Ever wonder how things work when practicing. That is the things that control you physically! Let’s look back to our younger years when we just stared walking. This may sound funny to you, but if you think about it, it is the perfect example of how we learn or train our bodies to do what we want them to do.

Our attempts at walking seem to be a series of failures. We pull ourselves up and hold on for dear life…and……BOOM we are on the floor. But we get up again and do it all over. Time after time we continue to repeat the same series of mishaps, falling on face over and over. But all of a sudden we take our first step. WOW!!! we are up and running. Well not really, but we do have that first step under our belts. After what seems to be a life time, we are walking and haven’t stopped yet. All those times we failed at it, were they really failures? I think not. They were necessary steps to our final objective; to walking.

Now fast forward a handful of years. Here we are attempting to learn how to play drums. Yikes what do we do??? We do exactly what we did when we wanted to walk. We do our lessons over and over. The key to success is not to give up but to continue to work at it. You see it’s repetition that will get us there. Just as when you were a child…you kept at it over and over never gave up.

Put that effort into practice and you will go as far as you want. Your journey has never been about speed…it’s been about patience and deliberate effort. Continue to do it over and over, even though you are sick of it.

With effort and repetition we gain facility. Technique. To repeat something at a comfortable tempo, is allowing your muscles to memorize the motion. Once you have it you don’t have to think about it…it’s there! Take note to what I said about a comfortable tempo. If you try to push the tempo, for any reason, you have for all intent and purposes just shot yourself in the foot.
Once your muscles become tense you have lost the ball game and are at risk of injury. A tense muscle has very little blood in it. Blood carries oxygen to the muscle. Without oxygen the muscle cannot function properly. You can damage yourself.
I hope you can put your ego aside and be a bit patience about your practice.
It will pay you back 1000 times over.