If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I love a good sports analogy. And truly, it’s because the demands of a professional musician are every bit as rigorous, complex and exacting as those of a professional athlete.
Though the muscles we train are smaller, the physical behaviors all musicians learn to master are no less intricate or complicated, and they require comparable levels of both endurance and focus.
For that reason, musicians also must train like athletes. In fact, we use largely similar strategies to learn and master our craft.
There are seven widely acknowledged principles of fitness training: overload, specificity, progression, adaptation, recovery, individuality and reversibility. All can be understood through the lens of musical training and can help guide our training/practice choices. We’ll dive into the first three today and save the final four for the next post.
Overload:
Exercise science tells us the body only adapts and improves when it’s pushed beyond its current limits. And this is what the Overload Principle is all about. Progressive overload involves gradually, systematically increasing the demands placed on the body during exercise to challenge both muscles and the nervous system, forcing them to adapt and improve function.
In weight training, this might look like lifting heavier weights, adding repetitions or sets, and reducing rest time between intervals. The point is to work to failure, which will cause the muscle fibers to tear and grow back stronger.
For musicians, this might look like:
- Stretching the limits of vocal range
- Playing/singing in increasingly extreme dynamics
- Practicing for longer periods of time
An element of healthy fatigue is implied in this principle. We want to work just past our current limits to build more strength and stamina.
Specificity:
This principle states that training must be tailored for the specific demands of the activity to be mastered. Athletes should focus on exercises and drills that most closely mimic the movements, skills, and demands of their sport.
A basketball player working on their jump shot would never focus on long-distance running. Instead, they would include vertical jumps, box jumps or other plyometric exercises in their training.
Motor movements and muscle fibers need to be trained to match the requirements of the task. This is the whole purpose behind the exercises, drills and études teachers assign to their music students.
So, if you want to be able to sing softly, you have to practice singing softly. And if you’re working toward more finger dexterity, it might be time to dust off your Hanon book of exercises!
Progression:
This is probably the easiest of the first three principles to understand: exercises must become gradually more challenging to make the body adapt, change and advance.
For a fitness example, consider a lunge. The basic forward lunge is where all beginning weight trainers start, in order to build proper form and a solid foundation for the future. But at some point, the body will adapt to that form and it will no longer be challenging. So weight is added. Progressively difficult forms are introduced, like the reverse lunge, curtsy lunge or rotational lunge…you get the point: musicians must increase the difficulty of daily exercises, vocalises, études and repertoire over time.
Consider a scale. A new pianist begins with a five-note scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol). But once that is mastered, they advance to an eight-note scale, which requires more complex movements of the fingers. Then two octave scales are introduced, an added arpeggio at the end, and so on. By increasing the difficulty of the task gradually, we can make the body adapt, change and advance.
Tune in next month for the next four training principles!
