The Secret to Dexterity: Crosstrain Your Hands - PHH 217

All of the things that we want our hands to be. We want them to be agile, we want them to be flexible. We want them to have dexterity and speed. All of those abilities are absolutely essential for our hands to be able to meet different playing scenarios. Right? The music that we play is pretty much it's all harp music, and it's all going to be the same fingers on the same strings, just in different orders and combinations. But we need our hands to be able to respond easily to those different coordinations.

Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that plan Playing the harp the way you want may not be possible for you now. I play and teach all over the world and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about. Showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started.

First, I want to let you in on something special. I think the most important thing you can do for your harp playing is to develop the habits that lead to success. Whatever that looks like for you. All of us want to learn how to play the harp beautifully, how to play with confidence and enjoy making music. And if you really want to learn those things, videos are great. But live learning is essential. You need to be able to ask questions and get answers. You can't do that with just a video, which is what makes the Miharp Mastery community so special. My Harp Mastery membership is for those who really want an online experience that lets them learn at their own pace and learn what they want and be able to learn live from expert coaches every single week. Plus, you get to connect with other harpists in the community who have the same desires for their playing. This is not only a powerful learning platform, but it's also the most generous community of harpists every anywhere on the planet. They're harpists with a positive outlook, a growth mindset, and a spirit of support for their fellow harpists. On the journey with them. We're ready for you. Join us just go to harpmastery.comjoin-now that's harpmastery.com join now. Welcome to the show and Happy Bastille Day. Now, this isn't a French themed podcast episode and we won't be breaking the bars on any prisons today. However, while the French national motto of Liberte, egalite, Fraternite, Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood is sounding across the globe, we should give some thought to the unequal treatment we give our hands. I mean, the difference in the demands we place on our right and left hands. Probably you've thought about the very different roles that our hands play musically. Most often the right hand plays a melody and the left hand plays an accompaniment. But think about it in a practical, action related way for a moment. If our right hand specializes in melodies, then it likely is accustomed to connected legato playing along with some chords and arpeggios. Our left hand, though, because it serves to support the melody, is more used to jumping between low bass notes and chords above them, or playing a series of octaves, or playing continuous arpeggiated accompaniments. That's a very different skill set from the one your right hand has. Just try playing a left hand accompaniment with your right hand or a right hand melody with your left hand and you'll find it a little uncomfortable. Try playing hands together with that role reversal and it may feel extremely awkward. If you've ever had to try to balance a left hand melody line with the right hand accompaniment, keeping the right hand softer than the left, you know how deeply ingrained those right hand left hand roles are. Of course, most of the time each hand plays the kind of playing it does best. But what about those occasions when the roles are reversed? How do you prepare for them so they don't stop you in your tracks? That's part of what I will help you with today. Even more importantly, I'll give you a plan for developing more independence between your hands. And that sounds like a fitting topic for Bastille Day.

Of course, aside from Bastille Day, July continues to be a busy month here at Harp Mastery. We are starting week three of our Christmas in July, a festival. And this week I'll be doing a live workshop on on practice and practice tools. How you can use practice tools to speed up your progress. How you can use it to organize your practice. How you can use those tools to keep looking and moving forward instead of going around in circles. So that's the live workshop which will be tomorrow, July 15th at noon Eastern. And we'll be doing that live workshop. It will be in the Heart Mastery Hub in our private Facebook group, Harphappiness HQ and on YouTube. So all of those places you can watch and I certainly hope you do. And of course we'll have our special promotion to go along with that. We have lots of practice tools for you at Heart Mastery and they will be on a 25% discount all this week. So you can look in our shop and look for those and take advantage of that discount as well as all the progress that you'll be making when you streamline your practice and use these tools. So that's our Christmas in July week three. We are also still doing our special Summertime challenge in the Hub. This is a free challenge, just little practice prompts to inspire you every week. And of course, if you participate in every week of the challenge, your name will be entered into a drawing once the challenge is completed for a little bundle of harp goodies. So we have that for the lucky winner and it's not too late to participate. If you are just jumping into the challenge now, you can go back and do those other weeks. That's perfectly fine. So, but you just have to have all of your weeks completed. And the way that we know you've completed the weeks is, is by leaving the comment telling us what you did in those posts. All the instructions are right on the challenge page. So you go to the Heart Mastery Hub, go to challenges and you can participate in the Summertime Challenge right there. Before we start talking about cross training your hands about getting your right hand to do left hand stuff and your left hand to do right hand stuff, you might be wondering why, and I think this is an important question that I really want to get out of the way and answer that first. Why do your hands need to learn the other's job? After all, wouldn't it make sense to have your right hand specialize in right hand things and your left hand specialize in left hand things? They have enough trouble doing what they're supposed to do, right? Why should they try to do the other thing? Why should they try to do the other hand's job? Or. Well, all of the things that we want our hands to be, we want them to be agile, we want them to be flexible, we want them to have dexterity and speed. All of those abilities are absolutely essential for our hands to be able to meet different playing scenarios. Right? The music that we play is pretty much, you know, it's all harp music and it's all going to be the same fingers on the same strings, just in different orders and combinations. But we need our hands to be able to respond easily to those different coordinations. We also need them to be able to respond to a variety of expressive situations, to be able to have that control. I know lots of times we think about control in terms of finger strength, but really our finest control happens when we can allow our fingers to be relaxed and to just do what we've trained them to do on their own, to not work so hard, to let go. And so while it's important to train our fingers to do the specific things they need to do for any one job, you know, in a particular piece of music. Right. Well, it's important to train them in the things they normally play. Giving them a chance to train at something they don't usually play informs them, frees them, and gives them experience that you're going to need when you get to those awkward situations. It's just another way to train your fingers. And this is why I call it cross training. Now, you might be familiar with cross training in sports, or you might not be, but cross training is. Has been around for a long time. And it's an exercise method or system that allows you to use several different modes of training that sort of complement each other. They're opposites that help you work together, and it generally uses a sport that's outside of an athlete's main sport to help develop their fitness in another way. So this was originally something that was popularized by runners, I believe, but it's now pretty common in just about any kind of sports. And it might be like runners using bicycling as an alternative exercise to help their endurance. Or swimmers practicing rowing to keep up their exercise capacity. Or football players lifting weights or running, or volleyball players perhaps practicing yoga to help promote recovery from training. Anything that moves your body in a different way and gives you a different set of parameters for.

Evaluating how well you're doing. Now, of course, this was popularized by the CrossFit gym thing, right? CrossFit is a branded fitness program, and it works with lifestyle changes and training, sports training and nutrition. But the whole idea is that your workouts are constantly varying and they're usually pretty high intensity. And, you know, these are very popular if you're in CrossFit. I've heard CrossFit referred to as, you know, it's not a gym, it's a religion kind of a thing. But the cross training idea, I think, is really important, especially for what we're talking about today. The way I have related. It is that if your right hand only does right hand things, it's going to get sort of muscle bound, if you will, into those right hand things. I mean, muscle bound is not the correct term because we're not really using muscles. But it's going to learn how to do those one things really well. But it's not going to have the flexibility to respond to every situation you want to. And it's not always good to keep doing the same things all the time. And the same thing, of course, for your left hand, we want more flexibility, we want more dexterity, and we want to be able to have our hands free to do what they need to do. Cross training. Having your right hand do left hand stuff, having your left hand do right hand stuff is a great way to do that. So before I give you a few ways to start cross training your hands, I want you to keep in mind these three very simple ideas. The first one is this. The more different things your hands play, the more varied your workouts, your exercises and your etudes, the fewer things will be new to your fingers.

If they already have experience playing a particular kind of pattern, then when they see that pattern in a piece of music, they're going to respond automatically. Now, I realize I'm talking about your fingers as if they were separate beings, but I don't know if this has happened to you, but there are so many times I have observed that my fingers seem to have minds of their own. They seem to not always do what I think I'm telling them to do. So I tend to think of them as sort of separate, separate learning beings. And so that's why I'm referring to them this way. Obviously, this is all motor control, but it comes down to the same thing. The more varied exercises you do, the more different etudes you do, the fewer things will be new to your fingers, the more accustomed they will be to playing a variety of patterns. So cross training fits right in with that idea. Here's the second idea. When you work outside the box, this allows your brain to develop new ways to process information. So when we think about your right hand doing stuff your right hand doesn't usually do, or your left hand doing stuff that your left hand doesn't usually do, that can sometimes be a little bit of a brain twister. I remember when this used to happen to me, and sometimes it still does. And when I'm learning something new, and I've seen it, of course, with all of my students, there's that time when all of a sudden your right hand has to do some sort of repetitive pattern. And your left hand has a melody that can be awkward. And it can be one of those things where you just can't think about it and you can't balance the hands. My right hand's too loud. My left hand's not so soft enough or not loud enough, whatever it is. So when you practice working outside the box, that way you give your brain more information. You give your brain more ways to think about what it's doing, right? It's not always in the same lane. For instance, you get used to the idea that maybe your right hand isn't always playing in treble clef or your left hand isn't always playing in bass clef. So working outside the box is very good for your mental agility as well as your fingers agility. And then here's the third idea, and that's an A plus B equals C, right? When your hands are used to new things, there's your A and your brain is used to processing them a little bit differently. There's the B. This equals C, which is more confidence. More confidence in your ability to learn and to learn more quickly. More confidence in your ability to read the notes more easily. More confidence in your ability to play faster. It's a speed thing as well as a learning, reading kind of a thing. So A plus B equals C. All right? A being the more different things your hands play, the more varied those workouts are, the fewer new things they encounter. B, working outside the box allows your brain to process things in a different way. And both of those add up to more confidence. Now, if that hasn't given you enough reason to explore cross training, I don't know what will. So let's go on and talk about three easy ways to start cross training. So idea number one for cross training is just plain simple cross training. Switch your hands up. If you're practicing a piece, or say you're practicing a passage in a piece and you're trying to get the fingers to do exactly what they're supposed to do. You just have some repetitions to put in, right? Well, try switching the hands. Hands. You can do this hand separately, at least. I recommend that for right now. So if your right hand, you know, play your right hand measures for a few times with your right hand, then play those same right hand measures but with your left hand. An octave lower or wherever is comfortable for your left hand. Give your left hand a chance to sort of get around those notes. You'll find that it's interesting. Your left hand Isn't used to it, even though it sort of knows how it goes. So one way to make this a little bit easier than that might be to say, okay, I'm going to play the right hand line with my right hand. Then I'm going to play the right hand line with both hands together. That'll sort of give your left hand a little bit of a warm up run at it. Then play it with the left hand alone. Then let's switch it up. Let's play the left hand, the left hand line with the left hand a couple of times. Then play that in octaves with your left and right hand together. Then have your right hand do it on its own. If the left hand is a line that jumps around a lot, you may have to have your right hand a lot higher on the harp. It may not be possible if you have a line that jumps around a lot to actually play it hands together at the same time. But if you can, that's sort of an easy way to get into it. Think about how this will help your reading skills. To have to have your right hand play a bass clef line, to have to have your left hand play a treble clef line. Although it's a little bit more used to that, isn't it, than the other way around. So this very simple way of practicing will help cross train your hands and it will at the same time help that passage come together more quickly, I guarantee it, because it's going to give you a different look at what's going on in those measures. An easy way to start cross training, kind of painless, and you'll find it very beneficial. So that's simple cross training. But let's take things up a notch and let's talk about what I'm calling complementary cross training. And this is something you've probably already done and you haven't thought about it, but this is taking one particular skill and working it in a different way. Now, I'm going to give you a minute to consider that because I'll bet you've already done this. Can you think about what you've already done this with? Well, I'll tell you, if you've had a passage of chords that you've been trying to learn, probably one of the ways you know to practice those chords is to practice them as arpeggios. And the other way around, if you've got a series of arpeggios, it will help the speed of your placing those arpeggios to practice them as chords. So that's complementary Cross training. And as I said, you've probably already done that. Good for you. And think about what you learn when you do that. Right. If you have chords and you want to really make sure you're getting all the notes in the chords, well, playing them as arpeggios will help you focus on each one of the notes in the chords individually so that you can be sure that all those inner notes particularly are right. If you have an arpeggio passage, placing those arpeggios as chords so that you can play all the notes at once will help speed up your placing. When they become arp arpeggios, it will help you learn the shapes and help prevent you from falling into that dangerous habit of just placing the next note one at a time. It will also help you place both hands at once, which can be a very tricky skill to just incorporate when you're just doing the arpeggios. And practicing them as chords first can really help with that. So there's one example of complementary cross training. You could also practice your arpeggios, for instance, if their arpeggios going up, practice playing them arpeggios downward. If they're downward arpeggios, practice playing them up. One of the things that I do along this line is if I have a chord or arpeggio passage, I use the patterns from the conditioning exercises, the first six conditioning exercises, and I'll play those arpeggios or those chords in those patterns. So. So it's working my fingers. Because the conditioning exercises are always a good workout. It will make my cords or arpeggios more even. And it just gives me another way to look at it. So that's terrific. Complementary cross training. As I've said, you've probably already done it, so you can give yourself a little pat on the back. But see if you can't take it to the next level. Do it a little bit more intentionally and think about how you are training your hands and your brain as you're doing this. Now here's a third way to cross train your fingers. It's a little bit more intense, but it will help really develop true equality between your hands. And that's this. Choose your favorite set of exercises. One hand exercises. I'm a fan of the conditioning exercises, but you know that. So choose your favorite one hand exercises and practice those exercises. Hands separately, but each hand at the same speed. No cheating for the left hand. I think this is the thing we're most afraid of, right? Our left hand feels like a klutz. So Getting your left hand to play at the same speed as your right hand is a real accomplishment. And think about just the freedom that you will have knowing your left hand is every bit as agile as your right hand. Now you can bring the speed back. Suppose you're used to playing your right hand at 60 and your left hand does 50. I'm just making up numbers. You choose what's right for your exercises and your hands. But if your right hand's used to 60 and your left hand's used to 50, let's make a compromise. Let's sort of say, all right, right hand, you're going to have an easy job for a while. We're going to take you back to 52 and left hand, we're going to take you up to 52 and let's work there for a little bit. Then let's raise the speed. The right hand shouldn't have too much trouble, but the left hand may struggle just little bit more. But you can tempo pyramid it if you like, or you can just say every week I'm going to raise it a notch or two, or whatever you like. But here's the thing starting to develop that equality between your hands is going to be a game changer for you. It's going to make you feel a lot better about what you can do and it's going to allow you to do so much more. So don't keep your left hand in, you know, second class citizen mode. Let's promote it and let's get it working at the same speed as your right hand. You'll be so glad you did a little bit more work and a little bit trickier to do than the others perhaps, but all three together are really valuable cross training methods for your hands. Now here's a bonus tip. What you might want to do, particularly for that more intense cross training where you're working your left hand up to speed. Keep a little chart, like a workout chart, right, you know, you've seen those right where you, okay, I did this exercise this day and this one this day and you get to track what you're doing and you get to see how much effort you've put in. That's a powerful tool. It can seem a little bit, I don't know, a little bit elementary. But the thing is that just being able to see what you've done really reminds you of how far you've come and the progress that you've already made. And that's a big motivator. So you can keep a workout chart for this too. So that you can see how consistent you are with the work that you're doing and you can track your progress. You could do it right in your practice journal. You could have a little chart that you put on a wall. You could give yourself stickers, you could do anything that you like, make it fun for you. But if you track what you're doing, you're going to do more of it and you're going to get better at it. You're going to see more progress, more quickly when you track it. I promise. And here's another little bit of motivation for you. This is actually a quote from Greg Glassman. Now that name's probably not familiar to you. It wasn't one that was familiar to me, but he was one of the co founders of, of CrossFit, those gyms that I talked about. And I love this quote and it seems to go with that whole workout chart concept. And the quote is this, no matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everyone on the couch, right? No matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everyone who's just sitting there on the couch. So don't feel like you're not making enough progress, like everybody else is moving faster because they're not. If you're doing all these steps or some of them, if you're doing one of these steps and if you're tracking it so that you're not, so that you know that you're doing it consistently, you will make progress. And your progress is going to be exponentially faster than the progress of those people who aren't doing it the same way. I promise. So you can keep that quote in mind. It's one you can probably, you know, write down and paste on your music stand, right? No matter how slow you go, your still lapping everyone on the couch. All right, here's one more little PS that that I just had to add in here. Sometimes I get comments from harpists who are right handed as I am wishing that they were lefties so that their left hand would be more coordinated. As, as I said, I'm a righty, but I've taught plenty of left handed harpists. And here's the thing, most of the time the left handed people have the same challenges that we do we righties do with our harp playing. And that's because no matter which hand is your dominant hand, your right hand is being trained to do right hand things and your left hand is being trained to do left hand things. So they have the same coordination issues that we do. So no left handed envy from this right handed harpist because I. Well, almost. There is one thing I envy left handed harpists about, and that is that they can mark their music without putting the harp down. Right? For us right handed people, we have to put the harp down, pick up the pencil with our right hand, reach over, mark it, put the pencil down, pull the harp back, lefties. Gosh, the harp's back. They just pick up the pencil with their left hand, mark their music and they're off and running again. That is something I do envy, I'm afraid. I hate to admit that, but it's true. But when it comes to actual playing, they have the same issues that we do. Right hand gets trained for right hand things, left hand for left hand things. And that's why cross training is so important. Next week here on the podcast, I have another opposite kind of a podcast for you. We're not going to be talking right hand versus left hand. We're going to be talking about harp music versus piano music. You know, we steal piano music all the time and turn it into harp music. But what really makes a piece of music a harp piece versus a piano piece? What is so different about it? Where are they similar? Where are they different? How can you use that to help you choose music if you're looking to arrange music or looking to learn a new piece? So we'll talk about heart music versus piano music next week. Remember too, we've got our Christmas in July workshop coming up tomorrow. That's Tuesday, July 15th at noon Eastern. We'll be working on practice and practice tools and how that can help you streamline your practice. Get more bang for your practice moment. So we'll be talking about that. We have the Summertime Harp Challenge going on in the Harp Mastery Hub. So participate in that and do all those weeks be entered in that drawing. Love to send that little box of harp goodies to you if you are our lucky winner. So much going on right at the moment. But remember, with everything that's happening, every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.