Nashville · Guide

Your back is not sore from playing. It is sore from standing still.

Lower Broadway runs live music more or less continuously, which means Nashville has a working population doing something almost nobody else does for a living. You stand in roughly one spot, holding an asymmetric weight, for a long set, several nights a week, and then carry gear out through a crowded bar at the end of it.

If that is your job, the thing that hurts is usually not the playing. It is everything around it.

The strap is doing something to you

A guitar or bass hangs off one shoulder. That shoulder rides higher, the other drops, and your spine makes up the difference by bending slightly toward the low side. Hold that for one set and it is nothing. Hold it four nights a week for a year and your body stops treating it as a position and starts treating it as your posture.

The tell is when you notice it off stage. Standing in line, carrying groceries, driving. If one shoulder is living higher than the other when there is no instrument on it, that is the strap talking.

• Switch shoulders when the instrument allows it, even for part of a set.
• A wider strap spreads the same weight over more surface. Small change, and the cheapest one available.
• Between sets, spend a minute in the opposite shape to the one you were just in. Not a stretch routine. Just the other direction.

Standing still is harder than moving

Front of house looks like the physical job. It usually is not. A player planted in one spot for a long set is doing something closer to an isometric hold than to exercise, and the muscles that keep you upright never get the break they would get if you were walking around.

Shift your weight deliberately. Move your feet between songs. If there is any room on the stage at all, use some of it. The players who last are almost always the ones who fidget.

Load out is when people actually get hurt

The set is over, it is late, the room is still full, and there is an amp to move. That combination of tired plus awkward plus in a hurry plus navigating people is where the injuries happen. Not during the show.

Two things are worth the extra thirty seconds. Make the trip twice instead of once. And turn your feet toward whatever you are lifting rather than twisting your torso to reach it, because picking up and rotating at the same time is the most reliable way to have a bad Tuesday.

When it is worth talking to somebody

Ordinary end of night soreness that is gone by the afternoon is just the job. Worth a conversation with a qualified provider: pain that is there when you wake up rather than after a set, anything that runs down an arm, numbness or tingling in your hands or fingers, or a shoulder that has started limiting how far you can reach.

The hands one matters more for you than for most people, and it is the one musicians most often wait on. Do not wait on that one.

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