How Often Should I Practice?
Ok, back after a long summer hiatus! Today I'm going to go over scheduling your practice sessions, and how it can have an effect on the total amount of time you actually have to spend practicing.
I'll start with the simple stuff that we've all heard a million times: it's very important to make sure that you practice at least once a day. If I had to distill learning piano down to a single concept, this would be it. Practice. Every. Single. Day.
Daily Practice is Real Practice
Practicing is about sustained power, not speed, and this goes double for the complex physical skills that piano playing involves. It's been confirmed for many years that bite-sized daily practice beats out intermittent marathon sessions. The scientific research on this subject goes back to the 1940s. In a landmark study, Grace Rubin-Rabson wanted to measure the amount of material that professional pianists could remember after equal amounts of practice. The twist was that the participants were divided into three groups: some did the whole session in one day, others did it in two smaller sessions in one day, and the last group spaced out the two sessions over two days. Result? The pianists that spaced their practice out over two days remembered the best.
Why should this be? The answer probably has to do with a good night's sleep. Sleep is the secret sauce for forming strong memories, especially the "motor sequence" memories used in piano playing. A study in 2004 confirmed this by testing two groups as they practiced tapping out finger patterns. Think: thumb, pointer, thumb, pinky; just the kind of movements that form the foundation of piano playing. The performance of the groups was rated by their speed and fluidity as they moved through these patterns. Next, one group slept for a night and the other simply rested for eight hours. Then both groups were retested.
Participants who had 8 hours of sleep before their second test showed significant improvement, particularly in the sections that had been especially challenging the day before. That is, they didn't only improve overall, but improved more in the tougher parts. The researchers concluded that late-night REM sleep helps consolidate motor memories into stable "chunks". This effect has also been measured in studies on foreign language acquisition.
The takeaway: your learning process doesn't end when you get up from the instrument; your brain continues to refine and strengthen the connections from one day to the next. Progress can be like a glacier: its movement is nearly imperceptible, but its power is monumental. If 7 hours of practice is broken up over a week, with good sleep in between each session, the results with be much stronger than 7 hours in one go. And that means fewer minutes actually spent at the keyboard to make the same progress.
Making Minutes Count
What if you don't have all week, and you need to do those 7 hours today? Well, if we go back to Rubin-Rabson's study from the 40s, we can see there's a little more to it: although the pianists who practiced twice the same day did not remember as much as the overnighters, they did have an advantage over the crammers. This gives us some important clues about how to distribute a single day's practice, and how to actually get results from multiple hours of practice.
Many beginning players don't take advantage of well-timed breaks to refresh their focus. It seems like an obvious and easy trick, but sometimes stereotypical ideas of "discipline" and "focus" can trip us up and trap us in an unproductive grind. Those principles are important, but not at the cost of misery and frustration. After a certain point, a continuous practice session will inevitably deliver diminishing returns. Attention starts to drift and the playing becomes less vivid. Your mind wanders to other things and improvement becomes marginal – or worse, mistakes can creep in while you are fatigued. Massive repetition doesn't do much to cultivate accurate playing. A handful of deliberate and mindful repetitions is all it takes. So leave out mindless grinding. Taking a break and returning the same passage lets you approach it with fresh ears and hands.
Another advantage to short sessions that I've noticed over the years: sometimes students get the impression that they "don't have enough time to practice" because they are waiting for that pristine uninterrupted hour. Don't wait! Just start now and get in a good 10 minutes while you wait for the coffee to brew. It'll be a better 10 minutes than the tail end of an hour-long slog, and infinitely better than no practice at all. Short sessions can much more easily woven into a packed schedule.
In fact, this is how professionals practice when they are chopping out 8 hours a day. It is never all at once on a single passage or piece. It's a constantly flowing cycle of learning, review, improvisation, listening, reflection, and a lot of breaks for everyday things. There is certainly a high level of intensity and discipline in play, but the best practicers know how to be flexible and work with their own bodies and minds.
To recap: Practice daily, in multiple short sessions if you can. Pace yourself, take breaks, stay positive, and rest assured that a lot of progress is taking place, so as long as you show up every day and do the work.
Happy Practicing!