April 03, 2023

Masterclass Episode: Warmups With A Focus - PHH 098

54 minutes

Do you have a daily warmup that you use to start your practice? If you do, I’m sure you rely on it to help you get your fingers and your focus ready for your practice session. That’s exactly what a good warmup should do, or at least that’s one of the primary functions of a warmup.

If you’ve worked with me as a student or in my online community or even if you’ve listened to this podcast for awhile, it will come as no surprise that I have fairly specific ideas about warmups: what they should and shouldn’t do, how long they should be, what their purpose is in relation to the rest of your practice. And naturally, I want to share those ideas with you today.

Today’s episode is a masterclass episode, meaning that it’s a “play along” episode. So you will not only learn my best warmup strategies, but you will get to try them out by playing along with me as you listen. If you’re not at your harp now, that’s ok; listen now to learn my guiding principles for warming up as well as how to do the playing drills and then you can come back and play with me when it’s more convenient for you.

I’ll also answer some of the questions I am asked most frequently about warmups, plus one or two questions that nobody has asked but someone should have. Maybe there’s a question you’ve thought about asking but haven’t yet; if so, I hope I answer it for you today. If I don’t, be sure to email me at [email protected], and I’ll try to answer it on a future episode.

A clarification before we get started: certain types of warmups have special physical uses for warming up muscles and tendons to prevent injury. Today we aren’t dealing with those types of physical warmups. We are talking purely about playing warmups that ease your fingers and focus into your practice. If you like to do more thorough stretching, that would happen before the warmups we are talking about today.

Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode: