Lessons from the Gym

By Jeffrey Agrell

Remember the best seller, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”? I would like to do a trope on it by considering playing the horn in the same way as exercising at the gym. Sometimes it’s useful to shine a light on common subjects from another angle to get a fresh look at things.

What I learned about horn playing from working out at the gym:

Warm Up.
Was there ever a dancer, a runner, a ball player who did not begin the day with a warm-up session? As musicians, we need it, too, for the same reason: to work for flexibility and prepare the muscles for the workout to come. Skipping this part invites injury. Athletes also do different kinds of warm-ups depending time of day and what they have already done. We might also consider have different kinds and different lengths of warm-up routines (see examples in Teuber, Farkas, Yancich, and other books). Don’t forget the benefits of using mouthpiece alone and/or the B.E.R.P.

Stay in Control.
A trained athlete always exercises (e.g. on resistance machines) with perfect form at a slow and steady speed, always being in control. We can emulate this by practicing with the metronome set on a speed where we can play a problematic passage perfectly (and/or, if necessary, changing the passage to achieve control, then gradually working toward the ink). As the saying goes, it’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.

Alternate Work and Rest.
Working out with an exercise machine, one should do three sets of 8-12 repetitions. Our version is having three well-planned and well-spaced practice sessions per day. We should also take care that we take rests along the way as we practice, especially during and after intense phases, such as high range. Practice; rest; again; rest; again; rest. According to fitness expert and author Peter Twist, “The stimulus to a training effect is the training session itself; however, the actual physical improvement, or physical adaptation, occurs after the training session is over. [my italics]. …The rest and recovery period is as important to conditioning gains as the actual workout itself. If an adequate rest period is not taken, over-training will cause an injury and physical development will be delayed.” In other words, to improve, you have to work hard, but for mental and physical well-being, you need to rest as an integral part of training.

Personal Trainers Are Great
As students, we have a ‘personal trainer’ – our horn teacher. After graduation we often don’t feel we need one any more. But the idea is still a good one: think of the Williams sisters in tennis. They are the best in the world, they can do it all - but they still have a coach who is there to help them use their time, avoid bad habits, and keep their playing at the highest level (“I’ve been noticing that your left foot is back about a half an inch from where you usually have it…”).

Work Out With a Partner
It’s a lot easier to endure jogging if you have a buddy there with you. Free weight lifters help and encourage one another through their sessions (“One more rep! You can do it!”). And then there’s us musicians… We sit, hour after hour, in a practice room, alone. Day after day, year after year, no time off for good behavior. What if… we invited a friend into the room on occasion to run scales together? Each player might bring new exercises to try out. You could alternate – one plays, the other rests. You could do duets for sight reading. You could coach the other one on solos (or just be the audience). You could run some excerpts. You could do some call and response. You might even end up using your imagination and improvise together – imagination blooms easily with two, but is much harder to conjure alone.

Breathe.
The practice is a little different, but the principle is the same. At the fitness center, it is important to exhale deeply and deliberately when you lift the weight and inhale when you lower the weight. As musician, proper breathing is an indispensable part of the kinesthetic synchronization of fingering-embouchure-breath to produce the desired tone. On stage and in an athletic contest, it is important to maintain deep breathing – it brings power, calm, and mental focus.

Vary Your Routine.
At the fitness center, muscle strength plateaus if you never vary your routine. Your body needs a new routine after 3-4 weeks of the same thing. It’s also a lot more fun.

Mental Training is Important.
Every serious athlete in every sport knows the importance of proper mental preparation and attitude in achieving (in solo sports) and winning (in team sports). A player who has successfully learned to focus and concentrate can outperform than a player with superior talent who is distracted. I once knew a high school wrestler who went up against an opponent who he knew could beat him. My friend knew that his only chance was to break the opponent’s concentration. Improvising, he started laughing softly. This so unnerved the ‘better’ wrestler, that my friend pinned his stronger opponent. For us, our ‘opponent’ is the internal/eternal radio in our heads that chatters on when we are up there on stage, facing the faces, trying to breathe and remember the fingering for C. Learn to quiet the monkey-mind and the road to peak performance is clear.

Be a Team Player.
Playing in a horn section is like a baseball infield – everyone has to do a particular and specific job in synch with the others to make it work well. Every night is the playoffs for an orchestral section, and a ‘win’ requires that every member of the team do his or her particular job well and in synch with the rest of the team.


There are more parallels with sport or exercise and music. Next time you’re working out, further enrich your sweaty efforts by discovering and bringing home more lessons from the gym to improve your horn playing and practice.