What is your personal "practice limit"?

[horizontal]

I feel almost embarrassed saying this, because I'm sure there are people here who have practiced 5+ hours a day for years on end, but I'm pretty sure I'm not physically capable of practicing more than maybe 2.5 or 3 hours a day for long stretches of time (months or years). If I try to do more my hands just crap up and start hurting pretty bad, no matter how much I try to relax them during practice. I've been getting more into mental practice lately to "make up the gap" in terms of being able to learn enough pieces, and reserving my actual physical practice time for only performance practice.

What do your consider your "personal limit" to be for the hours you can practice per day for long stretches of time (say, 12 months or 18 months)?

[becky8898]

till I fall asleep or my brain goes blewey.

Cheers, Becky

[horizontal]

till I fall asleep or my brain goes blewey.

Cheers, Becky

So you really think that you could practice 10 or 12 hours a day (assuming you had the free time) for months on end without having any pain or problems at all?

[ted]

I don't do any strict "practice" except five minutes night and morning on my silent Virgil Practice Clavier. The word "practice" surely implies the existence of something else which is the "real thing". I want the real thing all the time once I am at the piano.

I could play all day and half the night if I wanted to. If someone gets sore then I think a faulty movement is involved which needs correcting. Like most things in life though, direct proportion of effort and result tends to diminish beyond a certain point. Because one man can mow a lawn in half an hour it does not follow that a million men can mow it in a fraction of a second.

This is especially true, I think, for improvisation, which is all that interests me nowadays. 

[horizontal]

I could play all day and half the night if I wanted to.

I'm honestly not being facetious when I say this, but have you ever actually tried? For example, say, more than 5 hours a day without rest days intervening for weeks or months on end?

If someone gets sore then I think a faulty movement is involved which needs correcting.

I believe you are correct on this, but unfortunately I abused my hands quite severely with incorrect technique earlier in my life, and am ergo relegated to the practice/playing time mentioned in my original post.

[stevebob]

I must be misunderstanding something.  Whatever one's consistent allotment of practice time per day, why would it be expected to lead to pain or physical problems over the course of weeks or months?  (On the other hand, I would expect some psychological pain from doing any activity (however pleasurable) for 10 or 12 hours daily.)

I think a reasonable daily routine should, by definition, be able to be done "routinely" for weeks, months or years without any ill effects.

[horizontal]

Whatever one's consistent allotment of practice time per day, why would it be expected to lead to pain or physical problems over the course of weeks or months?  (On the other hand, I would expect some psychological pain from doing any activity (however pleasurable) for 10 or 12 hours daily.)

My mind is extremely durable in some ways psychologically. 10 to 12 hours a day would probably cause very little emotional or psychological distress to me, and I actually averaged somewhere around 8 hours a day for a period of about 18 months earlier in my life, which most likely (in combination with crappy technique) caused irreparable damage to my hands.

Just to inquire, have you ever personally practiced for 8+ hours a day for long periods on end without experiencing any sort of physical pain whatsoever?

[stevebob]

Just to inquire, have you ever personally practiced for 8+ hours a day for long periods on end without experiencing any sort of physical pain whatsoever?

No, but in the course of my employment I typed for comparable periods daily ... for many years.  I had no problems at all.

[becky8898]

Hi Horizontal. I think you mis understood my post.  Im not saying I can practice for 12 hours a day. im saying my mind would give out first. I dont practice unless im sharp. Strong mental practice is what counts.  If your head is off in the ozone your practice is useless.


cheers, Becky

[perfect_pitch]

My personal best was 8.5 hours in a day. And this was still while keeping my head focused and concentrating for an exam.

However, at one point - I was doing 35 hours a week of practice (7 hours a weekday).

I was sweaty as well... pongy as hell and tired, but it was decent good-hard working practice.

[horizontal]

No, but in the course of my employment I typed for comparable periods daily ... for many years.  I had no problems at all.

Typing is in no way directly comparable to piano playing. The physical resistance of keys on a computer keyboard is something like 10 or 15 times less than even a light-keyed piano.

The reason I started this thread really is that I hear the "you can practice 8+ hours per day if you have good technique, it's your mind that really matters" trope repeated by many teachers, but have curiously met very few people who have actually engaged in this behavior successfully. Of the perhaps 6 people I do know who practiced seriously in this manner (myself and several others I went to conservatory with), 4 of them (including myself) went on to experience quite severe problems with their hands. For myself it was almost certainly due to the combining factor of incorrect technique, but two of the other individuals really had close to flawless technique in terms of ergonomics and hand relaxation (at least as far as I could tell, it's possible I am simply terribly mistaken).

[horizontal]

at one point - I was doing 35 hours a week of practice (7 hours a weekday).

So was it that you would practice 7 hours a day from Monday to Friday, then hang back a bit during weekends and practice either little or not at all?

[pianisten1989]

I agree with Becky. Some days are like heaven, and I can practise forever. Then, some days are totally opposite, and I am dead after 3 hours, but then I normally rest, and practise some more later on the day. I really try to make it at least 5 hours.

[invictious]

The large numbers here put me to shame.

15 minutes...on some bad days.

In the mornings when I am sharpest, maybe 1.5 hours if I am really up to it. Normally don't go past 45 mins each go because of the diminishing marginal returns.

I wish I had time to practice more though.

[thalbergmad]

About 2 hours a month for me.

Thal

[ted]

I'm honestly not being facetious when I say this, but have you ever actually tried? For example, say, more than 5 hours a day without rest days intervening for weeks or months on end?

Oh yes, I used to spend absurd amounts of time at it when I was much younger, certainly more than five hours a day for months. I don't know why I did that. It did me no harm physically, but mentally and musically I can see now it was a useless grind directed at comparative striving and proving to myself I could play things. I forgot about enjoyment.

Nowadays, on the very occasional day I do play for several hours, it is because I am enjoying every second of it and ideas keep coming. If the ideas stop, then I stop too.

[birba]

I was told once if you can't cut it in three hours a day, give it up.
But since I've retired I probably practise 6-8 hours a day.  But I love it.  In fact, I have to force myself to stop sometimes.  But like good old (!) Becky says, if your mind isn't in it it's useless.  In fact it's detrimental.  You start doing things wrong.
Hey, Becky, what does "blewey" mean?

[invictious]

About 2 hours a month for me.

Thal

Not sure if you posted that intentionally after my post, but it certainly did help me feel much better!

Thanks Thal!

[horizontal]

Oh yes, I used to spend absurd amounts of time at it when I was much younger, certainly more than five hours a day for months. I don't know why I did that. It did me no harm physically, but mentally and musically I can see now it was a useless grind directed at comparative striving and proving to myself I could play things. I forgot about enjoyment.

Nowadays, on the very occasional day I do play for several hours, it is because I am enjoying every second of it and ideas keep coming. If the ideas stop, then I stop too.

Have you primarily been a hobbyist your entire life, or have you ever at any point considered piano as a vocation?

[omar_roy]

Lately I've been averaging around 40 hours a week, practicing 7 days a week.

I take lots of breaks to stay sharp.

[countrymath]

5 hours of classical.
5 hours of popular/theory.

I'm not working now, so i study a lot. When i get i job, i will have 6 hours daily only.

[becky8898]

Hi Birba : Blewy is when your supposed to be paying attention to your practicing but your thinking about the cute boy who sits across from you in Algebra, or a sleepover with Melissa and Carrie.

Now seriously to the post from the original thread. 

Five hours of formal practice.  2 in the morning before I go to school. An hour at school, then 2 hours when I get home for school , then at night either playing with my parents and my brother in our family piano quartet, or rhearsing with my brother who is applying to conservatory this spring as a violinist  - IM his accompanist.

Then go to bed and do it all over again the next day. 

On days when im having a lesson, or a recital, or rehearsing with the youth orchestra or im recording, or im playing at church or subbing in as rehearsal pianist at the community theater or my mom  has to take me to see my agent for some stupid reason  , then I practice maybe 3 hours. 

Now ill try and keep my brain from going blewy .

Cheers, Becky

[pianisten1989]

wait, you have an agent?!

[roger_1948]

Three hours of practice early in the morning from 7 am to 10 am every day . Of course im retired so that makes it easier. . I either practice or my wife wont make breakfast.  OH and Becky. ,my brain starts off blewy and then gets worse. 


Roger

[becky8898]

Hi Pianisten1989, Not just my agent my whole families. Remember my family is first above everything else professional musicians . So I guess its really my mother and fathers agent, but she represnts my brother and myself also.  She sets up  stuff for me sometimes , or people to meet and lots of other stuff most of which seems really really dumb, but my Mom says its important to talk to so and so and let them meet me.  that Kind of thing.   

Cheers, Becky

[thalbergmad]

Not sure if you posted that intentionally after my post, but it certainly did help me feel much better!

Thanks Thal!

I felt kind of bad looking at all the other posts, so I did an hour last night and will do another hour tonight.

Just me and Leopold De Meyer.

Thal

[kelly_kelly]

Becky, do you ever sleep?!

[perfect_pitch]

So was it that you would practice 7 hours a day from Monday to Friday, then hang back a bit during weekends and practice either little or not at all?

Well... that's what I typed isn't it? I'd call the weekend giving my fingers a break and recovering.

Have you ever tried practicing for 35 hours over 5 days? It's tough.

[kelly_kelly]

Well... that's what I typed isn't it? I'd call the weekend giving my fingers a break and recovering.

Have you ever tried practicing for 35 hours over 5 days? It's tough.

I don't think you were being criticized for "laziness" - but what seemed strange to me (and I'm guessing to horizontal) was that you didn't spread the practice over the whole week and do a bit less on each individual day? But whatever works

[pianist1976]

My "personal practice limit" is what my pupils left me   This is specially depressing with my laziest/uninterested ones, where my body is still in the classroom but my soul and my mind is trying to scape to a wonderful world where I can practice all I want/can. (that's not the case of my best pupils, it's a pleasure to work with them).

So there are days when I can practice half an hour, others two hours and others from three to four hours. My ideal practice time is between three and four hours. In my opinion this means absolutely nothing, every person has his/her own vital rhythm  

By the way, since a few years ago I follow Hofmann's and Arrau's advice and I take at least one entire month a year without pressing a single piano key.

[richard black]

Personal practice - I've done 6 hours+ in a day with a major gig looming, but rehearsing with others (which is my job, after all) I've done 10-11 hours a day, several days straight. The fingers start to feel a bit tired but you get used to it. Of course there's the odd bit of talking between playing.

[ted]

Have you primarily been a hobbyist your entire life, or have you ever at any point considered piano as a vocation?

A complete amateur. As a young man I was under considerable pressure to be a professional, from both my teacher, a prominent composer and jazz pianist, and my parents. Not a classical concert pianist though, I never had the necessary abilities for that. At around twenty I decided that I would earn my living another way and support my music in complete freedom. I was lucky in that I could do that quite easily, largely thanks to the computer revolution.

Mind you, I still encounter vigorous criticism from many sources, usually accusing me of anything from "selfishness" and "under-achievement" to "flouting economic morality" by giving away all my recordings and scores.
The truth is that I just don't like the music business, any species of it. It all seems to be a desperate battle for breath governed by money, fame, competitive struggle and social connection. Musical enjoyment ? What's that ?

I admire professionals and academics, I really do, and I wish them all well, but I could never have embraced that direction myself. I am too idealistic, and especially now I am retired and reasonably secure, too entrenched and prolific in my idiosyncratic playing and recording to want to change.  

To keep on topic, my playing time has also stabilised at around two or three hours a day average, I suppose, including recording.

  

[eitel]

Being that the number of piano students outweighs the number of practice rooms at my school I've gotten used to practicing for about 5 hours a day, because if I leave the room gets taken. However that time is more or less split evenly with proper practice and general messing around playing older pieces for fun. I find that even though I'm playing the piano non-stop for that period of time the fun pieces give my mind a break so I can continue to practice more.

[horizontal]

I still encounter vigorous criticism from many sources, usually accusing me of anything from "selfishness" and "under-achievement" to "flouting economic morality" by giving away all my recordings and scores.
The truth is that I just don't like the music business, any species of it. It all seems to be a desperate battle for breath governed by money, fame, competitive struggle and social connection. Musical enjoyment ? What's that ?

This is a pretty good sentiment, in my opinion.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe this was the life of Charles Ives. His vocation was the insurance business, and ergo most of his musical life was a "hobby." Yet somehow he is still remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century.

[thinkgreenlovepiano]

Today I got home from school and practised till dinner, at 8.
So that was about 5 hours, and then I had to eat. Then my parents barred me from the piano

My limit depends... sometimes I get tired easily, other times I could practise forever. And a lot of days, I just have too much schoolwork, and am unable to practise for long. Today, I was getting really frustrated practising, but my hands and brain still functioned fine and I didn't want to stop- my frustration was fueling me, and before I knew it, 5 hours passed.

[musicluvr49]

I'm actually not quite sure what my limit is, cause I don't really have the time to sit down at the piano and practice until my mind goes "blewey" as Becky said.
But I usually practice about 2 hours in the afternoon after school, and I'm not very tired or anything after that. Then some nights I get about 30 mins- to 1 hour. Depending on what time my little sibs go to bed. I'm not allowed to practice when they're in bed.  

[lostinidlewonder]

I would say on average I sit at the piano around 3 hours a day for personal practice. What would have taken me 10 hours of work when I was young would take me say 1 hour of work now. You aim to work smarter and more effectively rather than merely putting time into our work and hope that we "get it in the end".

I practice anywhere from 0-9 hours a day depending on my commitments. I never really time myself how longer I study for, I am more focused on getting the challenge solved rather than watching the clock and using time as a measurement of my efforts. I have done 9 hours a day for 1 month before and in all honesty even though I could physically endure it, mentally I began to hate the piano, began to have imbalance in my life ignoring friends and family. So physically we can always practice a huge amount of time but can we mentally deal with it? No one will die from over practicing, you will fall flat on your face sleeping on the keys before that happens (done that once before waking up with slobber all over the keys lol).

I tend to lose focus after about 1 1/2 hour of constant practice but this also depends on my state of mind and physical state. If I am stressed out, physically exhausted or sick I will usually not practice new material or tackle difficult challenges, it only wastes my time as I work more ineffectively and thus require more time to solve something I could crunch through faster if I where in better condition. When I am very ill I tend to only improvise at the piano (or keyboard if I want to play in bed lol), it seems to take my mind away from my physical state and indeed makes me feel a lot better, very therapeutic.

[thalbergmad]

Incredibly, I have just done 1 hour.

Thal

[jesc]

Piano is just a hobby of mine. Right now I don't have any time limit for practice but I'm considering putting one.

Sometimes when I have the time to practice I push and push further "while I have the time". Unfortunately for me, I don't feel much pain as I push my hands beyond their limit. I only feel the pain afterwards.

Currently I'm learning Liszt's Gnomenreigen. I kept pushing the speed further and further since I felt I can still play it faster and faster and faster and.... well, my hands don't feel good now. Ironically these are the only times remember how my teacher warned me about not taking good care of my hands.

[gvans]

As I'm on a week-long work-free practice jag, I read these posts with interest. In college, as a music major, I practiced for several years eight hours a day, breaking it up into two hour sections: once early, once mid morning between lectures, once late afternoon, and once late at night. I made sure to exercise hard running or swimming for an hour every day, too.

30 years later I've tried to duplicate this, but find my mind gives out before my hands. I try to combat this by working on different pieces during different sessions on different days, by playing chamber music one day, solo piano the next, etc. Sometimes I do memory work, other times I learn new material, other times I play chamber music.

Ergonomically, carpal tunnel surgery helped my hand fatigue immeasurably. CTS is very common in musicians; something to think about. These days I make sure to stand up and stretch between each movement or piece. Prolonged sitting is murder for your back. And I still work in daily exercise and frequent orange juice breaks.

Bottom line: one can practice for hours a day and practice well, but one must be clever about how to do it.

[richard_strauss]

I used to study for about 100 hours a week. I did that for a whole year since my teacher wanted me to play an entirely different concert program every week, so I had to practise over 12 hours per day. That year I did most of Bach WTC, 6 Beethoven sonatas, Schumann's Carnaval, Fantasiestücke op 12, Concerto op 54, all Schubert imprompti, 11 chopin etudes, 5 liszt etudes, 2 rachmaninoff etudes, 1 scriabin etude, chopin's 2nd and 3rd sonatas, prokofiev's toccata, most of ravel's piano works and some other pieces I can't remember. The thing is I forgot almost all of it!!! Certainly it was a great technical boost and I got noticeable advances in a matter of weeks, and by the end of the year my technique was unrecognizable but it was detrimental in artistry. The point is that technique for technique's sake is a dead end, it's much better to practise for 3 hours but both mind and body fully into what you're working on (that's the amount of time Chopin recommended to his students and he is reputed to have gone seriously mad at them if they practised more than that)

[seymourtom]

Apart from being amazed at the time some people spend each day playing, my first thought was that we should divide up comments from

1. Professionals, would be pros and music students, for whom 5-6 hours per day seems to be needed.
2. Retired or other amateurs with lots of time - 2-3 hours sounds OK.
3. Those like me who still work and try to do about 1-2 hours a day.

There is a point I am sure for some where it becomes unhealthily obsessive and could damage family relationships.

I believe the key measure which is very personal is what do you want to achieve and how much practice does that take?  I know I am too old (67) and lacking in talent to be anythig but a hack
amateur and that even six hours a day will not change that.

[ponken]

Some days two hours and other days 15 minutes.

[brriker]

While I'm teaching about 3 hours a day ( I get up at 5 am so I can bleh) and when I'm off work around 6.  I have done 12+ before when I got a gig where I had to fill in as an accompanist on very short notice for a difficult musical production.  I didn't really notice any physical problems--I was just tired all the time.  Really, if you count all the accompaniments I play in addition to the solo practice I do I must play the piano about 6 to 10 hours a day during the week.

[zeusje]

I study on avarage 2 hours a day, after a long day of work......

I stop at 10 in the evening because I agreed on that with the neighbours, perhaps I would play longer if I would not have this agreement.

[thalbergmad]

There is a point I am sure for some where it becomes unhealthily obsessive and could damage family relationships.

It is not the length of time I spend practicing that damages my family relationships, it is the noise I make when I do.

Thal

[pianoplayjl]

I always practice 1 hour on weekdays, with the exception of exam periods where i practice 1.5 hours.