Barriers and Facilitators for Implementing an Exercise-Based Injury Prevention Program for String Players
Welcome to another week of Musician's Journal Club, a social media community exploring research articles that impact musician's musculoskeletal health. Our article this week was a 2019 article from the journal Work entitled Barriers and facilitators for implementing an exercise-based injury prevention program for string players. Previous articles have focused on the high prevalence of playing-related injuries, so I wanted to take this week to explore some potential prevention options. I especially appreciate this exercise-based intervention because it requires minimal equipment so is more accessible for individual musicians to try on their own.
We've looked at several articles detailing the high prevalence of overuse injuries and playing-related pain in musicians, and there is research showing that exercise may be effective in preventing these overuse injuries. However, musician-specific interventions rely on intentionally chosen exercises to address areas of the body most prone to overuse injuries, which may not be the most commonly done exercises. Regular exercise outside of these specific programs has not been studied, so the focus of this paper is to examine a specially designed exercise-based intervention. Another challenge in implementing these programs is compliance. While a previous paper showed a 41% compliance, which is on-par with other physical therapy interventions, there was only 25% uptake, which yields just 10.25% participation in the program.
The main barrier to implementation of this program was time, both time of students completing the exercises and of professors having to undergo training and teach the exercise program. Interestingly, many of the comments on this week's Instagram posts mirrored these results, talking about how this is something that seems promising, but that it is hard to find the time to add additional exercises into an already-packed practice schedule, especially in music schools that may emphasize the hours of practice per day as a critical part of musical training. One suggestion to improve participation and compliance was to teach this intervention as a workshop within the music school in the study, so it would be integrated into the curriculum, and to have older students teach younger students, reducing the time requirement on professors and increasing student equity in the program. While this may be beneficial within an institution, it is worth noting that this type of intervention would be much more challenging to apply in a professional scenario.
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| Survey results showing that while most respondents don't incorporate exercise into their practice routines, many are interested in adding exercise to their practice. Similarly, respondents reported interest in an exercise-based intervention program even though most had not participated in such a program previously. The most common response for time availability to participate in an exercise-based intervention program were 15-30 minutes per day, with the next most common being less than 15 minutes per day. |
Reflection
I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of interaction and engagement on this week's posts. While the likes were relatively similar to previous weeks, there were significantly more comments on multiple posts and discussions happening in the comments, which was my original goal when beginning this project. This supports my hypothesis that the musculoskeletal-focused articles are more engaging to my audience, and I plan to continue in this direction with papers on musculoskeletal health that have direct implications for musicians.
The three main posts for this week's article had a combined 26 likes and 11 comments. The Instagram story questions had an average 10 responses per question. My follower count this week grew 8.3% to 130 followers. The pace of my growth has slowed significantly in the past few weeks, but I think this is mostly due to the limited audience for this type of work. While there is interest and passion surrounding research in musician health, the actual community of people doing this work is relatively small.
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