   
DoctorX2k2
Posts: 211
Joined: Jun. 14 2006
From: Quebec City, Canada
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 Working on Speed
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Hello,
I'd like to start by saying that my English is probably not the best of my skills, but I'm going to try as well as I can to describe my thoughts in an understandable way. :)
Over the time, I've read quite a few posts from members asking on out to increase their speed for different techniques. While a lot of advanced guitarists reply using the best of their knowledge and experience to provide a good answer, I feel they often lack the scientific data to backup their claims. Although I'm not a good guitarist, I'd like to share some information, coming from a Kinesiology and Medicine background. Although I'm pretty sure some people will bash my ideas, I really think it is good if you're running out of ideas to bring your speed up.
First of all, what effects speed? There are 5 groups of factors that have an effect on your overall speed:
1- Factors under the control of the central nervous system (CNS). These are receptors excitation, influx transmission, response elaboration and output to the effectors.
2- Neuromuscular factors (junction between the command system (CNS) and the effectors, the muscles). These are the initiation of the potential at the motor plate, synchronization of motor units, motor units’ frequency of activation, coordination of synergic muscles, and inhibitory activity of antagonists.
3- Muscular factors: quality of Motor Units, muscular elasticity and contraction power. The factors are the fast twitch fibers proportions, usage of ATP-PCr, quality of the contraction-relaxation couple and quality of the stretch-fire cycle.
4- Energetic factors: ATP-PCr pool and resistance to lower pH
5- Morphologic factors.
While morphologic factors can't be changed and most of the other factors are "set in" in the first 10 years of your life, you can still work on many different aspects to optimize your speed, especially in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th groups by working them out.
Obviously, you can't work on how fast your nervous influx travels from your brain to your muscles but you can optimize your motor patterns in different ways. For example, the flexors and extensors of your hand are always co-contracted. If only the flexors were active, your resting hand position would be a fist with a bent wrist. This synergy between the agonist and antagonist muscles could slow down your movements. When striking a note, you're flexing your finger. If the antagonist muscle was too active, your speed would be affected. If your flexors were overactive, then planting back the fingers would be harder. Motor patterns regulate that activation/inhibition process and they can be optimized.
The muscular and energetic factors are easily modified by training. You can increase the contraction power by training your muscles to develop more power. Working out the muscles will also develop the motor units’ recruitment. It can also switch your muscle fibers from one typology (fast twitch vs slow twitch) to another depending on the training. If striking a string requires X amount of strength, if that amount is 5% of your actual maximal strength, how would your speed and stamina be affected if your increase your maximal strength by 20%? The relative amount of force required to strike would be lower. As for the energetic factors, most of you already have higher energetic reserves or energetic capacities in your forearms than most, mostly from playing the guitar a few hours a day. Be aware that proper nutrition is required to max out the energy levels. Deficiency in vitamins and minerals can also decrease your performance in many ways, as many of them are necessary in nervous influx transmission and muscular contraction/relaxation, but an increased uptake won’t boost your performances.
Note that there are different forms of speed. In the guitar world, and lots of sports, we'd talk about gestural velocity or frequency. Unlike sports, we do not have to perceive signals to adjust our decisions and take the proper action. We mostly need speed of action, which is the capacity to execute a movement as fast as we can. One problem with speed of action is the formation of a speed barrier when practicing in a monotonic and stereotyped way, like a lot of practice regimen thrown around. This kind of practice creates a habit, a gestural stereotype that renders the development of speed a lot more difficult, sometimes impossible. That's because it consolidates the spatio-temporal parameters and instead of having an actual progression of speed, you stagnate.
To avoid the speed barrier, you need to constantly change training stimuli: different angles, different rates, different muscles, and different resistances. That is kind of a paradox to guitar players because we actually try to achieve a high degree of "automation" in our movements and this promotes the creation of a speed barrier, while changing the parameters constantly could push someone to develop a bad technique. It is important to understand that you can work speed and technique apart, but that you should play falsetas as fast as you can without bringing down your technique.
How can we achieve that when playing the guitar? Let's take picados, for example.
You could use different muscles in many different ways, bending from the large knuckles, bending from the middle joints, using different fingers (iii/mmm/aaa/imi/iai/mam/mim/aia/ama), maximum/minimum extension between strikes, striking apoyando and tirando, playing at very slow speed or max tolerable speed. As you also need to coordinate your right hand with your left hand, you can practices different scales, at different speeds, with different cejilla positions, in quarters/triplets/whatever. You could also stretch your extensors for a while as it inhibits the mechanoreceptors a little. You could stretch only the flexors, or both the flexors and the extensors. You could fatigue your extensors muscles with elastic around the fingers or your flexors by squeezing a tennis ball before playing. You could also be imaginative with elastics and use them as resistance (slowing the strike, but speeding the planting) or even as “under resistance” (facilitating the strike, slowing the planting).
These different ways would help you developing strength, stamina and coordination as well as breaking down the speed barriers. Note that exercising these muscles will also help you avoiding injuries and increase your ability to practice for longer periods without suffering from the effects of fatigue. Just don’t overdo it.
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