How To Get Back Into Playing Shape for the Fall Without Injuring Yourself
When we think about injuries, we often focus on technique and “doing things wrong” as causes of injury. Yet a more common issue is actually training volume, or in the case of musicians, hours played and intensity. If you’ve decreased your practice time in the last year, you’re not alone. Yet many of us are going back to gigs, ensembles, or school in the following months, which means a dramatic increase in hours playing an instrument every day. While most of us understand that we should increase time practiced incrementally, we don’t always follow through with that in real life.
Sample couch to 5k from Runner’s World. Note the gradual increase in intensity plus rest days
Just for reference, here’s a recent study on injury risks and runners. The key conclusions were that previous injury and overtraining were the greatest risk factors. Another aspect of that is intensity-in strength training, we look at rate of perceived exertion, or RPE as a marker of intensity, 1-10. For musicians, certain repertoire will be more intense, as well as performing, etc. So if we’re looking to get ready to handle more intensity and volume in two-three months, we want to roughly plan how we’ll get there, from our current starting point.
When you look at training for a race, i.e. couch to 5k, the programming starts with very little bursts of running, mixed with walking, gradually increasing in volume over a period of time. One might only run 3 days a week, but the increase in volume and intensity is gradual. The same can be useful for increasing your own practice time and intensity.
Let’s first look at the “goal” or what school or work requires of many musicians. During a full orchestral season, I will have roughly 20 hours a week of rehearsals, and two to three concerts (which may be more intense). That averages out to between 2-4.5 hours of orchestral related work per day, Tuesday through Saturday or Sunday. If I’m currently practicing 1-2 hours a day, I will need to gradually increase my practice to be physically prepared for the orchestral season. My tissues (muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc) and nervous system are not currently adapted to playing at that volume due to the SAID principle, or specific adaptation of imposed demands. Basically, we adapt to whatever physical (or other) stressors there are (or aren’t) in our environment. If you’ve run a marathon before but haven’t run in 3 months, chances are, you can’t run a marathon tomorrow without some risks. If you haven’t practiced for more than thirty minutes a day lately but have been asked to play a Wagner opera in two months, chances are you need to physically prepare yourself for that task, because you’ve lost some of that adaptations to that specific task. Fear not though, change is possible!
In applying this to music, some first things to consider are how often you rest between sessions in one day, how long the sessions are, i.e. 3 half hour sessions or one hour and a half session, and what’s the level of intensity of practice. Shorter sessions with lots of rest are less intense than sustained practice.
In addition to thinking about training time, we can also get more granular and look at RPE, or rate of perceived exertion, and try to mix and match exercises/pieces/etudes of differing intensity. In this chart, one of the pieces has a higher RPE, so i might only do it 3 days a week, while daily warmup exercises can be done more often because of their low intensity. We also tend to focus on daily practice for long term progress, but days off or lighter volume days are also great for recovery and resiliency.
An example might be practicing 1.5-2.5 hours MWF, having a 2.5 hour rehearsal on Wednesday, and lowering the practice hours that day, as well as the time on Thursday to allow soft tissue recovery time. Then Friday, continuing as normal volume without a rehearsal.
While it can seem daunting to think of these variables, we’re really just honing in on a few key principles:
Gradual increase of volume over time
Gradual increase of intensity over time, i.e. working towards performance or audition level intensity as well as demanding repertoire
Allowing for rest days and light recovery or maintenance practice days of practice after intense exertion.
If you’ve decreased your practice time in the last year, it’s ok and change is possible! But we want to create sustainable practice habits over time to prevent injury and to allow adequate recovery. So if you’re “getting back into playing shape,” think gradual and let me know how it goes!