Are you wondering how much to practice?  And how to organize your practice time so that you get the most out of it?  You know you’re supposed to take breaks every once in a while, but how often?  How do you keep yourself from practicing too much at one sitting, when you’re really on a roll?

For me, part of the answer is the 30-Minute Rule.  I practice in sessions of 30 minutes, separated by breaks of 5 or more minutes.

I find that anything longer than 30 minutes starts to yield diminishing returns—my mind wanders and my sound gets bad, usually around the 32-minute mark.  I know that sounds comically precise, but I’ve been keeping track of these things in my handy practice notebook for years, so I know!  In fact, every once in a while I break the 30 minute rule when I’m feeling desperate to learn a lot of music, and it ALWAYS yields the same things:  more frustration and a bad sound.

Knowing that there is a time limit to your session can help keep your mind focused.  Practicing may be challenging, but you know it’ll be over soon.

It can also make it easier to start your session—OK, today I really have to tackle those nasty octave slurs, but it’ll be over in half an hour.  I mean really, you could probably do anything for half an hour, if you had to.

The 30-Minute Rule is also for your physical well-being.  Playing a musical instrument is physically intense and your body, just like your mind, needs regular breaks from the rigors of practice.  Breaks help you to recover, and need to be built into the structure of your practice day.

Back in ye olden times, I used to try and practice at least 45 minutes or an hour at a stretch.  The thing is, when I tried to practice that much in one sitting, I usually found myself staring blankly out the window for any number of those 45 minutes—effectively I was taking a break.  Then I would berate myself for spacing out, and force myself back to work.  Eventually, I figured, why not just make it official, and work 30 minutes at a time, then take a real break?

The 30-Minute Rule also fits very nicely with the 10-Minute Rule.  You can do 3 10-minute segments within one larger 30-Minute session.  This can give you a good idea of what you can reasonably accomplish in your practice session. Knowing what you can do in 30 minutes will help you know how much you need to practice all together, and you can use your 10-minute units to divide up the time sensibly.

If you are professional musician, or music school student, give the 30- and 10-Minute Rules a try for a week or so and see if they are the right time units for you (brass players, for example, might want to plan breaks after a shorter time period).  While you’re experimenting, listen to your body, and adjust until you find your ideal practice time unit.  Then give it a fancy name (i.e. The 27 and 1/2 Minute Rule) and stick to it.

If you are an amateur or younger student, start with a smaller unit of time for your session of practice, maybe only 20 minutes, and divide it into shorter segments that make sense and feel good to you.  Then you can work up to longer sessions.  Remember, two sessions of 20 minutes with a break in between will yield far better results than 40 minutes in a row.

Keep an eye out for more on how to organize your practice in following posts.  And for more on breaks, see What to do on Breaks.

Happy Practicing!

Photo Credit: apesara

It’s that time of year again, the beginning of the school year.  Time for new backpacks, new notebooks, and new projects. And for many of us, it’s time to get back into practicing after a summer hiatus.

I always find getting back into playing shape after a break rather arduous.  Inertia is a powerful obstacle, and when I’ve gotten out of the habit of practicing it is hard to get back on many levels:  I don’t sound good, I don’t feel good, and I don’t think good neither!

With that in mind, and hopefully with better grammar, I’ve compiled a list of tips for getting back into shape.  They deal with the musical, physical, and psychological aspects of the process.  Many of the tips, as you might expect, are gentle reminders of good, basic practice technique.  A few of them (see No’s 4 through 6) are just the opposite of what I usually prescribe, and only apply for those first few practice sessions after a break.

1. Know that all your skills will come back.  The first few practice sessions after a break are ALWAYS tricky (for me, day 3 is the worst), but trust me and your past experience: you’ll get back to where you were before.
2. External motivation always trumps inertia, so give yourself a reason to get back into practicing. If you are a student, schedule a lesson.  If you are a professional, find yourself a low-stakes gig (like playing at a retirement home or for friends in a salon setting).
3. Make sure you do your physical warm-ups.  This is so important, it warrants two exclamation points!!  Jumping right back into practice after a break is an easy way to get hurt, and physical warm-ups go a long way toward preventing injury.
4. Speaking of preventing injury, make your first few practice sessions shorter than normal.  For example, my normal warm-up routine (stretches, long tones, scales, etc) takes 50 minutes to an hour.  After a hiatus, I do a “best-of” version that takes just under 30 minutes:  stretches, condensed long-tones, and my two favorite scale patterns.
5. Play something you like, not something you love.  For me, one of the main obstacles to getting back into practicing is how bad I sound, so playing a piece of music that I have a big emotional investment in feels too discouraging.
6. Don’t practice the hardest part first.  Ordinarily, that’s a great way to practice a piece, but not for your first few sessions back.  It can be disheartening, and can lead to the kind of poor practice technique that leads to injury. For me, this means no memorization work—it’s just too challenging right off the bat.
7. Have you been thinking about something you’d like to change in your playing? Now is a good time to start experimenting with it.  Just remember tip No. 8:
8. Go easy on yourself! The first few days back from a break are NOT the time to be berating yourself for lack of discipline, and they are definitely not the time to try and judge whether or not you are “talented” or “a good flutist.”  They are exactly the time to do whatever corny thing you can think of to make it nicer to get over the hump:  give your self a gold star in your notebook, take yourself out to ice cream after day 3, practice in your pajamas while lying in bed, whatever it takes!

In a manual transmission car, first gear has only one function: to overcome inertia and take the car from still to moving.  The first few days of practice after a break are like first gear.  Their only function is to get you back at your instrument, and start you getting back into playing shape.  Don’t expect to solve any big problems on those few days, and don’t expect to learn volumes of music either.  Just getting over inertia is enough. You can shift into high gear in a few days.

Photo credits: School girls by zedzap, Gear stick by johnmarchan

If you’ve been following along at home, you have hopefully tried Metronome Trick No. 1 by now.  Hopefully you’ve tried it more than once, hopefully everyday or practice session for a whole week.  And you’ve probably noticed that, what with all that repetition, it can take a long time to get from your starting tempo to two clicks above performance tempo.

Here’s the basic rule:  never practice any one thing more than 10 minutes at a time.

What do you mean, any one thing?

If you are working on getting a technical passage up to speed, “any one thing” means a small section of that passage that you have chosen to practice.  If you are working on the sound and expression of a slow movement, “any one thing” means a reasonable section of the movement, maybe one or two phrases.  If you are working on a technical exercise (scales or arpeggios), “any one thing” means any one exercise (i.e. for all you flutists out there in practice-land, Taffanel & Gaubert’s famous scale pattern No. 4).  If you are working on a particular skill (i.e. smooth legato leaps, “any one thing” means that particular skill.

What if it’s going to take more than 10 minutes to master?

Then come back to it during another practice session and give it another 10 minutes then.  Even if you think you could nail it in 15, you’ll get it even better if you give it two separate sessions of 10 minutes.

Really people, if any one thing deserves more than 10 minutes of your time, you might as well give it 20, and get it done for sure.

But why, and wherefore?

I invented the 10-Minute Rule in response to two things:  fear of tendonitis, and fear of going crazy.

The 10-Minute Rule can help prevent overuse/repetitive stress injury by the obvious mechanism of restricting how much repetition you do at a single stretch.  It also gives your brain a time limit on obsessing about some small detail of your playing, thus preventing craziness.

The 10-Minute Rule also has a much more subtle but equally powerful benefit:  it carries with it the assumption that there will be a next time, that you will get 10 more minutes on this particular passage, and it’ll get better then.  That assumption of a next time goes a long way toward removing the feeling of desperation that often comes with a real desire to be good at an instrument.

Seriously, though, never?

I make two, and only two, exceptions to the 10-Minute Rule:

• The 12-Minute Rule:  if you are SURE you will get your one thing mastered with just two more minutes of practice, go for it.  Once the clock strikes twelve, though, your metronome turns into a pumpkin and you have to stop, even if you’re just one click away.  Come back to it next session with another 10 minutes.  And if you are more than a few clicks away from done, don’t go past 10 at all.

• The 15 Minute Rule:  this is only for when you are memorizing something, and will be dealt with in a later article, I promise!

Note to beginners/amateurs: Try this idea as the 5-Minute Rule, as most of your issues can be solved in shorter sessions than those of more advanced players.  You can work your way up to the 10-Minute Rule as you get more experienced.

Another note: the cool picture above is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/367822192/