Back on September 3rd, I posted My annual resume… and the things I learned from it. This post was 3,000ish words which is quite honestly too long to expect anyone to digest. So I have broken down its meatier portions into a few blog posts which I will be posting here in the coming days. Of course, I do recommend you read a little bit of it for some context.
In that post, I discuss a lot of the way I manage my time. I broke that down into cooking, exercise, and technology tools. Today, I am reposting the “exercise hacking” section of the post where I disect how to sneak little bits of exercise into the work day and use it as a teaching tool for music students…
Exercise ended up getting the shaft towards the middle of the year. As I mentioned earlier, I am too tired at 9 pm, so I have to do it at 5 in the morning or most nights it wouldn’t happen.
I was motivated to do this only if I was working towards something. So for the first half of the year, my wife and I registered for what felt like every 5K offered in the state of Maryland. This got me running whenever I could, even during small 30 minute cracks of transition time in my schedule.
I am also very competitive with my orchestra teaching colleague. We both have the Nike+ Apple Watch and during the months of fall would constantly compete over who could run more miles by comparing the Nike+ leaderboards every day in class. Finding a friend or coworker to work out with can be very motivating, especially when you talk about it constantly throughout the day.
We also learned to “cheat” by turning things into workouts that might otherwise not be considered exercise. We have to tear down the entire cafeteria table layout and set up 85 chairs and stands every Tuesday and Thursday morning for our before-school Symphony Orchestra rehearsals. If you do this really fast and run an Apple Watch “Other” workout, you’d be surprised how many calories you can burn. We got that routine down to seven minutes by the middle of the year. And I can do it in 16 by myself. #proud
When it got cold outside, we decided to change it up. Our principal had a pull up bar sitting in his basement. We asked for it and decided that we would start doing pull-ups at the turn of every class period. Educators as we are, we decided that we would use this as a teaching tool. Much like playing an instrument, if you do something in small increments consistently, you get better. Who knew? Not our students... they continued to think our leaderboard of pull-ups was a competition until the last day of school. But some of them caught on. We were modeling how to develop skills with consistent work ethic. It is a good message to put on display. And my upper body got way stronger.
Alright, to my final work out hack. Fact: Young wind instrumentalists don’t know how to breathe properly. To make a good sound, you have to take a deep and relaxed breath in. Kids don’t know how to do this. But the body knows how to do it naturally… when it is out of breath. So for a sectional lesson or two a year, I try to put my students into this state by making them work out as a warm up. It started with jumping jacks, but I found that didn’t wear their energetic little bodies out enough so I took this 7 Minute Workout App (this is another great way to sneak workouts in to your work day, by the way), and projected it onto the big screen in my room. I did this for an entire rotation of sectionals this year (which is seven school days long). And I teach three sectionals a day. That is three high intensity workouts a day for a week and a half. Those kids have never made a fuller, fatter tone (that lacks any sense of control whatsoever... you kind of have to tell them that, and then express the need to breathe deeply but then have a consistent airflow out).
