Yu’re young. You’re indestructible. You’re a musician. You’re not going to get hurt practicing. It’s not as if you were playing football. Oh, sure, maybe you’ve heard older professional musicians complaining about pain, numbness, inflammation, and muscle spasms. Recently, for example, members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra were hurting so much that they asked their music director, James Levine, to ease up on the rehearsal schedule and to program shorter concerts.

But those are people who’ve been playing for decades. You’re basically just getting started. You’re invincible, right?

Wrong. You’re never too young to get hurt. Forty to 60 percent of music students report suffering some sort of pain or injury. One study found that the chief physical complaints of music students arose from overuse (as you become more fatigued, you lose some of your sense of pain, which is not good) and tension. Behind these was a general lack of physical conditioning.

Lisa Britsch has seen it happen for years. Back when she was teaching high-school orchestra, she had one student who would come in every Tuesday and say, “I can’t play. It hurts ever since I played in youth symphony last night.”

Britsch was puzzled. “I knew the youth symphony director, and he didn’t let kids play in pain,” she says. “There had to be something else going on.”

That student inspired Britsch to look into ways to help teen musicians avoid chronic pain, or at least get help for it. She decided to pursue graduate studies in the music-education program at Michigan State University.

“Playing in pain is not OK,” she warns. “If something hurts, something’s wrong.”