Change Your Diet...Change Your Piano Playing.

Boot Camps...usually in the beginning of the warm season it seems that so many places are offering boot camps to get people "back in shape" for hot weather clothes. 

We can even do them online...forget about going to the gym. There are the "30-day" diets with tons of different types of exercises, cleansing diets, build your bum or abs diets, and get off sugar diets. There are even yoga boot camps!

Well we can apply this type of approach to our piano playing and we'll see some of the great results that we do when we put extra care into our bodies and work hard to get in shape. 

When we cleanse our diets and our bodies, we're really just removing the things that don't help us reach our goals.

• Too much sugar makes us lethargic, gives us extra inflammation, and can lead to diabetes. We can remove "sugar" from our piano playing by taking anything out of our practice space and routine that isn't leading us to growth and our goals. 

Replacing bad calories with good ones gives us more energy, focus, and we feel more satisfied.

• What is in your practice routine that is weighing you down? Many times this comes down to what we're avoiding in our practicing...such as scales and or exercises. If you view your pieces as the "sugar" and your scales and exercises as your fruits and veges, you can see in a different way how we need the right mix of all of these to feel our best, or play our best. 

Focusing in on one particular area of our body for 30 days will really strengthen and tone that area. 

• Set a goal of practicing every major scale each day, for 30 days. Take one scale a day. Do nothing in that practice session but the scale of the day. Work harder on it than you ever have before...use your metronome and play the scale with different note values; such as quarter notes, then eighth notes, then sixteenth notes. Go faster each time, as long as you can play the notes correctly.   Set aside a special time for this each day for one month, and see what the results will be. 

Sometimes we simply need to change when we eat more than how much we eat. Those that aren't used to eating breakfast for example might find that they feel better and have more energy simply  by eating an apple in the morning with their coffee. 

• What would happen if you added in (for just a month) a morning practice session...for 10 minutes? Even if you have to leave at 6:00 in the morning to get to work or school...add in an extra 10 minutes somewhere in that morning time, that you can sit down and practice your scale, or that one passage in your piece. This stimulates your brain in a different/fresh way, as well as your playing. 

There are many different ways that you can apply the same ideas about taking care of your health to your piano playing. In fact, if you look at how you eat you will see something about your piano practicing; and when you address that in your diet, you'll see a difference in your playing as well. It's all a grand magical circle...all connected. 

Think about this too. Changing our food and what we put in our bodies, changes our brains and the way we think and even act. Imagine how your playing will change from doing the same thing! Having your own sort of piano "boot camp" in your practicing will produce great results...just like it does with our bodies. I think that the challenge then becomes continuing the good habits that have been established. 

What similarities do you see in your piano practicing/playing that you can see mirrored in your eating and exercise habits? Are you ready to set up your own "attack" on some of the issues that you'd like to work out of your playing? I feel a power walk coming on. 

Stay Tuned to PianoLessonsOnTheWeb.com to learn much more and achieve your dreams of playing the piano! 

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