How much practice is too much practice?

[mishamalchik]

    So having an immense amount of free time over break I find myself practicing upwards of 7 hours a day. I know that there is certainly such a thing as too much practice, where risk of injury and muscle fatigue can combine to make the extra time nearly pointless. I've heard a lot of numbers thrown around, from 4 to 6 to 8 hours max, to the statement that it's never too much. I don't play if it hurts to do so, and I  take breaks but I want to make sure that I limit my risk of injury, especially as I get into some more labor intensive etudes.

What is too much practice for you? What advice are you given by your teachers? How do you arrange your practice time?

[vaniii]

I practise from 11 am to 3pm most days, and from 11 am to 6 pm on occasion.  Broken up by students arriving for lessons, and daily admin tasks.

Each session is broken up into 30 minutes.  In-between I do something to refresh concentration: walk around the room, talk my my wife, get a drink or a small snack, teach a lesson.  Then I am back to it.  This is important, because though I can sit and play for seven hours in one go, it is not healthy or productive:

1) You increase you risk of blood clots sitting for prolonged periods daily.  Not to mention the problems with blind repetition of passages (even if rehearsed effectively), can cause muscle fatigue or RSI.
2) When we practise effectively, we do not make errors; we play it correctly.  Errors and miss-readings are a sign of mental fatigue or concentration loss.
3) The more efficient we are with the initial reading, the less repetition is needed.

There is a difference between playing for hours on end, and actual intense practise.  If you are sitting playing through pieces for seven hours, you are wasting your time.  If you are sitting thinking about, each note, each body movement, and the sound your making,  this will be productive.

It is a myth that rehearsing at length (upwards of 1 hour continuously) will yield results; its not the time, its what you do with it.

In regards to your laborious etudes, if you take time enough to understand the music you are playing in your rehearsal, you will find you will not need to practise it so much to 'get' it, but your rehearsals will be for confidence and permanence.  You will cut your time down from 8 hour slogs to a 1 hour reading and recital.

[Bob]

If you don't make progress... Then it's probably too much (assuming your practicing enough, practicing intelligently, etc.).

[lostinidlewonder]

    So having an immense amount of free time over break I find myself practicing upwards of 7 hours a day....

If you are being honest you really need to get some other hobbies, too much of anything is not healthy. There is a whole world out there using all your time to play piano seems silly.

[ted]

Practice, from the meaning of the word, is something done to enhance an objective, and not the end goal itself. So in the days when I played a lot of tennis, I spent time by myself practising serving, or time with another player practising specific shots. The reason for doing this, however, lay in developing greater enjoyment and increasing the likelihood of winning when I played matches. While no one would confuse these two states in sports, in music many players begin to treat hours of practice as something worth grinding at, a stand alone virtue, even if no clear goal exists at all and the movements being practised, usually very narrow in musical scope, have been mastered for years.

So for me any practice is too much when I could spend the time creating new music and letting ideas flow. I concede that purely technical practice has benefits, especially as I age, but I try to keep it to a maximum of twenty minutes a day on my Virgil Practice Clavier, which means I don't have to listen to it. Okay, perhaps there is more to it, but once at the piano I want to make music, and that is so intense that two or maybe three hours a day is plenty.

[isaach]

Well, it depends. Do you want to be really good and do you enjoy it? If so, don't listen to all the jealous detractors. Nobody ever became a great pianist by limiting themselves. This modern idea of worrying about fatigue is false, why? Because you need fatigue to get stronger. Mozart impovised for four hours at a stretch when he was like 5 years old. I remember Richter's wife saying he played for 13 hours a day. What they have in common is that they are both legends.

[dogperson]

Well, it depends. Do you want to be really good and do you enjoy it? If so, don't listen to all the jealous detractors. Nobody ever became a great pianist by limiting themselves. This modern idea of worrying about fatigue is false, why? Because you need fatigue to get stronger. Mozart impovised for four hours at a stretch when he was like 5 years old. I remember Richter's wife saying he played for 13 hours a day. What they have in common is that they are both legends.

No one is trying to be a detractor-- while you can come up with some information  of the 'greats' practicing 13 hours per day, there is equal information of limiting practice to the period of time when focus is retained.  Chopin, for instance, instructed his students not to practice more than 2 hours.  Rubenstein, per the second link below,, no more than 4 hours per day.  Heifetz: no more than 3 hours.

The point is that you lose efficiency in practice and additional time does not get you additional gains.  Practice needs to be limited to the time you are productive; if you really concentrate and think when you practice, you can not maintain that focus for thirteen hours per day.  In addition, there has been recent experiments effective practice that show that targeted, repetitive practice is more effective.

You might want to read this research study results:
https://www.bulletproofmusician.com/8-things-top-practicers-do-differently/
https://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-hours-a-day-should-you-practice/

[timothy42b]

If you are being honest you really need to get some other hobbies, too much of anything is not healthy. There is a whole world out there using all your time to play piano seems silly.

This.

[kevonthegreatpianist]

If your piano practice takes up all of your social and academic times, then you're practicing too much. Say, your grades are dropping because you play 8 hours a day.

(BTW, I don't know if you finished school or not.)

[outin]

I guess if one's goal is to be able to play 8 hour recitals, then it's important to practice playing for 8 hours. Might be a bit difficult to find much paying audience though...

[mjames]

When you're feeling tired you should stop.

[mishamalchik]

This.

You're not wrong haha but I'm staying at college over break and my school is in a very wealthy little town in the middle of nowhere and doing anything is super expensive. So there's literally nothing else to do. I still spend plenty of time cooking,drawing, studying for next term and watching netflix, but to be honest, there's really nothing I'd rather be doing than playing piano. I really, deeply enjoy it, to the point where a passage that I'm not getting right will get under my skin and I'll practice it repetitively and look up to find that I've spent 45 minutes on the same few measures. I'm also a natural introvert, so I don't feel at all "bored" or "depressed" at the prospect of spending such a large portion of my day at the piano.

Right now, I'm operating on a bullet point practice schedule to make sure I reach my weekly goals for pieces. I also ensure that I take breaks for ten minutes every hour. I'm trying to develop more "mental toughness" and consciousness of what I'm playing.

[lostinidlewonder]

... I really, deeply enjoy it, to the point where a passage that I'm not getting right will get under my skin and I'll practice it repetitively and look up to find that I've spent 45 minutes on the same few measures.

If these measures have hundreds of notes I can maybe understand but pretty much if you find yourself working on a few bars for this long you are working on something too difficult and I feel working quite inefficiently (which over time can really hurt potential). Often people choose pieces too difficult for them and practice all these unnecessary hours focusing on these giant projects thinking they are making large improvements, well you will make improvement but it is inefficient by comparison to more appropriate repertoire selection. This is a lesson I give many students it is really amazing how it can change their piano life if they accept it.

[minhogang]

I think 7 hours a day is great. I personally have a minimum practice time of 4 hours/day and a max of 8 hours/day. I don't think there can ever be too much practice, given that you take breaks in between. I haven't experienced injury at 8 hours. just avoid injury, and don't do physically difficult stuff for hours on end (example: playing chopin op 10 no 1 for 3 hours straight; that will surely injure your right hand)

Arthur Rubinstein stated that pianists shouldn't practice more than 3 hours a day, but I don't believe that.

[timothy42b]

If these measures have hundreds of notes I can maybe understand but pretty much if you find yourself working on a few bars for this long you are working on something too difficult and I feel working quite inefficiently (which over time can really hurt potential).

Yes.  Do a search on Bernhard's 20 minute rule.  If you don't master something in a short time you've chosen too big or too hard a fragment to work on. 

[louispodesta]

    So having an immense amount of free time over break I find myself practicing upwards of 7 hours a day. I know that there is certainly such a thing as too much practice, where risk of injury and muscle fatigue can combine to make the extra time nearly pointless. I've heard a lot of numbers thrown around, from 4 to 6 to 8 hours max, to the statement that it's never too much. I don't play if it hurts to do so, and I  take breaks but I want to make sure that I limit my risk of injury, especially as I get into some more labor intensive etudes.

What is too much practice for you? What advice are you given by your teachers? How do you arrange your practice time?

Thank you for having the temerity for even broaching the question.  Most students live by the dictum:  what teacher says, teacher goes.

1)  As I have posted before, a teacher whose first name was Fredryk taught his students to practice no more than two hours a day.  Another teacher, whose last name was Hummel (a student of someone named Wolfgang Mozart) stated the exact same thing.

2)  The point, as accurately posted before, is that perfect practice makes effective practice.  Like more before you, the notion that more is better is a ("Conservatory Method") gigantic level of BS.  You eventually get burned out, as did a Juilliard student by the name of Van Cliburn, who went down this very same path. 

3)  As a young man, he spent upwards of 13 hours a day practicing.  As an adult, he could not even do one third that much, as evidenced by his noticeably small solo performance repertoire.  Even worse, his concerto repertoire was reduced to just two pieces, the Tchaikovsky and the Rachmaninoff.

4)  The point is:  your practice schedule should reflect 1) properly practicing specific passages, and it should also (in my opinion) 2)  reflect not only your particular hand morphology, but also your inner self.

Follow your own path and your own voice because what most people forget is that after all is said and done, YOU ARE THE PIANIST!

All the best, good luck, and do not hesitate to contact me by PM, should you so desire.

[tenk]

Sigh...

2)  The point, as accurately posted before, is that perfect practice makes effective practice.  Like more before you, the notion that more is better is a ("Conservatory Method") gigantic level of BS.  You eventually get burned out, as did a Juilliard student by the name of Van Cliburn, who went down this very same path.

3)  As a young man, he spent upwards of 13 hours a day practicing.  As an adult, he could not even do one third that much, as evidenced by his noticeably small solo performance repertoire.  Even worse, his concerto repertoire was reduced to just two pieces, the Tchaikovsky and the Rachmaninoff.

Standard-issue Louis -- cites opinion as fact. You have no basis for your claim, and everything that you've said about Cliburn is just flat-out wrong (other than he attended Julliard). He toured and recorded plenty throughout the 70's (well after his Tchaikovsky Competition win), and went on hiatus in '78 after the deaths of both his father and manager. Not a single source I've been able to find has attributed "burn-out" to his withdrawal from the public eye.

Not that you care what's true. Pick any random Louis post and you're sure to find him jumping to conclusions and making sh!t up.

[lostinidlewonder]

There are some really freaking weird people in this world, who the hell goes on piano forums and makes up things? I mean surely there are better things to do with your time? COME ON! lol

[mishamalchik]

     I'm slightly amused by the tone this conversation has taken. I hate to disappoint Louis, but I'm hardly a rebel; my teacher has not given any instruction about the amount of time I should spend practicing, only that I should, in fact, practice as my term grade depends on it.

    Having said that, I suppose if my teacher told me to only practice a certain number of hours a day I would give it due thought and consideration. I trust my teacher's judgment and experience, if I didn't I would request a different teacher next term. While my teacher and I certainly disagree from time to time, I don't understand the tendency (and glorification) I see among some students to actively defy and rebel against the advice of their teachers. The only substantial disagreement I had with my teacher was about a fingering, and I conceded  after some persuasion because I realized that if I insist on doing things my own way, then I negate many of the benefits of studying under him. I don't have to agree, but I must be open to thinking about music in different ways, from different perspectives especially as an inexperienced performer. He has 40 plus years of demanding concert experience over me, no matter how "cool" it might be to rebel, I'd rather take away everything I can learn from him by adhering to his suggestions and then as I grow and develop and move on, I'll take with me the most valuable lessons and leave behind the things I disagreed with. Though so far, I've found that most of the things I initially disagreed with, I came to appreciate later!

[stevensk]

When you're feeling tired you should stop.

-This!