Posted by Rick Denney on March 09, 2003 at 12:21:23:
In Reply to: How much daily (?) to exercise? posted by Volker on March 08, 2003 at 04:36:25:
From a musical perspective, the life of an amateur usually imposes plenty of "rest" periods without having to plan them. I don't practice nearly as much as I should if I really wanted to improve, but I practice as much as I can and still keep life in balance.
This is true for athletics as well. I know many obsessive triathletes who train 15-20 hours a week as amateurs, invading their family life and their professional life to the point that one or the other often fails. Some of them are obsessive in the same ways that someone with an eating disorder is obsessed about their distorted view of themselves in the mirror. I know many who show the symptoms of overtraining: Their heart rate won't descend to their usual resting heart rate after a workout, their sleep is disturbed, their mental focus is shot, their injuries won't heal, they suffer from new over-use injuries, and they get sick frequently. I don't expect that many of these problems would be the result of too much practice time on the tuba, except for one--performance improvement stops or goes backwards.
That said, Lance Armstrong rides his bike 6-8 hours a day, with a day off each week. He alternates to some extent: Speed work on the flats one day, followed by a relatively liesurely long recovery ride the next, followed by hills the next, and so on. The mantra for endurance athletes is, "speed or distance, pick any one." During my buildup for a marathon, I would run long on Sunday, not at all on Monday, a moderately intense tempo run on Tuesday, longer and slower on Wednesday, intense speed-work, not at all on Friday, and a slow medium-distance jog Saturday. During the weeks of the longest long runs, I've taper back on other things, and my peak week was 45 miles.
Triathlon training was similar: Intensity on day was followed by longer, loss intense workouts the next day.
If there is a translation to playing the tuba, it would be that I might focus on high-range flexibility one day, and focus more on low-range tone production the next. But I still try to do some of everything in every practice session. Even in my long runs, there would be hills during which I'd have to work at my limit to get up them. When I feel my lip muscles getting tired such that I'm resorting to pressure, I immediately spend a minute or two with low, long tones and then take a break. That's the same thing as jogging for a half mile between intervals.
The best translation is this: Form is everything. This is true for the weight-lifter, the marathoner, and the musician. When marathoners run too long for their training or their nutrition, they run out of muscle glycogen and have to slow to the point where their bodies can reprocess muscle protein into glycogen. Cyclists call this a bonk, and marathoners call it a death march. Swimmers call it being pulled into the rescue boat, heh, heh. The point is that a death march has no positive training benefit. The quality and usefulness of the workout ended when the death march began. With weightlifters, if they use inertia instead of strength to get the weights up, then they are not building muscle. Form is everything. When my high-range exercises break down into using pressure to make up for a loss of embouchure strength, then I'm doing more harm than good. We do what we have to do at gigs or in races, but we should not train that way.
Rick "whose playing is improving the more he is conscious of form" Denney