Some Background

If you want to skip learning about my life and hearing all of these jokes I cooked up go ahead and skip to the next section. Don’t worry, I won’t judge.

Recently, I’ve decided to start prioritizing my health after a long time of it being on the back-burner for (checks watch) the last 5 years…

I’ve gone through different fitness and weight loss stints throughout my life, starting all the way back in middle school and doing p90x (yeah that’s right, those infomercials got me). In high school I lifted weights prior to Jazz Band, and in grad school I started lifting again to help deal with the seasonal depression from being in one of the snowiest cities in the country Rochester, NY. Note to self: Garbage Plates while delicious did not fix my lower-than-typical mood.

Now, after having my kid Jude, I decided I needed to find a way to keep exercise in my life in a sustainable way so that I could do what I love for longer. As of this moment, I lift weights and do cardio four or five days a week.

Weightlifting and Progressive Overload

Alright so time for the good stuff. People that read the previous section thanks for entertaining me, and for the people that skipped I did in fact judge you.

One key principle of weightlifting is progressive overload (PO). This is the gradual increase of stress you put on your muscles in order to increase strength. In the simplest version, this usually means adding reps or weight over time. More broadly, it means increasing difficulty in a controlled way while keeping your form intact.

A Huge Caveat

Okay, easy so far. Lift Stuff + Progressive Overload = Muscle Gets Stronger and Larger

However, there is one very important thing missing from the above equation. You must do all of this with good form/technique. If you lift too heavy, you will sacrifice your form, which can lead to bad results such as injury. A lot of people call this Ego lifting. Lifting weights far too heavy for them, because it strokes their ego rather than actually making them stronger.

So let’s update our equation: Lift Stuff + Progressive Overload + Good Form/Technique = Muscle Gets Stronger and Larger

The key to all of this is to lift the correct weight with good form within the desired rep range. Now there is more to this, but I think on the simple end this makes the most sense to me!

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How does this Apply to Music?

Thanks for asking person who definitely didn’t skip the first section. To answer your question, we must first take a look into a game I love doing with my younger students. This game helps us find our baseline for our progressive overload!

Questions for Yourself or your Student

This is a game I have done with a large majority of my students at Radford. I typically do this game with a student when they bring in a piece of music and they are struggling to execute the piece or a specific passage. Then I’ll start asking them questions about how they practiced it.

1. How much time do you think you spent on this? (If the answer seems reasonable, I usually move on to the next question.)
2. Did you use a metronome? (A little part of my soul leaves for Valhalla when they say no)
3. If they say yes, what tempo did you use in your practice?
4. How did you chunk it? (Chunking is the act of slicing a piece of music into smaller pieces or taking smaller pieces and making it part of a larger whole)

These four questions usually paint a pretty clear picture of their time in the practice room and often it sounds to me a lot like Ego Lifting (let’s call this ego practicing for this application). They are practicing at a tempo much too fast for them, they are playing chunks that are too large for them, or both!

The Successful Rep Checklist

At the end of the day you need to remember that high-quality input gives you a much better chance at high-quality output. In simple terms: Better reps = More Gains.

Here is the successful rep checklist I use in my own practicing and with my Radford Students to assess if:

1. Am I able to play through this chunk with the best technique I possibly can?
2. Am I able to play through this chunk without stopping?
3. Am I able to play through this chunk with 99% note accuracy?
4. Am I able to play through this chunk with 99% rhythmic accuracy?
5. Am I able to play through this chunk with my highest level of musicianship?
6. Am I able to play through this chunk while reading this music without looking down if possible?

This checklist can and should change based on instrument and personal preference! Now onto the infamous metronome game.

The Metronome Game

To the start the game we must first constrain one of the two main variables we can alter in our practicing to change difficulty: chunk length. So let’s do a four-bar chunk of any piece, however you can do any chunk length you would like! After that do the following steps:

1. Set your metronome to the performance tempo.
2. Attempt one rep of the chunk without stopping.
3. Assess the rep using the successful rep checklist above.
4. If you achieved all six guidelines, keep the tempo the same and move to step 6. If you missed any of the six guidelines, slow down the metronome by 5 clicks and go back to step 3.
5. You found your ideal practice tempo! Congrats, time to go reward yourself with a celebratory garbage plate!

When I do this game with my students at Radford we often drop our tempo by a TON! For example, if we are working on Drum Corps on Parade by John Pratt, we may start around 110 BPM and end closer to 70 or 80 BPM.

Once we find their practice tempo, their execution level skyrockets! Because of the fine filter we have for what is an acceptable rep (via the six guidelines above), we are then inputting high quality reps into our brain to consolidate later when we rest. Thus, more gains!

Progressive Overload in Practice

So how does all of this tie back to weightlifting and progressive overload?

Well, for me, this game is akin to trying to find a good weight for an exercise. Usually for weightlifting we do it in the opposite direction. You start very light and move up to heavier weights until you find your working weight. In music we started with our fastest tempo and move our way backwards until we find a good working tempo.

So now comes the big question?

How do we apply progressive overload to our practice sessions?

Alright, time to throw a new important practice idea at you, so sit down and put away that garbage plate so you can focus: You should do a majority of your practicing on the edge of your current ability or skill level.

This is the exact same as in weightlifting. We are lifting on the edge of our strength level, our body adapts and makes us stronger, which gives us more strength, which makes us be able to lift more! Thus the circle of life (did you just hear the lion king theme in your head?)

So we should do the same principle in our practice! As we get better at executing a passage at our current practice tempo and/or chunk length we can slowly increase the difficulty as we get better at the passage over time. This can be done through chunk length, tempo, or both. There are more ways, but I find these to be the biggest variables to change!

For example here is a plan that is easily executable for a difficult 4 bar chunk you are working up for a lesson or performance:

Day	Chunk	Tempo	Progressive Overload strategy
1	2 bar	60%	N/A
2	4 bar	60%	Increase Chunk
3	2 bar	75%	Decrease Chunk, Increase Tempo
4	4 bar	75%	Increase Chunk
5	2 bar	90%	Decrease Chunk, Increase Tempo
6	4 bar	90%	Increase Chunk
7	4 bar	100%	Increase Tempo

When should we increase difficulty?

I don’t want to prescribe too hard when to increase difficulty, but I really like using the following principle: Increase the difficulty after sleeping.

Sleep and rest help your brain stabilize and consolidate the information you practiced, which is one reason improvement often shows up after time away from the instrument. If you want to learn more, Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep is a popular entry point into this topic, but the broader takeaway is simple: rest matters.

This is part of where your brain organizes and stabilizes the work you put in during practice. So I believe sleep makes the most sense as a marker to increase difficulty. You can also increase difficulty after resting or even within the same session, but I highly recommend using sleep as your main marker to change difficulty if you can.

Curriculum and Picking Pieces

As a university teacher I have also found progressive overload to be a huge part of developing a curriculum that serves my students.

At the end of the day, I think an important thing for me to do is to give my students assignments that will challenge them at the edges of their ability. If it is too hard everyone will be frustrated. If it is too easy, they will be bored. And after they finish a piece or etude, making sure that the next one they tackle will continue to challenge and push them!

Conclusion

I hope that you found this helpful as you work to improve the skill of practicing!

I love talking about this stuff and if you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me or leave a comment!

Now go get your practice gains!