The Importance of a Warm Up Routine
Musicians have so many things to practice, when we think about it, sometimes it can be very overwhelming. One way that we can deal with this is having a good warm up routine, but what does that mean? I think each musician might answer this a little differently, but I believe a good routine is a way that you practice that targets multiple different areas of playing music, and I think for trumpet this is very important. Playing the trumpet comes with a lot of unforeseen difficulties that are not revealed to most of us before we decided to play the instrument. This includes struggles with endurance, different kinds of pain around the mouth and lips, easily acquired injuries, and a lot of frustration, every trumpet player has experienced one, or all of these. One way that we can minimize these frustrations about playing the trumpet is a healthy warm up routine. Again, each trumpet player will have their own opinion on this, but this is what I think. I believe that a good well rounded warm up routine should include at the very base, some long tones, lip slurs, and articulation. Practicing these three things helps set you up to play in a healthy way for the rest of whatever you need to practice for the day. As a general rule of thumb, for your warm up routine, I think it is a good practice to follow something like play 5 minutes, then rest 5 minutes, or something akin to that where you are resting as much as you are playing. This helps prevent injury, or exhausting yourself during your warm up. So for each category there are a couple of exercises that you can play, and I think it is important to have multiple different exercises for each category, otherwise your warm up routine will get monotonous and boring, and you won’t want to practice. I also believe it is better if you don’t play the same exercises every day for your warm up routine, for a couple of reasons. The main reason, as mentioned before, is that it gets old very quickly, another reason, however, is that different exercises for each of these categories engage different muscles in the lips and mouth. Over time if you are only practicing the same exercises for each of the three categories, you will experience a bottleneck where some of the muscles that you need to exercise lose some strength, and your playing suffers because of it, even if it’s just a little bit. So I would recommend not doing the same exercise more than 2 days in a row so you are consistently working out the other muscles in your face to optimize your progression as a trumpet player.
