October | 2012 | Bill Plake Music

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So you’re inspired to take your practice to a new level of commitment. You’re ready to spend the time and the energy. Ready to become more focused and disciplined. That’s great! Riding that wave of enthusiasm is going to take you into a deeper realm of self-expression (and satisfaction).

I’d like to offer an idea that might help you make that transition in your practice time more effective: Think like an athlete. After all, athletes and musicians have something in common. Both spend lots of time practicing precise, repetitive movements.

Many years ago I became deeply involved in endurance sports (cycling and triathlon, in particular). Any wise endurance athlete knows that training has to be done in cycles. You simply can’t train hard all year long (potentially injurious and counterproductive). You need a program that includes carefully planned work at different levels of intensity and duration, as well as plenty of strategically applied rest.

Competitive endurance athletes often plan their training in yearly cycles (including several shorter cycles nested within the year), with specific goals about when to be in peak condition for particular events. At the end of every competitive season comes the “off-season”, which is essentially a carefully prescribed period of rest.

This rest season is absolutely essential to the continued success of the athlete. It promotes mental and physical recovery, as well as providing an important period of reflection about the effectiveness of the training efforts of the previous season.

After this rest period, the athlete begins to train again. And the smart athletes realize that they need to scale back their efforts considerably from where they were at the end of the previous season.

They can’t just start hitting it hard, no matter how enthusiastic they are. (This is true even if the athlete has maintained a reasonable amount of fitness throughout the off season by means of less intense, yet regular physical exercise and activity.)

And the same is true for musicians. Even if you’ve been practicing regularly (let’s say, for example, an hour a day) and you want to significantly increase your practice time, you’re best off by doing it gradually.

One of the best pieces of advice given to me by an excellent cycling coach some years back, has also helped me in my practice as a musician. He said to attain the optimum results when increasing my training efforts, I should always aim for “teasing myself” into better condition.

In other words, each training session should leave me feeling like I want to do a bit more, go a little further. And then the next day, I dig a little deeper, but still “teasing” myself into condition. Still hungry and curious for more.

As you might guess by now, this approach to physical fitness training has helped me significantly as I apply it to increasing my musical practice efforts.

Many of the musicians that come to me for Alexander Technique lessons do so because of chronic pain and/or injury they’re experiencing as they play music. There are several causes of their pain: excessive tension, misdirected muscular energy, distorted posture, to name but a few. Often these problems are exacerbated by practicing “too hard”.

So besides teaching these musicians how to play with far less effort and tension, part of my job is to teach them how to safely build their practice intensity back up. I show them how to “tease themselves” into better condition.

Here are some things you can do to help you safely and effectively increase the intensity and duration of your practice:

Stop before you get tired. Don’t bring yourself to exhaustion during any point in your practice session. Even though you’re working hard, aim for feeling energized as you finish. A “good kind of tired”, instead of a complete wreck.

Improve your awareness as you practice to notice where and how you might be working too hard. In particular, notice your neck, shoulders, back and legs. Think release and mobility instead of tension and holding.

Notice your mental states. Are you able to bring 100% of your attention to the act of practicing? Are you thinking clearly each time you start a new phrase (or attack a note)? Do you feel “foggy” or fatigued during any point of your practice session?

Recognize intensity. Not all practice is equal. One hour of long tones in the upper register of a brass instrument is far more taxing than 2 hours of easy, melodic etudes in the lower and middle register. So don’t just think practice time, weigh in intensity as well. Be willing to make a shorter session if it has more intense work in it.

Become disciplined about time. Work in pre-specified amounts of time. Avoid going from practicing one hour a day to 3 hours in one session. Spend a few weeks building up to this duration.

Become disciplined about stopping. I rarely practice anything for more than 15-20 minutes without putting my saxophone down and walking away from my practice area, even if just for a couple of minutes. If you get in the habit of doing this, you’ll avoid a significant amount of accumulated fatigue (both physical and mental). Also, give yourself permission to stop at any moment you feel like you’re straining or misdirecting your efforts. Mastering the art of stopping is essential to your safety and your improvement.

Become disciplined about resting. This goes hand in hand with stopping. Rest many times during a practice session, turning a one hour period into 4 short practice periods with a few minutes of rest between each. Then give yourself a good 5-10 minute rest at the end of the hour. Lying in constructive rest is a great way to recharge your batteries at the end of each practice hour. Take a day off each week from practicing.

Think in training cycles. Just like the endurance athlete, modulate your training efforts. Have some easier days, some more intense days. Also consider easier weeks, and more intense weeks.

Make your aim to finish each session wanting more. This brings us full circle to my first bulleted point above. Put your instrument away with a sense of curiosity, a sense of longing to explore more, to go deeper. At first this might seem unsatisfying (or even frustrating), but as you gain control over your ability to stop, your ability to rest, your ability to manage your time effectively, you’ll find a deep sense of accomplishment and confidence in your practice efforts (not to mention you’ll really improve your playing!)

The similarities between the musician and the athlete are many, and I’m certainly not the first to have drawn these comparisons. By thinking more like an athlete, you’ll change your practice in a positive, progressive and sustainable way.

In my experience teaching the Alexander Technique to pianists, string and woodwinds players, I often encounter a similar kind of counterproductive thinking concerning the hands and fingers. Specifically, too much attention is placed upon what the hands and fingers are doing.

Not only does this divide the musician’s attention, often cutting off the awareness of what’s going on in his/her body as the music is being played, but also, it interferes with hearing pitch, timbre, and perceiving time clearly.

And sadly, all this attention on the fingers doesn’t even make them work better. Quite the contrary.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of problems with hyper-awareness of the fingers that I’ve come across with my students:

A saxophonist who is consciously trying to keep his fingers very close to the keys (in an effort to not “waste” movement and play more “efficiently”). In doing so, he makes his entire body stiff and his fingers sometimes can’t move in response to the demands of the music. He’s stuck.
A pianist who stares constantly down at her hands as she plays, making sure her fingering is “correct” as she plays an unusually high percentage of wrong notes on a piece that she knows quite well.
A violinist who can’t keep his eyes off his fingers for fear of playing out of tune. (Ironically, as soon as he takes his eyes off his hands, his pitch improves dramatically.)

The simple truth is that if you want to improve how your hands work as you play, you have to leave them alone, so they can do the right thing without interference. To do this you have change your thinking. You have to replace the thought of your fingers “doing the right thing” with a broader kind of thinking.

First, start with the aim of being free in your body as you play. In particular, ask yourself for freedom in your neck, shoulders and back. This alone will not only change the quality and quantity of muscular tension as you play, but also, will calm and center your mind and improve your breathing.

Make this a top priority as you practice. The freer you are in your head, neck and back, the freer your fingers are to move and create the stability necessary to play your instrument. This is something you’ll need to practice as you practice (yes, I meant to say that). Here’s a previous article I’ve written about practicing paying attention to help you with this.

Next, rather than trying to feel how (or what) you think your fingers need to feel, think instead of where your fingers need to go as you play from one note the next.

By taking your attention from what you feel to where you are going, you increase your spatial awareness (and improve your sense of time, as well). Your brain organizes the music making task in a fundamentally different way, allowing your fingers to move freely, easily and quickly. In the simplest sense, you get out of the way of your brain’s ability to organize and control complex movement, so it can do what it needs to do unimpeded.

This is something that can be practiced gradually, using simple visualization:

For example, if you’re a saxophonist, practice a very easy, familiar pattern (arpeggio, scale, intervals, etc.) at a slow tempo as you think, not of what your fingers are doing, but what keys need to be pressed and/or released as you go from note to note. Think ever so slightly ahead to the next note to be played as you land on each note. If you practice this regularly, you’ll learn that you can play rapid passages that you couldn’t play before with stunning ease and clarity. (Same general idea if you play piano, strings, etc. Think where on your instrument you want your fingers to land, not what your fingers have to do.)

Finally, replace the thought of fingers with tonal imagination. Practice singing passages or patterns that you find difficult on your instrument. First, sing the passage slowly and very precisely, making sure the sequence of pitches and the rhythms are crystal clear in your mind. Once you’ve accomplished that, play the passage by following your ear. Really hear the passage clearly in your mind, and don’t worry about what your fingers have to do.

Most of the chronic technical difficulties musicians struggle with are a result of tense anticipation. Hyper-awareness of the fingers is akin to driving a car on the highway at top speed with your eyes planted downward on the road in front of you. Scary and stiff. Same thing on your instrument.

So change how you think about your fingers. Practice consistently shifting your attention from your fingers to your broader senses, and you’ll be surprised how limber and accurate your technique becomes.