Yoga for Musicians The Plank English Piano Teacher Free Audio Classes Adults Children.

hello musicians welcome to the yoga for musicians podcast now i'm a teacher and i always always stress upon my students to use yoga effectively and to use a warm-up a yoga warm-up if they can before they start their practice and actually consider it a bit like perhaps tuning up is it something that you just do before you practice look we don't always get time please please please do your stretches at the very least don't sit down to practice without doing some stretches but if you've got a bit more time and if you've got a routine going it's it's really a very good discipline to have a regular practice routine at a regular set time with a regular set um meditative session beforehand so get up in the morning have your breakfast your coffee whatever it is that you do answer all your emails get all that out the way do your stretches do your five or six yoga movements and then do your practice and then every 20 minutes if you can or every 45 at the very most have a break for 5-10 minutes do some stretches have a drink look out the window rest your eyes stretch sit down again and practice for the next 40 minutes okay i mean look i understand that musicians often practice six seven eight hours if you push your body too much you're going to end your career early if you push your body too much you're not going to enjoy the act of playing music as much as you should okay it's not some sort of self-flagellation and i think as musicians you know we're all so guilty of this pushing pushing pushing we want to excel and we become obsessed completely obsessed you know to the point of um you know losing friendships getting divorced um not sleeping and eventually having to retire early because we've completely we're you know riddled with arthritis and this isn't this is not a myth this happens um you know julian lloyd webb has had to retire recently for uh medical reasons you know the body can't take it so i do really try to press upon musicians that i teach that this these methods will not only allow you to practice better and to improve at a faster rate but they will also give you longevity in your in your music your musicianship okay so the stretches are absolutely durable you have you must do the stretches at any rate but if you can put together four or five yoga moves to do before your practice sessions each day that's such a cool idea and if you can get into this habit of practicing regularly at a set time um each day after your stretching and your yoga movements you will find i i absolutely promise this you will find that you improve your musicianship improves you will have to practice less but achieve more this is how it works this is how the body and the mind work okay together so i'm putting together a series of yoga movements that i think will benefit particularly musicians and the first one what i'd suggest you do by the way is is you put together your own four or five that you do um in the mornings or before your practice i mean look if you if you prefer to do them in the evenings and and wake up the next morning and just go straight into your breakfast however you do it however you work it out you work out your own um uh timetable how best suits you to um perform at your your peak you know um now this one is called the plank and the plank is um as a core strengthening exercise and the reason the core is so important for musicians is because when we're playing we absolutely need to have a strong core it's the co in the core is this center um this area that goes from your head um down to your rump if you're seated and actually down to the ground if you're standing but it's the center of your gravity um your physical um energy center if you like and the stronger the core the better your posture but also the better your balance and the better equipped you're going to be to handle your instrument you'll understand balance and you can um your the muscles in your belly will help you deliver the perfect tone on your instrument this is true for all instruments they're all in need of this strong core okay so how do we do it well typically there are lots and lots of different ways of doing um a plank but the way i'm going to tell you now is the way that i do it so i make a straight line i on the floor if you go on all fours first of all and then you pop your feet on your toes you'll need uh trainers or to bend your toes so you're on the ball of your feet and you're making a straight line your arms are out straight and you're making a straight line from your heels up to your head now look ahead don't look down don't look up you'll find the next day that you your shoulders are pinching if you're doing that so you want to make this dead straight line okay hands flat on the ground on your yoga mat level with your shoulders now some people prefer to move their hands forward and it uses up very much um different areas of muscles uh in your arms depending on you know how good you are how experienced you are you can experiment a little i recommend for our purposes we are directly beneath the shoulders also with the feet we're doing it on on the balls of our feet on our toes you can also do it actually on the arch of your foot so you can tuck your foot in as it were or out so that you're actually resting on the top arch to see that again uses very different muscles but some people prefer to do it that way you're really engaging with your stomach muscles if you do that it's actually quite hard to do it that way but you can you know experiment a bit and do whichever one you like now when i first started doing planks i think my first plank was 11 seconds which really isn't very long at all i don't recommend looking at stopwatches and working out minutes i don't think that's useful for us but we'll use all the time we're doing these exercises we're drawing in slowly through the nose well for four seconds through the nose not don't gasp but four seconds in and eight seconds out so we're drawing in and we're breathing out through the mouth really really slowly okay so we're doing this sort of cycle and if you can do one of those when you first start your plank and then you start to feel the tension in your belly things start to hurt and become uncomfortable then you need to stop but what i'd really aim for if possible is fall okay so if you can do four of these breaths you're on to a bit of a winner already and then later on when you get better you can add and you can perhaps do ten or you know you can do you can make send yourself to a sort of meditative meditative state and just do it for as long as possible perhaps you could think about bars in the piece of music you're playing and you could do you know if you're memorizing we could look at the piece of music you could listen to the piece of music that you're actually working on let's say we were working on um the first uh the the prelude and the bach suite in g and perhaps those with the first four bars we could the first plant could be those first four bars um and then perhaps we could go on and do the next two lines because i i'm you know i have the same sheet of music that i work from all the time so i know those two first two lies perhaps you could think about that um or perhaps you know i mean you could listen to a whole movement i mean who knows what you do but what what you want to focus on and you you'll find that you stop focusing on it when it becomes second nature is that you're tensing and you won't be able to not tense these muscles are all around your belly okay later on we'll talk about um side planks which are sort of extension and really really helpful as well especially for cellists and anyone who um uses their arms quite a lot in in their musician in their instrument um the the thing with the core is once you start doing the plank you will find that your posture changes and one of my uh demands actually of all my students is that as often as they can remember they draw their tummy in towards their backs now you can't slump when you do that you it's impossible you automatically when you draw that tummy in you automatically straighten your back now when you start planking all of these things come together okay now you can't um draw that tummy in constantly you're going to forget you can't do it it's impossible to to be aware of it and just hold it in all the time but if you do it every time you remember that's good enough and you'll find you do it more and more often and then the more planking you do you'll actually find that it's actually you're practically doing it all the time do you see this is how the body works this is how yoga works this is how this practice of um musicians yoga works these exercises all fall into into place and and they work for good reason and they will benefit us they will benefit our playing our practicing our playing our longevity our performance okay so that was the prank today and i hope you enjoyed that and um we'll try and uh build an arsenal over the coming weeks of wonderful wonderful um yoga positions that are going to be um particularly helpful helpful for us um so take care and look after your body your body is a very important temple take care