Arm flapping is a common mistake among both piano and flute students. Let’s talk about why we flap our arms and ways to fix it.
The Ideal Way to Hold Your Arms
Whenever you play a musical instrument, it should feel like your arms are wet spaghetti noodles that hang between your wrists and your shoulders. Obviously you’re going to move your arms occasionally – we’re human and need to move around or the joints will get stiff. The movements need to be graceful and, ballerina-like, leading with the elbow or wrist.
Arm Flapping on the Flute
Some flutists have a tendency to flap our arms in order to send out our emotions. When our elbows are raised, it changes the shape of our chest cavity enough to create a different tone color which makes it very easy to pull out the emotion of the piece.
The big problem: if you’re flapping your arms or even just holding one or both elbows up for an extended period of time, you’re compressing your wrist and putting extra strain on your shoulders and upper back. Compression + strain = pain.
The other problem: it makes you look ridiculous. I don’t care as much about this problem because I’m not an aesthetic person, but I thought I’d put it out there.
The solution: if you want to emote in a certain section, raise one elbow for 1-2 measures. You’ll create the tone color that you want and then you’ll be able to hold onto it with your embouchure once you lower your arm. Write a reminder in the music to raise your arm here and lower it there. Otherwise, use the ideal way to hold your arms as described above.
Arm Flapping on the Piano
Most pianists flap our arms because we’re flipping our thumb under our hands for more than an interval of a 2nd in order to crawl our fingers across the piano. We don’t realize we’re doing it, we’re just concentrating on getting our thumbs a 3rd or a 4th up the keyboard. Our bodies do funny things when we’re concentrating.
The problem: it puts extra strain on your shoulder and it slows you down just a tad for that one interval.
The solution: Take your thumb and move the tip all the way across your palm. That’s how far you have to move your thumb in order to leap a 4th.
Don’t concentrate on it too much when you’re practicing your piece. Your body needs to do funny things in order to to concentrate. Concentrate on doing this when you’re doing your one-handed arpeggios during warm-ups.
Since arpeggios are fun and easy, it will give you more time to concentrate on your new habit. After you’ve mastered this, your new skill will naturally matriculate into the other aspects of your playing. I talk more about why we do scales, cadences, chords and arpeggios at the beginning of the warm-ups here.
What to Expect
It takes about a month to change a habit. Some people take a week to stop the arm flapping habit, some take a month or two. It depends upon the situation and how long you’ve been doing it. Good luck!