Practice Smart Not Hard

We have all heard the phrase, “practice makes perfect.” But I believe that the more we fixate on achieving perfection, the less we allow ourselves to learn from the actual practicing. As singers, we get a limited amount of time that we can sing in a day. We want to make sure we are setting ourselves up for the most productive practice session as possible so that we can maximize that time. We want to ease the pressure to achieve that perfection and shift our focus to how we use our practice time to our advantage. Singing practice should always happen when we are calm and relaxed and at ease with our singing. If we can think through our practice session as any athlete would think through their work out, we can pace our singing sessions and allow for more ease. We want to start every practice session with stretching and checking in with our bodies. Getting the body ready to sing will help make sure that our voice is being cared for throughout the whole practice session. We don’t want to dive right into our hardest repertoire or the challenging new song we are learning. We want to ease into singing those harder things after we have already warmed up and gone through more secure repertoire. Mapping out a quick plan for each practice session will help to keep from jumping ahead and singing too much too soon. When we don’t pace ourselves, we are more likely to get vocally tired and need to end our sessions sooner. It is also more likely that our voice will be more tired for our next practice session. So we singers need to think through our practice sessions and take our time to ready our voice. This will help us gain more with less exertion over time and help us to practice smart, not hard.