End Every Practice Session More Relaxed Than You Started

Most of us end a practice session more tense than we began it, and we assume that is the price of the work. I want to suggest it is not the price of the work. It is a habit — and like any habit, it can change.

Here is the thing nobody told me when I was young and practicing four hours a day: how you practice becomes how you perform. If you spend an hour gripping your way through a hard passage, you are not only learning the notes. You are learning the grip.

You are rehearsing, with real dedication, the exact tension you will then carry to the stage. I know this because I practiced my way into repetitive strain injuries in both arms by the time I was in music school, and the only guidance I got was “you should learn to relax” — with no instructions attached. It took me years, and eventually the Alexander Technique, to work out what those instructions actually are.

They begin with a trap. I call it the Try-Harder Trap: the quiet belief, underneath almost everything, that more effort equals more effectiveness. Well-directed effort equals more effectiveness, and for most people it means using much less effort overall. Over-efforting thins your sound, stiffens your technique, and leaves you feeling like you are fighting your own body. And the cruel part is that it feels productive the entire time. It feels like trying.

So the first move is not a technique at all. It is a change of aim. Most of us practice to get the notes right, and then we stop.

But look at what that sequence actually trains. You play the passage, you miss, you miss again, you tighten, you try harder, you finally nail it, and you move on — having just rehearsed the mistake several times and the tension every single time. If music were only about getting the notes right, we would all be perfectly content listening to robots.

We are not. So I want to widen the definition of a good practice session: not the notes right, but the notes right with ease — and, when it is really working, the notes right with ease and with heart and soul. Ease is the doorway, and it is the simplest way in.

Ease, it turns out, is not merely random or a trait handed to a lucky few. It is a skill. If you had met me twenty years ago, rigid and in pain, you would not have bet on me. The ease that I now play violin with is testament to the fact that ease is learnable — and here is the most useful skill I know for it.

I call it the Magic Pause. Your tension is a habit, which means it is automatic, learned, and mostly invisible to you; it fires before you are even aware of it. You cannot stop it from arising.

But there is a sliver of freedom right after the thing that sets it off — right after you decide to lift the instrument, or reach for the shift, or begin the fast run. In that sliver, instead of diving straight down the old pathway, you pause. Not to relax — trying to relax is just more effort, one more job to do — but simply to wait.

Because if you wait a second or two without feeding it, the anticipatory tension subsides on its own. It always does. You did not have to fix anything. You only had to not rush.

That word — rush — is the whole game for a lot of us. The habit is to whip the instrument up and go. The pause interrupts it, and in the gap you find something quietly radical: you have other choices.

Where do you put the pause? This is the reframe that changes the most for people. Tension is a “when” problem, not a “where” problem.

We spend enormous energy on where it hurts — the shoulder, the wrist, the jaw — hunting the sore spot, buying the next shoulder rest. Sometimes there is genuinely something to address there, and it is worth checking. But far more often the ache is only the place the bill comes due.

The cause is a when: the exact moment you tighten. Right before the entrance. Right before the shift. Right before you look at the notes. Find the when, put the pause just before it, and the where tends to take care of itself.

Here is how to turn all of it into an actual practice method — the one I built this month’s class around. It is almost embarrassingly simple.

Play a short passage you know gets tense. Rate your tension from zero to ten — zero is loosey-goosey, ten is a brick. Be honest; the number is only for you.

Then find one critical moment in that passage, the single spot where you tighten most. Play up to it, pause, wait for the anticipatory tension to subside, and continue. Rate it again.

Find another critical moment and do the same. What you will usually watch happen, over a few rounds, is the number coming down — an eight, then a six, then a four, then a two. When it reaches a two, you are done.

Not only because the notes are finally right, but because you have practiced the passage the way you actually want to play it: with ease. You have rehearsed freedom instead of tension.

I watched a room full of musicians do exactly this a few days ago in my Lab — different instruments, different pieces, the same numbers falling in real time. It is not magic, even though I named the pause that way. It is just the first honest thing most of us have ever been handed in place of “try to relax.”

There is a deeper reason I care about this, and it is why the work is not only about comfort. When you are clenched, the music inside you cannot get out. I think of it like a garden hose with a kink in it — the water is right there, under pressure, ready, and the only problem is the kink.

Ease is how you unkink the hose. What comes through is not merely fewer aches. It is you — your sound, your expression, the thing you actually have to say. That is what I mean by Soulforce, and it is the whole point.

So if you take one thing from this, take the smallest one, because the small one is the whole method. The next time you sit down to practice, before you play, pause. Wait for the tension to settle. Then begin. Do it before the hard passage, before the shift, before you even lift the instrument — and watch your number come down. That is a practice session you get to end more relaxed than you started.

If you would like to do this live, with me and a room of other musicians, I run a free class every month — the Musician’s Tension Reset Lab. It is hands-on, we experiment together, and you are welcome as many times as you like. You can sign up at soulforcearts.com/tensionreset.