Musical Lessons from Deadlifting
In my early 30's I got the strength bug (yes, that's a thing!) and started training seriously with barbells. In a fashion typical for me, I became obsessed with it, reading all I could, watching videos and getting a few private sessions with a coach to ensure I had good technique. I achieved a decent level of strength in my five years of training, but the challenges of young children and the onset of COVID made time an even more valuable commodity, so I traded in barbells for more convenient training at home with dumbbells, kettlebells and bodyweight exercises.
Last year, with both kids in elementary school, I found myself with a little more time on my hands. I was eager to get back in the gym and lift heavy stuff, but now in my "early" (cough, cough) 40's, I knew lifting would be a different animal. Muscle mass tends to peak somewhere around your mid-to late 30's, declining steadily afterwards if you don't work to counteract it. I'd kept a decent baseline, but I knew I'd lost a considerable amount of strength, and that fact combined with my advancing age meant I needed to be more precise in my technique and intentional in my training goals if I wanted to avoid injury.
Eager for expert guidance, I enlisted the help of Brian Tabor (AKA Strong Made Simple). More on him later.
My goal was to achieve a double bodyweight deadlift by my birthday, eight months away. "Deadlift" is undoubtedly the coolest name of the basic barbell movements. I like to imagine a group of meathead marketers sitting around a table asking each other, "how do we make picking something up off the ground sound sexier?" Because that's all a deadlift is, really; picking a barbell up off the ground, standing up with it, then putting it back down again.
While a double bodyweight deadlift may sound impressive, most in the strength community consider it a solid intermediate goal, something the majority of people who've been training consistently for a few years can achieve. It was something I had accomplished in my 30's, but could I do it in my 40's?
TL;DR, the answer is yes, and if you skip to the end of the post you can see me lifting 340 pounds just a few days after my birthday.
I was proud of this accomplishment, but what was more valuable than the lift itself was what I learned in the process. So many things I "picked up" (terrible deadlifting pun, anyone?) along the way were analogous to musical practice and teaching.
The Beginner's Mind
As someone who regularly works with true beginners, I know the mind of a beginner to be a beautiful thing – open, curious and joyful (not to mention sometimes impatient, bored or distracted!). Not knowing anything means everything has the potential to inspire awe. I approached my time with Brian with a similar mindset, but it wasn't always easy! Right away, Brian made a number of changes to my technique that were contrary to what I had learned, or simply felt awkward when I tried them out.
In a masterclass for String Gym, violist James Dunham posited that a critical quality of a string quartet player is a willingness to try their colleagues' musical ideas with conviction, even if their initial reaction to the idea is disagreement. The importance of this mindset is reflected in another of my favorite ideas about teaching and learning from Indiana University Professor Mimi Zweig: no matter how good the information you have to share, a student has to be ready to receive the information. If the mind is closed, the timing is off, or the student is simply not in the right headspace your well-crafted feedback will fall on deaf ears.
I was determined to have a mindset like the one Dunham and Zweig envisioned. I knew reworking the fundamentals of my lifts would improve them, and I trusted Brian, so I embraced the changes he suggested, as awkward as they felt initially.
Reworking Fundamentals Takes Patience
The deadlift works a ridiculous number of muscles. Because so many body parts work in concert, weakness in just one link in the chain results in less weight lifted. In my case, Brian identified I wasn't staying tight in the core muscles of my trunk as I lifted. Since these muscles act as a crucial connection between the legs and back, limited activation there made me weaker overall. Brian gave me exercises to strengthen those muscles, as well as cues to help me think about firing them when I lifted.
But I didn't just need exercises to reprogram my core, I needed time, and lots of it! Intellectually, staying tight in my midsection was not hard to understand, but man, did it take my body a long time to get it! This gap between understanding and doing is something I see regularly in my students, and it can be agonizing! So often we grasp a concept quickly on an intellectual level, but moving from that understanding to an unconscious skill takes our bodies time, patience and repetition, and usually MUCH more of each of those things than we would like. Experiencing that feeling weekly in the gym myself gave me a regular dose of empathy for my students' instrumental challenges.
Work Sustainably and Track Progress Systematically
Brian used an app to assign my weekly workouts. The app had a metrics feature that tracked the stats of my various lifts, allowing me to see how they were progressing over time, which was key to my long-term motivation. Improvement as a beginner is obvious: you might be able to play a piece or passage this week that you couldn't last week, or play it faster or cleaner than you could before.
But the more we improve, the smaller our improvements become. And at that point, if we don't track our playing closely it can be hard to notice ANY forward motion.
Tracking musical progress nowadays is simple, as most of us always have a smartphone at hand with which to record ourselves. Creating an archive of these recordings gives you a simple way to see changes in your playing over the long term. Many students nowadays do this with social media, creating practice accounts with which to share their videos. Though I occasionally post similar videos myself, not all the sounds I make are ready for public consumption, so I use a different strategy!
From Jason Haaheim I learned to make an archive of my playing in the Apple Music app. If you click the three dots and click the "get info" option, you can enter as much text in the comments section as you want, allowing you to keep detailed notes on any run-through. Jason also takes the ingenious step of labeling his best take of any piece or excerpt, giving him an easy way to remember what his best playing sounds and looks like, and a standard against which to measure future performances of the piece.
My own progress, in both lifting and viola, is rarely linear, tending to come in waves rather than straight lines. I'll work hard for 4-8 weeks, peak, then relax a bit before ramping up again. These waves allow my body and mind time to recuperate and grow without burning out. Dan John, a thoughtful fitness trainer and writer, uses the maxim "little and often, over the long haul." Challenge yourself enough to grow, but leave some gas in the tank! Working at 80% or so of your capacity like this day in and day out is sustainable, and sustainability is critical to growth in the long term!
The Musical Athlete
When I started with Brian in August of 2023, I could lift 265 lbs for five (pretty ugly) repetitions. Eight months later I lifted 340 lbs, or twice my bodyweight, for two reps, hitting my goal just in time for my birthday:
I've continued my work since then, hitting 335 for six (much smoother!) reps a few weeks ago:
We make music with our bodies, so I’ve always thought it serves us well to think of ourselves as musical athletes. I experienced the truth of this idea firsthand last last week while playing three performances of Mahler's massive Second Symphony, "The Resurrection," with the San Diego Symphony. The piece is both artistically epic and a true test of musical endurance, clocking in at over an hour and twenty minutes.
While strength training has improved my posture, stamina and endurance, it has also further developed my kinesthetic awareness when I play. This finer awareness of my body, and the ability to consciously release or tense muscles as I'm playing, is critical when performing a piece like the Mahler. As I felt tension creep into different places in my body, I could consciously release it so it didn't accumulate excessively and exhaust me. By the end of the week, I was tired but able to recuperate fully within a day or two.
Whether it's barbell training, or another somatic practice like Yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais, dance etc., the musicians I know that have stayed healthy over a long playing career recognize the importance of treating their body as respectfully as an athlete would. Whatever your preferred physical practice, it’s worth pausing regularly to consider how you are supporting your work in the practice room by taking care of your body.
