All shook up

December 7th, 2010 by Julie Ferguson

“I had a huge, constant knot in my forearm. Chris Ojeda developed tennis elbow. Matty Eggleston popped a tendon in his hand. We were all sidelined with all these injuries.”

“It’s the same motion, back and forth, back and forth, rotating up high. You have a heavy weight at the end of the arm, out in the air. It’s not just the shoulder. It’s the wrist as well.”

“Any time you’re on your feet for 8, 10, 12 hours at a stretch with that amount of bending, lifted, constant movement, torquing your body around, it takes a toll on you.”

You would be forgiven if you think the above quotes are in reference to an athlete’s injuries but, no, we are talking bartenders here – – a type of urban athlete, one might say. Robert Simon of The New York Times looks at the stresses and strains – and the resulting injuries – of the modern day bartender. As demand for fancy cocktails and shaken drinks increases, bartenders are paying a price for their tips in the form of repetitive motion and muskuloskeletal injuries.
It doesn’t help that bartending, already a profession given to showmanship and flair, has become a bona fide performance art in many establishments. Take the “crazy monkey shake” referenced in the article. When we went looking for more information, we found a reference in this all-star shake-off feature that assesses various shaking styles and the qualitative effects on the resulting cocktail. The author says, “The crazy monkey involves shaking so hard and so long that your body feels like it is flying apart. The idea is to see if a ridiculous and unfeasible shake appreciably alters the drink.”
This is by no means the only in-vogue vigorous shaking style. There’s also the celebrated “hard shake” method. Watch a clip of Japan’s most famous bartender, Kazuo Uyeda, employing the hard shake technique. And this is but one of the hazardous trends that Japanese bartenders, highly regarded as masters of the craft, are popularizing: See ice ball carving and picture doing that 8 hours a day under rush conditions.
Is bartending the new frontier for injury prevention specialists? Judge for yourself next time you are socializing at a busy cocktail lounge over the holiday season. Simon’s NYT article talks about the need for bartenders to focus more attention on ergonomics and the need to adopt a mixology form that will minimize stress.
Postscript:
New York master mixologist Eben Freeman offers a hard shake tutorial if you’d like to try your hand. Presumably, this shaking style is a tad less perilous to the occasional cocktail maker than to the professional.

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