmful movements. Hundreds of musicians have successfully used body mapping to heal from injuries and chronic pain. Being aware of all of the senses helps to integrate their musical intention with the appropriate quality of movement.

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Body Mapping Involves:

For more information on body mapping, resources, and to find an educator visit the Association for Body Mapping Education website: www.bodymap.org.

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