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I will describe in this lesson some techniques and training excercises that will make you a faster drummer and build your chops at the same time. This section is for those of you who are interested in getting extremely fast. I am a big WFD fan. WFD stands for "Worlds Fastest Drummer". It is a contest held twice a year and uses a tool called the Drumometer to record the number of strokes produced in a one minute time limit. It is an event where drummers from all over come and share their ideas and techniques. It is a great vacation and a great educational experience at the same time. If you are intrested in speed drumming, learning how to play faster, or possibly competing yourself, check out my pointers below. Even if you aren't interested in the WFD but you want to increase your speed, you will benefit from these pointers.
1. Before you do anything of these excercises you should first warm up. This first step is one of the most important things you can do not only to avoid injuries, but because muscles work faster when they are literally warm. Have you ever been in subzero weather without gloves? If so, you know how stiff and slow your fingers get when they're cold. The opposite is true when your muscles are warm. Raising the temperature of your muscles is a definite way to speed up. The easiest way to do this is to start off with some slow and easy and warm up exercises for 5 - 10 minutes.
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2. Use a mirror as often as possible. Below is a picture of a set up that can be used to judge proper stick heights while practicing. Notice how the mirror is angled inward toward the practice pad at the base. Having the mirror at this angle allows you to have the perspective of looking at your sticks straight on and flush with the surface of the pad. Doing this allows you to see exactly how high the sticks are coming off the pad. Make sure that each stick rebounds to the exact same height as the other stick. Watch the tips of the sticks and make sure they are bouncing in straight up and down perpendicular lines relative to the practice pad. Pay close attention to your posture and hands and make sure they look and feel comfortable but yet correct.
3. I've listened to Art Verdi's advice (http://www.artverdi.com) and have been playing simultaneous strokes with the left and right hand at the same time. This technique has a lot more to offer than you might think.
With this technique you will be able to find out which hand if any is weaker or stronger than the other. Using a metronome and setting it at a moderate tempo you would simply play simulataneous strokes continuously until one hand isn't able to keep up with the other one. The one that gives out sooner is obviously the one that is weaker. You may find out that both of your hands are pretty equal, however, chances are they are not. This technique will help you in the process of balancing your hands by showing you which hand needs work.
Another thing this technique can do for you is show you if you naturally let one stick rebound to a greater height than the other. If one of your sticks is not rebounding to the exact height as the other stick then your energy is off balance and your spending more energy in one hand than the other. It is a waste of energy for the one hand that is rebounding higher. Always adjust the hand with the higher rebounds to match the hand that has a lower rebound. A lower rebound means less energy to move the stick and the less distance it has to travel up and down. Making both hands equal so that there is consistant stick hieghts will gain you speed and efficiency by balancing the energy. It will also allow you to produce a smoother even sound. Although this is easier said than done, this is a valuable point that can be easily overlooked.
Art also said that this method will save you practice time. He gave a scenario where a person might train for 30 minutes on one hand and then spend another 30 minutes on the other hand taking an hour of time to practice. By playing simultaneous strokes you would not only cut your practice time in half, but you would also be building your coordination. This skill is used a lot in music (e.g. simultaneous strokes on the snare + toms for the purpose of building tension or just before coming back into the main chorus of a song).
The last thing it does is that it can improve your technique. (If you use traditional grip, this last point probably won't help you) Using matched grip, if you watch both hands while your playing them at the same time, you can see how one hand may be slightly bent differently or perhaps your choking the stick too high/low, etc. Always choose the hand that feels more comfortable and imitate it exactly with the other hand. Make both hands look exactly alike. Use a mirror as often as possible. This improves your technique by ironing out the inefficiencies. The image below shows my hands playing simultaneous strokes. The WFD champions keep their sticks from rebounding too much higher than 1 inch off the practice pad. Below, I am using the mirror set up as described in pointer #2. The picture shows what your sticks should look like in the mirror about 1 inch off the pad.
4. Learn to use your fingers independently. This is an advanced exercise. It breaks down to common sense and physics. Using larger muscle groups to move things around means that you are also having to move more muscle, bone, and blood. And obviously this means more mass. The more mass you have to haul around, the heavier it is. It takes more energy to move heavier things around and this will sap your speed. By using only your fingers or wrists to dribble the stick on the drum or practice pad it takes considerably less energy to maintain. But because your finger muscles are smaller than your wrist or arm muscles they will tire out quickly without proper training. Lets take a look at the obvious differences between the two. Using only fingers means only the weight of the finger itself and the stick need to move. Using your wrist means you'll be having to move the weight of your whole hand which contains all of your fingers plus the weight of the stick. The wrist will have to use more energy to move all this mass around but because it is stronger it inherently has more endurance than a single finger muscle has. If you are not used to using your fingers only, then it will become obvious that your wrist will be able to move the stick faster and for longer periods of time. However, through disciplined training you will be able to get your fingers up to speed with your wrists. Once you have mastered using only the finger muscles to dribble the stick, then experiment with using your wrists, fingers, and even your forearms in combination as this will maximize your endurance potential by dispersing the work effort across different muscles.
For more information on learning how to play with the fingers, check out my lesson on "Mastering Finger Control"
5.Conserve your energy. One of the secrets of great drummers is that they are able to control the energy from the stick. Having masterful control of the kinetic energy within the stick takes years of practice and a great deal of coordination. These masters are good at conserving energy and letting the sticks do a lot of the work for them. Controlling the rebound of the stick such that it bounces straight up the path in which it came down is one of the control skills that these masters have. If you've seen the analysis of great golf drives then you would know that a good swing also follows the path that it took when the club was on it's way up for the wind up. Why does it matter wheather or not the stick follows the exact path down that it came up in? The answer is conservation of energy. It takes more energy to change direction than it does to let it continue on a straight path. Therefore if your sticks are bouncing in different places every time you come down with the stick then you are not only having to move the stick up and down, but you are also moving the stick to the the left and right. This type of lateral movement is a huge blow to your energy, speed, and accuracy. It is usually the result of trying to go too fast. Make sure the sticks are going back up the exact path they came down to conserve energy and this will gaurantee an improvement in your technique and speed. Slow the metronome down if you can't keep it consistent.
One way to begin doing this is to pick a spot on your snare or practice pad and using a permanant marker draw a bead about the size of a dime. Then whenever you practice you should aim for that exact spot every time the stick comes down. Do this with both hands. The more you save on energy the longer and faster you can play.
My lesson called "Fluorescent Path Trace Analysis" is probably the best way to get your strokes consistant. It will provide you with a great way of actually seeing the paths that the sticks are taking.
6. Find the threshold of tension. It took me years of playing to realise that relaxing helped me play faster. You should avoid playing drums for extended periods of time if you are feeling a lot of tension in your fingers, wrists, or arms. Months and years of playing like this can lead to injuries, namely tendenitus, or carpol tunnels. However, I feel that it is neccesary to feel tension sometimes so that you can recognize where your limits are.
Tension is easy to recognize. Tension will show itself in whichever muscles you are using to move the stick and is evident as a burning sensation similar to the burn of doing crunches. Playing with tension is similar to trying to drive a car with the emergency break pulled. Tension is speeds worst enemy.
By carefully finding your threshold of tension you should be right on the edge of tension and a very relaxed state. This is contradictory in a sense, but by careful experimentation you can find this threshold. In order to find your threshold of tension you need to get your metronome and set it at a speed at which you can play singles strokes on one hand for 1 minute straight nonstop without tension setting in. You should make sure that your sticks are hitting exactly with the metronome and not buzzing. This may be a lower speed setting than you expect. Start with a slow setting, or one in which you would have no problem playing single strokes for an entire minute. If your able to do it easily without tension, push a little faster and set the metronome 2 bpm faster. Eventually you will get to a point where you cannot play for an entire minute without feeling tension building in your muscles. Now, at this point you need to back off 2 bpm and you will be at the speed of your threshold of tension. It is this speed that you must concentrate your efforts and practice as relaxed as possible. Why should you practice at your threshold of tension? Because tension leads to sloppiness and this same sloppiness can also be burned into your muscle memory. If you are practicing at your threshold of tension, you will be able to keep your technique clean and make your strokes more consistant while still pushing the muscles. Practicing at this threshold will strengthen only the muscles that are necessary.
7. Practice playing at different lengths of time.If you continuously practiced your runs for 30 secs and did this everyday you would be training your subconcious to expect an end in 30 seconds. And then when it comes time to do a full 1 minute competition run, you would stand the chance of your brain telling your muscles to let go after 30 seconds. However, this is not to say that every one of your runs should be exactly one minute long either. If you are in the habit of doing short full blast runs on the Drumometer try and mix in some 70 - 90 second full blast runs so that your muscles and mentality will not get too acquanted to a set time period. Now, when I say "full blast" I do not mean completely tensed up and straining all of your muscles. I mean focusing as hard as you can to relax and keep your strokes consistant, even, and low. Remember that half of sports is mental. And this sport like all others takes a great deal of mental training.
8. RELAX. A big advocate of relaxing is Tiger Bill, also a WFD champion. You've heard this one a thousand times. But let me explain why it works so well. When you relax the stick rebound height will decrease, your playing will get softer, and it will feel much more comfortable to play. All of these things will serve to greatly conserve energy. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you will be playing as fast as you were when you were all tensed up going full blast. What relaxing does is that it allows you to begin using only the muscles that are necessary to get the job done. If you play with tensed muscles then whats happening is that your activating all these other uneccesary muscles. These muscles are literally fighting against you. When you're all tensed up, the biceps, forearms, wrist, and finger muscles will eventually begin to burn and this will inevitably put on the emergency break. This is incredibly inefficient. By striving to put fully relaxed runs into your training regimen you are training for efficiency, and strengthening only the muscles that need to be used. You will be training yourself to activate only the muscles that are needed. You will also be training your muscles how to play this way. This is a mental excercise. It will take mental effort to concentrate on relaxing your muscles while you play. This actually may be the toughest skill to master. Master this one and you will unlock a potential for speed and technique as you've never known it before.
9. Here's a technique I like to call "revving". A good way to describe this technique is like revving an engine. You simply speed up to a very fast pace or as fast as possible and then immediately slow back down to a very relaxed pace. It should sound as if someone were stepping on the gas and revving an engine and then letting off the gas so that the engine slows back down to a relaxed idling pace.
This is a great technique that teaches your muscles how to relax. There is a constant mental battle with yourself to keep your muscles from tensing up. This technique, however, helps you relax without having to think about it so much. Most importantly it teaches you how to relax while playing fast. The goal is to get your muscles up to the threshold of tension and maybe just a little past that but then coming back down to a relaxed pace so that your muscles do not remain tensed. Once you get good at this, you can begin revving faster and faster. After practicing this for sometime, you will notice that you will be able to "rev" at very intense speeds yet remain relaxed and comfortable. It will help your endurance enabling you to play for longer periods. Personally , I have gained a considerable amount of speed by using this revving technique as described.
10. I call this technique "jiggling". This technique is performed by quickly jiggling your wrists and forearms back and forth. The motion should represent trying to twist a doorknob back and forth. The motion however is very subtle and not as obvious unless seen up close. The wrist and the forearm move together as one in that twisting motion back and forth. Using the french grip, this motion carries the fingers upward bringing the stick downward. Jiggling back and forth in this way allows you to get more muscles groups involved at one time (fingers and forearm muscles). This motion is learned best by being completely relaxed. If you start to feel tension, you are not doing it correctly. Watch my technique in this video:
Video Lesson
http://www.drumskillz.com/video/data/Pyramid.mov
11. Check these websites out for more techniques and excercises on how to get fast.
* http://www.tigerbill.com
* http://www.artverdi.com
* http://www.drumcanman.com
* http://www.stevedowdrums.com
Let's review some basic rules that you should follow when doing all these exercises:
1. Try not to practice for too long at a speeds in which you can not keep up perfectly with the metronome. Practicing like this means sloppiness and the more you play this way, the more your burning sloppiness into your muscle memory.
2. Speed drumming can put a lot of uneccesary strain on the body if it's not done relaxed. If you feel tension building in your fingers, wrists, or arms, try to relax and lower the stick heights. If this doesn't work, take a break, and slow the metronome down a little.
3. Stretch your fingers, wrists, arms, and shoulders, frequently and thoroughly.
4. Find a tempo where you can play perfectly in synch with the metronome for long periods of time(10 - 20 minutes). Doing this burns the correct technique into your muscle memory. This is the seed and foundation of speed.
5. Use a mirror as much as you can. If you do you can catch your flaws and correct them before you burn them into your muscle memory. Reversing the effects of practicing the wrong way for several years is a painstaking and frustrating process.
6. RELAX Concentrate as hard as you can to relax your entire body. Pay attention to your back muscles, torso muscles, even your legs. Tension can show up anywhere. Unecessary tension is a waste of energy and takes away from your performance. The multiple Olympic Gold Medallist sprinter Carl Lewis was an awesome athlete who understood much about speed. When someone asked Carl's coach about his success, he remarked, "the faster you want to go, the more relaxed you have to be". A quote from Bruce Lee, a guru of speed, "The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."
Scott LaBorde Modified: 2007-06-11 07:33:59
http://www.drumskillz.com/cont_view.php?cont_id=31
1. Before you do anything of these excercises you should first warm up. This first step is one of the most important things you can do not only to avoid injuries, but because muscles work faster when they are literally warm. Have you ever been in subzero weather without gloves? If so, you know how stiff and slow your fingers get when they're cold. The opposite is true when your muscles are warm. Raising the temperature of your muscles is a definite way to speed up. The easiest way to do this is to start off with some slow and easy and warm up exercises for 5 - 10 minutes.
[img]
[/img]2. Use a mirror as often as possible. Below is a picture of a set up that can be used to judge proper stick heights while practicing. Notice how the mirror is angled inward toward the practice pad at the base. Having the mirror at this angle allows you to have the perspective of looking at your sticks straight on and flush with the surface of the pad. Doing this allows you to see exactly how high the sticks are coming off the pad. Make sure that each stick rebounds to the exact same height as the other stick. Watch the tips of the sticks and make sure they are bouncing in straight up and down perpendicular lines relative to the practice pad. Pay close attention to your posture and hands and make sure they look and feel comfortable but yet correct.
3. I've listened to Art Verdi's advice (http://www.artverdi.com) and have been playing simultaneous strokes with the left and right hand at the same time. This technique has a lot more to offer than you might think.
With this technique you will be able to find out which hand if any is weaker or stronger than the other. Using a metronome and setting it at a moderate tempo you would simply play simulataneous strokes continuously until one hand isn't able to keep up with the other one. The one that gives out sooner is obviously the one that is weaker. You may find out that both of your hands are pretty equal, however, chances are they are not. This technique will help you in the process of balancing your hands by showing you which hand needs work.
Another thing this technique can do for you is show you if you naturally let one stick rebound to a greater height than the other. If one of your sticks is not rebounding to the exact height as the other stick then your energy is off balance and your spending more energy in one hand than the other. It is a waste of energy for the one hand that is rebounding higher. Always adjust the hand with the higher rebounds to match the hand that has a lower rebound. A lower rebound means less energy to move the stick and the less distance it has to travel up and down. Making both hands equal so that there is consistant stick hieghts will gain you speed and efficiency by balancing the energy. It will also allow you to produce a smoother even sound. Although this is easier said than done, this is a valuable point that can be easily overlooked.
Art also said that this method will save you practice time. He gave a scenario where a person might train for 30 minutes on one hand and then spend another 30 minutes on the other hand taking an hour of time to practice. By playing simultaneous strokes you would not only cut your practice time in half, but you would also be building your coordination. This skill is used a lot in music (e.g. simultaneous strokes on the snare + toms for the purpose of building tension or just before coming back into the main chorus of a song).
The last thing it does is that it can improve your technique. (If you use traditional grip, this last point probably won't help you) Using matched grip, if you watch both hands while your playing them at the same time, you can see how one hand may be slightly bent differently or perhaps your choking the stick too high/low, etc. Always choose the hand that feels more comfortable and imitate it exactly with the other hand. Make both hands look exactly alike. Use a mirror as often as possible. This improves your technique by ironing out the inefficiencies. The image below shows my hands playing simultaneous strokes. The WFD champions keep their sticks from rebounding too much higher than 1 inch off the practice pad. Below, I am using the mirror set up as described in pointer #2. The picture shows what your sticks should look like in the mirror about 1 inch off the pad.
4. Learn to use your fingers independently. This is an advanced exercise. It breaks down to common sense and physics. Using larger muscle groups to move things around means that you are also having to move more muscle, bone, and blood. And obviously this means more mass. The more mass you have to haul around, the heavier it is. It takes more energy to move heavier things around and this will sap your speed. By using only your fingers or wrists to dribble the stick on the drum or practice pad it takes considerably less energy to maintain. But because your finger muscles are smaller than your wrist or arm muscles they will tire out quickly without proper training. Lets take a look at the obvious differences between the two. Using only fingers means only the weight of the finger itself and the stick need to move. Using your wrist means you'll be having to move the weight of your whole hand which contains all of your fingers plus the weight of the stick. The wrist will have to use more energy to move all this mass around but because it is stronger it inherently has more endurance than a single finger muscle has. If you are not used to using your fingers only, then it will become obvious that your wrist will be able to move the stick faster and for longer periods of time. However, through disciplined training you will be able to get your fingers up to speed with your wrists. Once you have mastered using only the finger muscles to dribble the stick, then experiment with using your wrists, fingers, and even your forearms in combination as this will maximize your endurance potential by dispersing the work effort across different muscles.
For more information on learning how to play with the fingers, check out my lesson on "Mastering Finger Control"
5.Conserve your energy. One of the secrets of great drummers is that they are able to control the energy from the stick. Having masterful control of the kinetic energy within the stick takes years of practice and a great deal of coordination. These masters are good at conserving energy and letting the sticks do a lot of the work for them. Controlling the rebound of the stick such that it bounces straight up the path in which it came down is one of the control skills that these masters have. If you've seen the analysis of great golf drives then you would know that a good swing also follows the path that it took when the club was on it's way up for the wind up. Why does it matter wheather or not the stick follows the exact path down that it came up in? The answer is conservation of energy. It takes more energy to change direction than it does to let it continue on a straight path. Therefore if your sticks are bouncing in different places every time you come down with the stick then you are not only having to move the stick up and down, but you are also moving the stick to the the left and right. This type of lateral movement is a huge blow to your energy, speed, and accuracy. It is usually the result of trying to go too fast. Make sure the sticks are going back up the exact path they came down to conserve energy and this will gaurantee an improvement in your technique and speed. Slow the metronome down if you can't keep it consistent.
One way to begin doing this is to pick a spot on your snare or practice pad and using a permanant marker draw a bead about the size of a dime. Then whenever you practice you should aim for that exact spot every time the stick comes down. Do this with both hands. The more you save on energy the longer and faster you can play.
My lesson called "Fluorescent Path Trace Analysis" is probably the best way to get your strokes consistant. It will provide you with a great way of actually seeing the paths that the sticks are taking.
6. Find the threshold of tension. It took me years of playing to realise that relaxing helped me play faster. You should avoid playing drums for extended periods of time if you are feeling a lot of tension in your fingers, wrists, or arms. Months and years of playing like this can lead to injuries, namely tendenitus, or carpol tunnels. However, I feel that it is neccesary to feel tension sometimes so that you can recognize where your limits are.
Tension is easy to recognize. Tension will show itself in whichever muscles you are using to move the stick and is evident as a burning sensation similar to the burn of doing crunches. Playing with tension is similar to trying to drive a car with the emergency break pulled. Tension is speeds worst enemy.
By carefully finding your threshold of tension you should be right on the edge of tension and a very relaxed state. This is contradictory in a sense, but by careful experimentation you can find this threshold. In order to find your threshold of tension you need to get your metronome and set it at a speed at which you can play singles strokes on one hand for 1 minute straight nonstop without tension setting in. You should make sure that your sticks are hitting exactly with the metronome and not buzzing. This may be a lower speed setting than you expect. Start with a slow setting, or one in which you would have no problem playing single strokes for an entire minute. If your able to do it easily without tension, push a little faster and set the metronome 2 bpm faster. Eventually you will get to a point where you cannot play for an entire minute without feeling tension building in your muscles. Now, at this point you need to back off 2 bpm and you will be at the speed of your threshold of tension. It is this speed that you must concentrate your efforts and practice as relaxed as possible. Why should you practice at your threshold of tension? Because tension leads to sloppiness and this same sloppiness can also be burned into your muscle memory. If you are practicing at your threshold of tension, you will be able to keep your technique clean and make your strokes more consistant while still pushing the muscles. Practicing at this threshold will strengthen only the muscles that are necessary.
7. Practice playing at different lengths of time.If you continuously practiced your runs for 30 secs and did this everyday you would be training your subconcious to expect an end in 30 seconds. And then when it comes time to do a full 1 minute competition run, you would stand the chance of your brain telling your muscles to let go after 30 seconds. However, this is not to say that every one of your runs should be exactly one minute long either. If you are in the habit of doing short full blast runs on the Drumometer try and mix in some 70 - 90 second full blast runs so that your muscles and mentality will not get too acquanted to a set time period. Now, when I say "full blast" I do not mean completely tensed up and straining all of your muscles. I mean focusing as hard as you can to relax and keep your strokes consistant, even, and low. Remember that half of sports is mental. And this sport like all others takes a great deal of mental training.
8. RELAX. A big advocate of relaxing is Tiger Bill, also a WFD champion. You've heard this one a thousand times. But let me explain why it works so well. When you relax the stick rebound height will decrease, your playing will get softer, and it will feel much more comfortable to play. All of these things will serve to greatly conserve energy. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that you will be playing as fast as you were when you were all tensed up going full blast. What relaxing does is that it allows you to begin using only the muscles that are necessary to get the job done. If you play with tensed muscles then whats happening is that your activating all these other uneccesary muscles. These muscles are literally fighting against you. When you're all tensed up, the biceps, forearms, wrist, and finger muscles will eventually begin to burn and this will inevitably put on the emergency break. This is incredibly inefficient. By striving to put fully relaxed runs into your training regimen you are training for efficiency, and strengthening only the muscles that need to be used. You will be training yourself to activate only the muscles that are needed. You will also be training your muscles how to play this way. This is a mental excercise. It will take mental effort to concentrate on relaxing your muscles while you play. This actually may be the toughest skill to master. Master this one and you will unlock a potential for speed and technique as you've never known it before.
9. Here's a technique I like to call "revving". A good way to describe this technique is like revving an engine. You simply speed up to a very fast pace or as fast as possible and then immediately slow back down to a very relaxed pace. It should sound as if someone were stepping on the gas and revving an engine and then letting off the gas so that the engine slows back down to a relaxed idling pace.
This is a great technique that teaches your muscles how to relax. There is a constant mental battle with yourself to keep your muscles from tensing up. This technique, however, helps you relax without having to think about it so much. Most importantly it teaches you how to relax while playing fast. The goal is to get your muscles up to the threshold of tension and maybe just a little past that but then coming back down to a relaxed pace so that your muscles do not remain tensed. Once you get good at this, you can begin revving faster and faster. After practicing this for sometime, you will notice that you will be able to "rev" at very intense speeds yet remain relaxed and comfortable. It will help your endurance enabling you to play for longer periods. Personally , I have gained a considerable amount of speed by using this revving technique as described.
10. I call this technique "jiggling". This technique is performed by quickly jiggling your wrists and forearms back and forth. The motion should represent trying to twist a doorknob back and forth. The motion however is very subtle and not as obvious unless seen up close. The wrist and the forearm move together as one in that twisting motion back and forth. Using the french grip, this motion carries the fingers upward bringing the stick downward. Jiggling back and forth in this way allows you to get more muscles groups involved at one time (fingers and forearm muscles). This motion is learned best by being completely relaxed. If you start to feel tension, you are not doing it correctly. Watch my technique in this video:
Video Lesson
http://www.drumskillz.com/video/data/Pyramid.mov
11. Check these websites out for more techniques and excercises on how to get fast.
* http://www.tigerbill.com
* http://www.artverdi.com
* http://www.drumcanman.com
* http://www.stevedowdrums.com
Let's review some basic rules that you should follow when doing all these exercises:
1. Try not to practice for too long at a speeds in which you can not keep up perfectly with the metronome. Practicing like this means sloppiness and the more you play this way, the more your burning sloppiness into your muscle memory.
2. Speed drumming can put a lot of uneccesary strain on the body if it's not done relaxed. If you feel tension building in your fingers, wrists, or arms, try to relax and lower the stick heights. If this doesn't work, take a break, and slow the metronome down a little.
3. Stretch your fingers, wrists, arms, and shoulders, frequently and thoroughly.
4. Find a tempo where you can play perfectly in synch with the metronome for long periods of time(10 - 20 minutes). Doing this burns the correct technique into your muscle memory. This is the seed and foundation of speed.
5. Use a mirror as much as you can. If you do you can catch your flaws and correct them before you burn them into your muscle memory. Reversing the effects of practicing the wrong way for several years is a painstaking and frustrating process.
6. RELAX Concentrate as hard as you can to relax your entire body. Pay attention to your back muscles, torso muscles, even your legs. Tension can show up anywhere. Unecessary tension is a waste of energy and takes away from your performance. The multiple Olympic Gold Medallist sprinter Carl Lewis was an awesome athlete who understood much about speed. When someone asked Carl's coach about his success, he remarked, "the faster you want to go, the more relaxed you have to be". A quote from Bruce Lee, a guru of speed, "The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."
Scott LaBorde Modified: 2007-06-11 07:33:59
http://www.drumskillz.com/cont_view.php?cont_id=31
