Exercise and Exercises
As we enter into the summer, I can feel that my schedule is easing up a bit. With this extra time, I started thinking about finding time to get more exercise. It makes me laugh sometimes at how much effort we make to find time to exercise, yet we are always looking for parking spaces as close to the front door as possible. We look for the remote control so we don't have to get up to change the tv station, or we use bluetooth speakers from our phone instead of getting up to change a CD on a CD player. Now we work remotely, so we don't even need to walk to and from our car to drive to work! We file papers digitally and so we don't need to get up to pick documents out of the printer. Nonetheless, exercise is really important.
Finding the time to exercise is more than moving our bodies. It is also taking a mental break, getting away from our screens, and giving us time to think. Sometimes exercising means giving ourselves time to shut off our brains and not think. Allowing ourselves to move lets our bodies spread oxygen throughout the body. When we do cardio exercises, we breathe more deeply and expel "old" air and let in more oxygen. It revitalizes us physiologically and also freshens and sharpens us mentally. Exercising improves our ability to cope with stress and can make us happier.
When we learn a musical instrument, the Suzuki teacher gives exercises to practice. These exercises are usually small steps that must be repeated over and over to gain mastery. Sometimes they are simple warm-up exercises just to get the physical mechanisms of playing our instrument into motion. Practicing your bow hold ten times in a row is like doing ten crunches, or practicing Variation A can be like doing 24 jumping jacks. It gets us moving, and builds our body awareness. We move, breathe, and provide oxygen from our lungs to our finger tips. Our blood circulation can better reach the bottoms of our feet when we think about placing them flat and distributing our weight solidly into our feet.
Do we sometimes skip exercising? Finding self-motivation can be hard, and some exercises, like running, are better with a partner or a group. Do we sometimes skip warming-up with Twinkle Variations and our bow hold exercises? I hope not, as these are so important to be part of our daily routine. While we are very eager to practice the newest piece and advance towards the end of the book, we need to realize that "exercising" and feeling the exchange of oxygen as we play our learned pieces leads to greater freedom. Using our muscles and our time to enjoy the ease with which we can play our learned repertoire is like going out for that easy jog in the morning. It helps us connect to our bodies and gets our blood flowing. We come back from our walk or run, ready to face the activity and challenges of the day.
This is the same for the musician who starts with those repetitive exercises and then can move on to working on the new and challenging repertoire with greater focus and energy. As Dr. Suzuki would say, it is "knowledge plus 10,000 times that leads to greater ability." Let's not skip the 10,000 repetitions. We need to oxygenate ourselves through the exercises on our instruments and through exercising our bodies. The result is greater ease, greater happiness, and greater readiness for the challenges to come.
- Sachiko