(Much Needed) Update to Conditioning Best Practices

A few Blog Months ago, I attempted a post on "conditioning best practices for tuba players." I just revisited it and confirmed my nagging suspicion that I've since disproved most of what I then thought to be true. After years of frustration I have only in the last several months made some real progress, progress which I suspect might age quite a bit more gracefully than it did the last time I thought I could say so. Who really knows. Again, I will offer the disclaimer that this reflects only one person's experience, and even then may cease to be relevant in short order.

The first, unfortunate, point is that I still have yet to achieve perfect interchangeability in musical results between a strictly vegan diet and one which involves occasional strategic beef loading. Two days in advance of an important playing obligation seems nearly always to be an effective time to do this. Whether this restores depleted iron and protein supplies in the body or simply provides an extra caloric boost I have no idea at this point. However, it is very real and I am now relying on it, with notable success in recent months.

Man, did I trash napping back when I wrote the other post. For whatever reason, napping has now become my choppers' best friend rather than their worst enemy, indicating that something else was fishy back in the day which for whatever reason a substantial midday nap badly exacerbated. Everyone should read Dr. William Dement's The Promise of Sleep. It has priceless information that everyone can use, like the fact that the "two-thirty feeling" is actually a natural drop in the body's built-in alerting system. (Closed-circuit to white people: this means that the siesta is actually a scientifically justifiable masterstroke of productivity, not an emblem of laziness. I am proving it.) Having claimed the 6am-2pm shift at work almost a year ago, I am finding that for me as someone who has never been able to sleep very long at a time, it is highly effective for me to basically only ever try to sleep when alerting is low, i.e. late night into early morning and early to mid-afternoon. When I have work during the day and gigs at night I sometimes end up sleeping almost an equal amount during both stretches for days at a time. Sounds awful to you, maybe, but for me it's a godsend as I never have to go straight from work to a gig or vice versa without refreshing myself.

By the end of a long day without any breaks, you simply have no energy, and what I'm coming to suspect is that looking at all of this in terms of general energy level is a much more fruitful approach than focusing on specific muscles. This is informing my eating as well. If you have seen me eat, you most likely share my disbelief that my prior struggles with conditioning could possibly have been due to insufficient caloric intake; and yet, I am paying more attention to this and it is working. I am also going out of my way to diversify my diet rather than eating so much of the same things, and while I can't say for sure that this has had any impact, it sure can't hurt. Right now I am halfway through Enette Larson-Meyer's Vegetarian Sports Nutrition and am most struck by the sheer number of nutrients that factor directly into performance athletics. In the past I probably was getting decent amounts/proportions of macronutrients but not nearly the diversity of micronutrients she outlines. I am making the effort now; it helps to be close to the nation's fruit basket, and lots of Trader Joe's locations.

You're laughing at the phrase "performance athletics" on a tuba blog? I was right there with you for a long time and the consequences nearly ruined me physically and emotionally. This leads me to probably my most disturbing recent discovery, soon to be put to the final empirical test over winter break but right now with very strong anecdotal evidence to support it, and this is that ceasing all unnecessary strenuous athletic activity (in my case, my coveted handful of trips to the basketball court each week) has made a dramatic positive difference in my tuba playing. How is this even possible? Strong aerobic conditioning is thought by many to have great benefits to wind players. For whatever it's worth, I for one have never quite been able to prove this to myself anyway; more substantively, though, I strongly suspect that this amount of strenuous exertion has simply been depleting my energy stores and that I have not been getting the right amount/kind of either food or sleep in the recovery period. There were hints of this as soon as I started paying attention, but it was too uncomfortable a conclusion; there's no way tuba playing could burn all the extra calories I've been consuming by itself, and the absence of strenuous physical activity is literally a death wish. Is this where the fat tuba player thing comes from? I hope not, but I certainly am paying close attention to all of this. Stay tuned for the results of future experiments.

Making A Habit Of It: A Second Lapse Into Foodblogging

I now continue tumbling down the slippery slope of blogger-like behaviors with an encore foodblogging extravaganza. This year's iteration, however, bears quite a bit more directly on my musical activities than you probably would otherwise imagine. Over the past several years, I began to suspect that my largely vegan diet was not serving the needs of my choppers all that well. My first thought was protein, but I now suspect that iron has a much larger impact. The following dish was developed for iron loading, combining as it does three vegan iron powerhouses: kale, tempeh, and black beans. I eat it three times a week and have seen a noticeable improvement in my ability to get and stay in tuba shape. It's also a darn tasty and filling meal sure to please all but the most terminally constipated of fast-foodists. The recipe is shared below. Please note that most all of the measurements are approximate and included simply for effect; I do not own any measuring implements and have never actually measured anything when making this dish. Use your instincts and embrace some subtle variation within repetition. (Did I mention I eat this three times a week?)

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Iron, Man!
feeds 2 people, or 1 tuba player

•1/3 Cup Canola Oil
•Two Handfuls Chopped Onions
•One Handful Chopped Garlic
•2 Tbs Ground Cumin
•1 Tbs Ground Cayenne Pepper
•One Package Trader Joe's 3-Grain Tempeh, Chopped
•One Generous Splash Bragg's Liquid Aminos
[low-sodium soy sauce substitute, available at health food type places and some supermarkets; a miracle; get hip to it if you're not)]•Two Handfuls Cherry or Grape Tomatoes, Chopped
•Lots of Kale, Chopped (I use about 3/4 of the Trader Joe's bag)
•One Can Cooked Black Beans, Drained and Rinsed
[if you have time to cook your own beans and know how to do it well, this can really put the dish over the top; unfortunately, I have been opting for the expedience of the can lately]

In a large, deep skillet or wok, combine canola oil, cumin, cayenne pepper, onion, garlic, and tomatoes. Cook on low heat for 5-10 minutes, mixing occasionally to distribute. Mix in tempeh and liquid aminos and cook for an additional 5-10 minutes.

Now add as much kale as will fit in the pan. You really can't have too much, since it cooks down so severely, but you'll be lucky to fit a whole bunch/bag in there unless you're cooking in one of those massive witches cauldrons.

If using a coverable pan, cover at this point, but do not mix. When kale first begins to wilt, uncover and mix to distribute spices and oil. Cover and cook for an additional 5-10 minutes, or until kale reaches the desired state. (If using a wok with no cover, it's possible to get more or less the same results by bringing the heat up a tad and mixing every few minutes.) Uncover, mix in black beans, remove from heat and let cool. Serve.

You're now ready for life as a bodybuilder, or an improvising tubist, whichever sounds more exciting to you.

Conditioning Best Practices for Tuba Player(s)

[Update 11/28/14: Wow. This entire post is garbage. Almost all of it, anyway. Sorry everyone. I really have been tied in quite the knot over this during the last several years. Things have brightened just a bit recently, and I will be publishing a brief corrective today, hopefully one which ages better than this one has as my investigations continue. I am leaving this up only for the sake of curiosity and historical accuracy.]

One of the most valuable aspects of returning to school has been the opportunity to begin a sort of empirical investigation of how to stay in tuba shape. The frenzy of my undergraduate years, which often included an inhumane amount of daily tuba playing (as often at my own behest as that of the institution) was tremendously productive in many ways, and yet because it was more or less impossible to get out of shape under those circumstances (and also because I was younger and more resilient), I left school with no reliable method or plan of attack for maintaining this level of conditioning, or even, as I realized just a few years ago, any real understanding of how conditioning works.

I hasten to clarify that I am not referring here to matters of embouchure, airstream or any other external "product" or the physical technique of producing it, but rather to the internal chemical and mechanical condition of the muscle and soft tissue surrounding the mouth which, to a greater or lesser degree depending on your level of Jacobsian mysticism, mediates one's physical ability to create those external results. I'm a long way from a thorough clinical understanding of this sort of thing, nor am I finished with my anecdotal investigation of the various factors through the more tractable lens of musical results. However, I thought it would be worth inventorying and sharing the strongest of my suspicions as they stand today. Consider this list subject to revision and highly personal.

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•Play for an absolute minimum of three 20 minute individual practice sessions every day. At least one should be longer and involve "feeling the burn" in your corners (i.e. where the muscles are; the center of the embouchure contains very little muscle and any pain or discomfort there is a major red flag). Two half-hour sessions at early and late hours have occasionally been sufficient, but usually not for an extended period of time, and especially not if what happens in between them is physically and/or mentally taxing.

•The most reliable way to "feel the burn" is to play music with no or very few breaks and lots of large intervals: Bach suites, jazz saxophone transcriptions, walking bass lines, running patterns and licks in all transpositions with a metronome, etc.

•"Feeling the burn" can range from working up to the point where you just begin to feel it and then stopping all the way to what I've heard weightlifters refer to as "total failure," when your muscles simply can't fire anymore. The happy zone on any given day is probably somewhere in between, so listen to what your face is telling you, not just that day but in terms of the larger patterns of how your chops have felt day by day for the preceding couple of weeks.

•Don't count rehearsal time as maintenance time unless it is so taxing that further playing that same day feels counterproductive or injurious. If this is the case, you've already given your muscles all they could handle that day.

•Space practice sessions evenly throughout the day. Don't play within an hour of your sleep: 1-2 hours after awaking is ideal; up to 4 hours before falling asleep seems tenable, though later seems to work just as well. Keep in mind that if you are a daily practicer, the longest you go without playing on a daily basis is between your evening session and the next morning; keep an eye on this time and don't let it get too terribly long one way or the other. Leave more time between your first and second practice sessions each day than between your second and third.

•At least 6 uninterrupted hours of sleep are absolutely required for a full recovery. Sleeping in shorter blocks for any amount of time is virtually useless to the muscles even if it is highly restful mentally.

•The most common interruptions are noise and nature calling. Therefore, I sleep with earplugs and limit food and drink to the extent possible after 8pm. Salt, alcohol and caffeine all will have you pissing your brains out a matter of hours later, so keep fairly dry, fatty, completely unsalted snacks handy in case you're really hungry late at night: unsalted sardines, extra firm tofu, dried fruit and nuts can be all consumed in satisfying quantities without precipitating a piss-fest. Two sips of wine a hour or two before bedtime can be relaxing; the alcohol will also dry you out a bit provided you leave enough time before sleeping for it to do its work, and it is also an appetite suppressant if you're feeling excessively snacky at an inconvenient time. Salt is just dangerous. Don't mess with it. Seriously. I cook primarily with Bragg's Liquid Aminos, which is (are?) miraculously low in sodium, and just a pinch of iodized salt here and there.

•Napping, while again often highly restful in every other way, is incredibly, gallingly destructive to the cycle of rest and recovery. My chops do not seem to differentiate between napping and sleeping: in other words, if I any more than doze off for a few minutes, it's as if I've "gone to bed" and my body hits the reset button. That is to say that if, for example, I have two practice sessions before 3pm, at which time I take a nap, awaking at 5pm, it is as if I have a new day on my hands, except (a) I had one too few practice sessions the previous day, (b) my body has not fully recovered from the previous day because I did not get at least 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep, and (c) I don't have enough time before I will be tired again to replicate a full practice day. Hence, I have essentially taken one potentially productive day and turned it into two unproductive days marked by the double-whammy of not enough sleep or practice, and two unproductive days in a row is generally four times worse than one. Further, this almost always leads to interrupted sleep for two or three more nights, which makes things even worse.

•Having said all of that, when the issue is fatigue and not underconditioning, it is likely that I will wake up from a long-ish nap with unusually loose, fresh feeling chops but very little endurance. I do this only in desperate circumstances because it tends to yield very good results in concert later that night; however, the long-term effect is similar to that described above, since you are still vastly undercooking your face and underrecovering two "days" in a row instead of one. I shudder to think how much of my life I've spent trying to get back into shape after doing this, so as miserable as it can be to be tired all day, I've started toughing it out until my normal bedtime almost no matter what.

•Eat a little bit of animal protein every day. It's clear to me now that my days as a strict vegetarian nearly ruined me. Perhaps it is possible to make this work, but I've found it much easier to simply reintroduce fish to my diet, which has lots of stuff besides protein that vegetarians don't get enough of. The rest of my current diet is very nearly strictly vegan across the board, so I'm not as concerned practically or philosophically with this single concession as I once would have been. While this was not the "magic bullet" I though it might be, it has in combination with the sleep guidelines made a significant difference in my conditioning. I began to suspect something was up years ago but couldn't confirm it. Rather, it was two separate incidents nearly a year apart which I couldn't explain, one at the tail end of a See Us Be Cute tour, the other when I moved to California last year. In both cases, the exigencies of travel meant that I (a) didn't practice much for several days, and (b) ate a ton of meat for being trapped at restaurants which didn't serve much else. In both cases, despite being completely exhausted and not in the best of spirits, I had indestructible chops two days later.

•Perhaps I simply have not mastered the craft of conditioning, but my final remark for now is that I have thus far found true consistency virtually unattainable, and in fact, even as an undergrad when conditioning per se was a non-issue and I maintained a near-fanatical devotion to routine, consistency was still a major problem. Some brass players insist that if you are consistent enough in the structure of your practice, it will translate directly to your conditioning; others maintain this is all in our heads and that if we so much as take note of how our chops physically feel, we have already lost the battle. I feel that both mindsets have let me down in a big way. My feeling has always been that there is a cycle of sorts at work; more recently, I've begun to suspect that one big piece to this puzzle which I have not yet mastered is ascertaining on a daily basis what my face needs. This probably sounds odd, but I have only recently learned to tell the difference between extreme fatigue and extreme underconditioning with a reasonable degree of accuracy: the physical sensations and musical results are remarkably similar. This is undoubtedly the source of some severe frustration in years past as it is then far too easy to mistake one for the other, which leads you to actually do the worst possible thing to your face that day. I will say that true days of rest are almost always conditioning setbacks, even if they are physically necessary to avoid injury; therefore, it becomes extremely important to avoid becoming this fatigued. Assuming this is attained, ideal conditioning seems to me to require a kind of scheduling flexibility that is almost impossible for most people, whether students, amateurs or professionals, since you have to react to subtle changes in your chops by adding or cutting practice sessions, or adjusting what you do during them and for how long. I know it's silly to get this detailed about it, but I've found the alternative terribly unsatisfying and counterproductive, and so I'm paying special attention these days to the Chop Cycle and trying different ways of gaming it to stay as strong and loose as possible. Did I mention that the parameters "strong/weak," "tight/loose," and "swollen/limber" all seem to operate independently of each other? It's quite a minefield, but I'm committed to figuring it out, hopefully sometime before my faculties start to erode from old age. To be continued...

Reinforcement

Consider this a mere prelude to a longer reflection on the topic of conditioning, but like most of us horn jocks, I'm continually fascinated/horrified at the relationship brass players have to our mistakes. It's a staple of music school lexicon that the best way to eliminate mistakes is not to practice them, but is it truly possible for a brass player not to practice their mistakes? Ever? Seems to me that no matter how hard we try, unless we are both independently wealthy and exceptionally, pathologically driven, we are going to have days where the ol' choppers simply won't cooperate, whether by virtue of over- or under-cooking the previous day(s). A day off to rest may or may not be in order depending on the particular sonic malaise, and even if it is, it may or may not result in a real live "good day" when we return. Most likely, we need to play some, if not a lot, and it's not going to sound good, i.e. it's going to be one big "mistake," or a series of them. And if we simply sit around waiting for a good day, we eliminate the very possibility, in addition to earning ourselves days or weeks of restorative maintenance filled with "mistakes." If there is a solution to be found here, it remains a mystery to me.

My grandmother, who never played professionally but had an acute musical sense, once said that what made brass entrances most exciting was the suspense surrounding the heightened potential for something to go wrong. I'm now imagining some orchestra outreach type in a sport coat and tennis shoes proffering this alongside his allegorical interpretation of sonata form as part of the hidden code of classical music listening. He might be half right.