Find Out How to Fuel Your Practice Sessions!

There’s More Than One Instrument in Your Piano Studio!

Self-care – it’s a term we hear more about these days and there’s a good reason why. Taking good care of ourselves benefits all areas of our lives.

• It certainly helps us physically by eating healthy foods, exercising, going to the doctor when we need to, keeping hydrated and getting enough sleep.
• It also helps us to have better mental faculties, higher emotional intelligence, and be more open and connected to our family, friends, and even our community.

We also have to maintain our cars, our homes, our finances, our personal possessions and even our relationships; not just ourselves.

In our piano playing, we take care to keep our piano music in order, our practice areas clean and organized, and even our instrument in top shape. That’s a great starting point, but sometimes we forget that we ourselves are instruments as well, and taking care of our bodies and hearts is just as important.

Do you ever find yourself struggling to focus, retain what you’re learning, coordinate your fingers and hands correctly, or any number of challenges like this? Many times we think that we just have a bad attitude, or we’re being lazy, or we’ve just “lost our passion”.

While that may have some relative truth to the situation, it also could be that you’re dehydrated, or you didn’t get enough sleep, or you haven’t eaten all day long. A lot of times when we’re really irritable and feel like nothing is really clicking, it’s because we are getting sick and just don’t know it yet.

Many times, we can create a positive impact on our mental well-being and ability to learn and perform by taking care of our bodies as an instrument just as we do our pianos. While we might have to tune a piano just once a year, we have to “tune” our bodies daily to function at peak capacity.

There are some specific things that you can do each day to fine-tune yourself before you begin practicing to make sure you are getting the most out of your practice time.

• Drink some water before you start practicing. When you take a break, drink a little more.
• Don’t practice after being up all night or simply not getting a lot of sleep due to other demands. You can play your piano, but save the learning sessions for when you are alert and fresh mentally.
• Eat some protein before you practice. Sugar will cause you to crash in the middle of your practicing if you do it long enough, and you want to be able to maintain good focus throughout the entire session.
• If your body is hurting anywhere, make sure to stretch gently and be prepared to observe how your body is reacting while you are playing your piano. Don’t continue to practice if you are really hurting; best to wait until an injury is healed so you don’t prolong the healing or cause permanent damage.

Seeing yourself as an instrument that is just as important as your piano in terms of reaching your goals will not only make your piano playing better, you will feel a lot better physically and mentally as well. Sometimes it helps to think of food as fuel that we fill our own tank up with so we can accomplish what we want to and what we need to.

Remember that practicing self-care will make your piano practicing more productive!

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

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