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Hey everyone,

Hopefully I've moved this post to the right forum.

I've noticed that when playing my left hand will collapse at the knuckles at times. It's not the first time I have noticed, I'm really just not sure how to remedy the issue. My right hand will dip at the knuckles when I stretch my hand along the key bed, and it feels way more controlled. As thought I need to flatten my hand out to stretch it further. This makes sense to me anatomically, but I just don't have that control in my left hand, it will collapse when I don't want it to and then I'll notice it a moment later.

I read a post that discouraged the use of hand strengthener tools or hand strengthening exercises. In this instance I'm inclined to believe that specifically for the "bridge" of my left hand at my knuckles it needs more strength. I'm right handed and played the drums growing up so my right hand played the hi-hats. I thought going back to play the drums with my left hand on the hats would be a good idea and could take much dedicated time.

While I am open to my ideas above I am curious, how else can I remedy this?

Thank you, and looking forward to your thoughts and opinions.

Try to play etudes with busy left hand and simple right hand. It will allow you to focus on your left hand. Playing some exercises with left hand alone for some time may be a good idea, too.

I'm not at all against strength training for hands, I have been using it. I think it's perfectly fine and in many cases necessary. In the book about piano technique which I like most of all it's written that the main cause of pianistic injuries is the lack of muscles development. I believe it's true.

Which book is that?

OP - I wonder if doing some hand exercises with a tennis ball may help encourage the curve of your hand.

It's not available in English unfortunately. It's called "About the development of pianistic skills" by Anna Schklovskaya, she was a student of Blumenfeld.

I think one can extend that not only to muscles but also in general to all the various parts of the hand, arm, ... tendons and other connecting parts all need to get used to an increased amount of work and stress. That would be true for just about any regular physical activity.

The more difficult question is by how much.

I'm open to hand exercises, just wondering how much might be too much. Tennis ball exercises sound like a good idea too.

All of your ideas are good, so thanks to you all. I think I will make it a part of my practice routine to begin working my left hand only to catch it up in strength.

To be noted though that most strenghening exercices are aimed at developping the muscles and tendons that control the hand. Collapsing fingers is due to an internal weakness. I am not an expert in anatomy, but it is much more difficult to remedy to that sort od issue. Any good practice will reinforce anyway the various parts of the hand, but i doubt it will completely address your issue.

I think that this is the kind of issue you could go into a lot of depth with with the right teacher.

I have heard from many teachers that done amount of strengthening the hands is required in the way you describe. What you should absolutely avoid is trying to isolate the fingers from the rest of the mechanism. That is dangerous.

Funny enough, someone in another forum where I posted this question before moving it here said my issue wasn't about strength but about habit. They also posted a video of John Browning demonstrating the Russian School's method of hand posture. This made me think that this is more a matter of having my hand in a curved position for extended periods so as to build up stamina, which could make my hand "feel" stronger. I just tried holding this brain shaped stress ball like a computer mouse in my left hand and just resting my hand on my desk lap. Honestly started to ache after a minute. I am going to try this too, maybe even get a cheap left handed mouse somewhere and use it every couple of days. I have to imagine that if it is truly about habit, my right hand has always had it easier and its really no contest unless I attempt ambidexterity. This makes more sense because I hadn't thought about the strengthening exercises targeting the muscles and tendons that control the hand, instead of what I'm looking for in the knuckle bridge muscles.

I think most of the effect of a stress ball is to reinforce the tendons and the muscle. The knuckle bridge has no muscle. The weakness is coming from the surrounding tissue. The only exercice i have seen documented is to put your both hand in a curved position, the tip against the wall and to lean on them making sure the fingers dont collapse. There are a number of variants of that exercise. Of which these video. I dont know if any of these are really efficient, and i am not even sure the issue can be fixed.

If you want to go strength training way, you first of all need to train intrinsic muscles of the hand: interosseous muscles and lumbrical muscles. These are the muscle groups responsible for bending straightened fingers in the knuckles (metacarpal joints), and interestingly interosseous muscles are also responsible for stretching of the hand. In the book I mentioned, it's recommended to lean against the wall with your fingers and then to push off from the wall moving your metacarpal joints, keeping your fingers straight. I think exercising metacarpal joints with elastic band is equally or even more effective.

But certainly you still need to watch your left hand while you correct your technique. The exercises will help you to feel strength and agility in your hand, and to feel right kind of movement, but it's no magic, you still need to pay attention while re-learning.

This is essentially one of the important things I learned recently. However, how do you know if you have strong enough fingers? What is the benchmark? And is it always better to have stronger fingers or is there a point where it simply doesn't matter anymore? It is super hard to find information about all of this online, and I'm left floundering because every pianist seems to have a different opinion.

For example, I have been told I can't play this piece properly (which I posted this recital) due to lack of finger strength, as I have only been playing on grand pianos for six months I probably haven't been able to develop it fully yet. Would you say this is true? Is it obvious to a professional pianist?

But the collapsing effect is not a muscle issue. Hyperextension or hypermobility is related to the ligaments ability to control excessive extension mouvements of the fingers. To which extent weakness of these ligaments can be corrected, I dont know.

I dont think finger strength as a specific cause is the reason. It is a simple lack of skills, practice and musical experience. There are irregularity with arpeggios and scales which will be fixed with practice. In any way finger strength can mean a lot of different things. So one can put a lot of things into it.

Left hand knuckles collapsing isn't necessarily hypermobility imo, especially if we're talking about the first knuckle. Hypermobility is a real issue when the second and third knuckles collapse uncontrollably, but I've seen a little "double-jointedness" in a lot of people and it doesn't really affect their ability to play really well.

Why not?

For a working joint it's a muscle issue. It's a critically important thing that I've learned some time ago. The active movements of a joint are normally restricted mainly by muscles and only secondarily by ligaments. Among pianists there are many who can bend their metacarpal joints backwards "unnaturally" up to 45 degrees and more. E.g. Lang Lang. Among women it's even more widespread. Their ligaments are extremely elastic by nature or as a result of years of stretching. But their knuckles don't collapse when they play because of strong intrinsic hand muscles which maintain a good tone.

Muscle tone is an unconscious tension of a muscle which maintains body posture and muscle's resistance to passive stretch during resting state. When hand muscle's tone is weak (and that is almost always because of untrained and weak muscles), it can't resist the weight of the arm and knuckles collapse easily when not controlled consciously. Ligaments can not maintain enough resistance alone without sufficient help of muscles, in that situation ligaments and other joint soft tissues get injured easily. Nerves included. The joint without sufficient support of muscles becomes what is called "destabilized", that is too mobile passively under pressure, besides soft tissue injuries it in turn leads to wear off of the joint cartilage and with time may trigger detrimental processes in the joint.

Well, it depends a lot upon what one includes in the term. I tend to use it in a precise sense of purely muscle/physical capabitity, irrespective of of other skills that would allow one to use the capability such as technical skills, motor control, .... When looking at your video, putting aside musical/interpretative questions, it is visible that you are not comfortable. Your hands/arm are often times stiff and rigid, vs fluid and nimble. So at the base, it is just a question of developpping and practicing the technique to play reliably, evenly (as needs be) or not and comfortably basic runs, more or less varied, of arpeggios, scales, broken chords, ....

Since you can play the piece end to end, I would say it is not so much a question of strength but simply of technique and practice. Now it may be that you would need to work on specific strength elements, but it is a secondary sub-topic.

Often the lack of finger strength causes "empty" sound and loose chords and octaves. If your sound is "full", and you feel in full control of wide chords and intervals, especially ff, than you probably have strong enough fingers.

I believe that the absence of injuries is also a reliable indicator. I really noticed that pianists with strong hands and thick fingers get injured rarely or not at all.

How you feel is also very important. When your hands are strong you feel power and feel you are in full control of the instrument. You probably saw beginners who touch instrument like it was a hot stove...

I believe there is no sense in strength training beyond some point, unless you have breaks in your practice or a chronic condition that requires such training.

I haven't noticed any signs of weak fingers.

Thanks, that is very valuable to know. Then perhaps I have strong hands, because I've never really faced any kind of injury, which I certainly hope is the case.

I'm just thinking about professional pianists. All of them certainly have very good hand posture, etc. but hand strength is much harder to tell from an outside perspective. How do you know if a sound someone is producing at the instrument is due to finger/hand strength, or simply good weight distribution on the keys?

That's good to know. My knuckles aren't as curved as I've seen advanced pianists do it. Somehow, from the sound, people (teachers etc.) often say that my fingers are weak, and I'm not quite sure to what extent it's true.