This week’s Musician’s Maintenance is all about the “R” word. Rest. You know you need to do more of it, but there’s never enough time.
We’ve already covered some of the easier things to incorporate into your practice, like warming-up and taking better breaks, that can help improve your performance and reduce your risk of injury. Those are both ways to “drain the cup.” But they do it in little bits at a time.
Rest and recovery is where you can really make a big impact. And there’s no way around the fact that the biggest wrench in your rest and recovery tool box is sleep.
So this week is all about sleep and we’ll try to view it from the perspective of a performance health and injury prevention strategy, rather than just being lazy.
This week’s feature is a review of a study that you may find interesting if something is hurting. Plus I’ve got three more resources including why sleep should not be optional for musicians, simple tip to improve your bedtime routine, and some breathwork to help you get to sleep more easily.
Everything is below.
Enjoy!
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Sleep Powers Your Practice
Musicians have to acquire new skills daily, consolidate memories, and recall them. To engage in the challenges of deliberate practice you are also going to need a long attention span, a mood conducive to the process as well as good reaction time. Guess what influences all of these areas. This piece is a nice summary of all the things sleep can do for a musician, as well as the effects of chronic sleep deprivation. No matter how you look at it though, musicians need to sleep!
The Importance of Sleep for Musicians | Musical U
Sleep Hygiene for Musicians
If you are having trouble getting to sleep it may be because you have some bad habits around bedtime that are sabotaging your efforts. Here’s a nice 7 minute podcast with some tips for musicians, by a musician.
Episode 22: All About Sleep Hygiene | The Musician’s Guide to Being Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise
Before Bed Breathing Protocol
If when you lay down you have a brain that won’t turn off, then breathwork may be beneficial to you. Here’s a bedtime protocol from XPT life. XPT stands for Extreme Performance Training and it’s a company formed by olympic volleyball player Gabby Reece and big wave surfer Laird Hamilton. They put a heavy emphasis on breathwork for their athletes. I’m not sure some of their training methods meet the needs of musicians, but I think breathwork could be hugely beneficial for musicians and I have become very interested in it. Future editions will have more, but this bedtime protocol is a great start.
Bedtime Protocol | XPT Life via Vimeo
musician’s maintenance: book
Go The F**ck to Sleep
Ok, this one isn’t an actual recommendation. It’s a parody children’s book and there’s even a video of it being read by Samuel L. Jackson. If you’re ok cursing at yourself a little in the name of improving your health and performance, then this may be a mantra to use when you’re procrastinating going to bed. (Affiliate)
Sleep, Injury and Elite Performance
Sleep is one of those tricky things in life that everyone knows is important, but it’s often pushed to the side to get other things done. Effectively that means that we treat an extra hour of doing whatever it is we feel that we need to get done as being more valuable than that extra hour of sleep.
But what if it isn’t. What if that extra hour is actually more valuable, we just aren’t that good at judging it’s worth relative to our goals.
Sometimes the harsh reality of numbers can help put things in perspective. That’s what I’m hoping this week’s study can do for sleep as it relates to injury risk in elite performance.
The study is called “Too little sleep and an unhealthy diet could increase the risk of sustaining a new injury in adolescent elite athletes.” Here’s what the researches did.
They looked at a group of elite athletes in Sweden’s national development program and mailed them a questionnaire during the fall semester and another during the spring semester. The questionnaires looked at stress, nutrition, self esteem, sleep and injury.
The researches then took that information and look at which of those factors was related to a new injury. Here’s what they found.
Sleep Well and Eat Your Veggies
Sleeping more than 8 hours per night was associated with a 61% reduction in the risk of injury!
Eating the recommended amount of fruit (1 serving per day), veggies (1 serving per day) and fish (2x/week) was associated with a 64% reduction in the risk of injury!
What This Means for Musicians
Here’s how I interpret this study. People striving for elite performance, in a stressful, competitive, injury prone environment (sound familiar?) ask a lot from their bodies. In this study, those who gave their body what it needed (quality food and sleep) were able to handle those challenges.
Those who didn’t were more likely to not be able to handle the challenge and experienced an injury.
Another way to say it, by way of the water and the cup analogy, is that It’s not about how much you put into the cup as long as you can effectively drain it.
Obviously the study was done on 16-19 year old athletes, so the comparison to musicians is not perfect, but I think it’s worth thinking about.
tl;dr
Sleeping >8 hours a night was associated with a 61% reduction in injury risk. Eating enough fish, fruits and veggies was associated with a 64% reduction in injury risk.
musician’s maintenance: sharing
Please forward this issue of Musician’s Maintenance on to a friend, teacher, colleague, or any other musician you think may be interested. Thank you!