Nutrition for Musicians

Everybody loves trashing stress (including me! Lol). 

But our enemy is rather the imbalance. Because having no stress at all is unhealthy too. Without stress, there would be no adaptation and without adaptation there would be no evolution and we would be extinct long ago. Stress is what triggers your body to change the way it functions in order for you to survive longer (not necessarily healthier!). 

In previous posts, I explained how this can affect our health and quality of life. But there is a bright side for stress. 

The body has a balanced cycle of breakdown (catabolism due to stress) and rebuilding (anabolism due to rest). If you respect the rhythm it will pay back, but messing up with it will fire back. 

Examples:

String musicians will develop calluses on the fingers that come in contact with the strings, resulting from harsh friction between the fingers and the strings (source of stress/catabolism). 

At some point the pain is so bad the player has to slow down or even stop practicing (rest/anabolism) and during that time the body is triggered to preserve, accumulate and thicken the layers of dead skin under stress to make this area more resilient. Only then a cellist will be able to play Dvorak Cello Concerto for 45 min without shredding their fingers. 

Auditions at the beginning of a career are very stressful but it gets less stressful by time because after this one terrible audition when you almost had a meltdown, you went back home and slept for the rest of the day as if you took some drug (rest/anabolism). This is when your body recovered from too much adrenaline and your mind stored the experience as “safe” (hopefully!). The next audition you will be less stressed and you will need less rest to recover. 

When muscles are sore after a workout (stress) this is because you literally teared you muscles apart! Then for the next 3 days your body is so stiff it takes you 3 minutes to sit down on the toilet (rest by force)!! But then your muscles get stronger (anabolism).

Getting sick but developing immunity, failing the test once but not twice, playing slow and speeding by time, climbing a tree, camping, fishing.. I can go on forever …this is all the result of stress as long as there is enough rest and nutrition that counterbalances it.

More for musicians here