Elbow Gender

There will be more on Mary Cohen’s books next month, but I’ve been thinking about this issue for some recent lectures and couldn’t wait to write about it any longer. Did you know that there’s a difference between male elbows and female elbows? Was that a gasp I heard? This was first brought to my attention by the wonderful Jonathan Reynolds, a Minneapolis physical therapist who has a great arts medicine practice. He just happened to mention this casually in conversation with another violinist and I one day. We both said, “huh?” and gaped at him. He kindly replied, “Yeah, women’s arms angle outward from the elbow, and men’s are straight. Our stunned reply to that was “WHAT???” along with jumping up and down a couple of times. This just seemed immensely important in terms of holding the violin, and I couldn’t believe I'd never seen anything about it in pedagogical literature. What follows below are my conclusions, based on a lot of thought, harassing my students to let me examine and photograph their elbows, and no rigorous scientific testing whatsoever.

The angle in question is called the “carrying angle” and is seen when the arm is extended straight by the side (it’s easier to see if your palm is facing forward). The website,  http://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/elbow , provides the following information. “The resting angle of the elbow prevents the arms from hitting the sides of your body as you walk. This is known as the “carrying angle.” Women typically have smaller shoulders and wider hips than men, and this can cause variations between carrying angles in men and women.” The greater carrying angle in women develops during puberty. There have been quite a few studies done (you can google it), and the difference in carrying angle is now seen by many as a secondary sex characteristic (which could be used as a means to differentiate male and female skeletons).  Here are two examples from my studio, male on the left and female on the right:

So what does this mean for violin and viola players? For holding the instrument, the implications are quite dramatic. When a person (let’s say a male) folds up his forearm to bring the hand towards the body, the elbow angle naturally allows the forearm to be directly in line with the upper arm:

However, when a person with a greater carrying angle (let’s say a female) does this, the natural motion of the arm is to bring the hand towards the chest.    

The only way for females with carrying angles such as these to attain the same position as the males shown above is to rotate the arm/elbow to the right (as you would to play higher on the G string). It seems therefore that many females would be better served to hold their instruments more in front, rather than out to the side, so as not to argue with the natural angle of their arms when bent into playing position. The more an arm is pulled under the violin or viola, the more susceptible it becomes to injury, whether by straining tendons or by putting undue stress on the ulnar nerve where it runs in the bony ridge of the medial epicondyle. Most shoulder rests have been designed with a man’s body in mind, with the possible exceptions of the Wolf Forte Secondo, or the old Menuhin pads. The newer Everest, a wonderful shoulder pad, was designed by making a computer model of the shoulder. It definitely angles the violin out towards the side when its curves and the shoulders’ curves are lined up. I often find it to be a great choice for my tall college guys, but rarely for the young ladies. How much would you like to bet it was a male shoulder that was the model for the Everest? I wonder if one modeled on female shoulders would be different? Sure seems like an area ripe for exploration.

So that is my brief and unscientific exploration of the topic to date. I’m still pondering the effects carrying angle might have on the bow arm. Seems like it might make for more natural pronation in females, but I need to get out the construction paper and experiment (the only way I figured out this much). In the both holding the violin and in bowing, elbow carrying angle might be a factor contributing to the fact that more females suffer playing-related injuries than men. Any thoughts?