How to improve physical technique? [Bob project]

[Bob]

What are your ideas related to devoping strength and endurance?  Scales or 8ves for example.  Assuming you are playing with perfect form, how do you go about pushing the edge of your playing?  Do you practice slow and then push some fast speeds?  Do you play 80% of your fastest speed?  Add one click of the metronome per day?  Things like this...

[Motrax]

For a specific difficult passage, I begin with the metronome at a VERY slow speed, one whic I can very easily handle perfectly (technically speaking). I then repeat that passage again and again, clicking the metronome one level up each time. When I make a single mistake, or even feel that my finger didn't reach a note confidently enough, I click the metronome down once and practice at that level a couple times until I'm absolutely sure I can go faster. Rinse and repeat.

But of course that takes a whole lot of time for a single passage. For endurance, I play technical exercises by Moszkowsky or Czerny or whever.

Lastly, I sometimes imrpovise little passages which work on a single technical aspect like rapid octaves or trilled thirds or whatever, and I do little variations on that single technique. That can be more interesting than drilling etudes, and is equally helpful for technique.

[zhiliang]

For me, i do maybe 8 bars or more of a Chopin etude for a particular weakness i want to work upon. Sometimes, we might not be able to complete the whole piece but it really helps a lot in building up different aspect of your technique and in the long run, you might be able to put these small portions together and there you m9ght have learnt one of the etude. So by doing this, you can actually work on a few different aspect.

Zhiliang