How to Return to Regular Piano Practice After a Vacation or Break
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After a vacation or even a relatively short break, returning to regular piano practice can be more difficult than expected.
On the one hand, rest can bring freshness. Sometimes, after a few days away from the instrument, you feel ready to throw yourself at the piano.
On the other hand, you may quickly discover that your usual ability to concentrate has disappeared. After 20 or 30 minutes, you already feel like stopping.
So how can you return to your normal practice rhythm?
Set a specific goal
One of the best ways to restore motivation is to have a clear goal ahead of you.
For me and for many students, an upcoming concert works extremely well. When you know that in a few weeks you will have to go on stage and perform a program, practice immediately gains a different meaning.
Grigory Sokolov once expressed this idea very precisely:
“I do not live after the concert. I live before the concert.”
An even stronger motivator can be a competition. In fact, I am thinking about organizing an online piano competition in Piano BAZA in the near future.
But your goal does not need to be that ambitious.
You can simply decide to:
— play a piece for friends or family;
— make a good recording;
— prepare a video;
— learn a piece you have wanted to play for a long time;
— bring a piece to the point where you genuinely enjoy playing it from beginning to end.
The important thing is to have a clear destination ahead of you.
Listen to great music
Another simple way to get back into the right state of mind is to listen to classical music in a great performance.
It does not have to be piano music.
Of course, you can listen to music while you are on vacation as well. But after returning home, a truly good performance can have a surprisingly strong effect and help you reconnect with the desire to practice.
Sometimes just a few minutes of excellent playing are enough to make you want to open the score and sit down at the piano again.
Musical inspiration can often restore motivation faster than trying to force yourself through sheer willpower.
Return to your previous schedule
The third important point is organization.
If before your break you practiced regularly from, for example, 9:00 to 10:00 in the morning, try returning to exactly that time.
Your body and mind already know that routine. Rebuilding an old habit is often easier than creating a new one.
In Piano BAZA, the Practice Diary has helped me personally with this. When you keep track of your work and see your regularity, it becomes much easier not to fall out of the process.
Do not expect your previous concentration immediately
A common mistake after a break is expecting to practice exactly as you did before the vacation from the very first day.
But concentration and endurance also need time to return.
If you used to practice comfortably for an hour, but after a break you already want to stop after 20 minutes, that is completely normal.
The important thing is not to end the practice session entirely at that point.
You can stand up, walk around, stretch a little, listen to one of your recordings, look through some interesting scores, or simply switch your attention for a few minutes.
Then sit down at the piano again, even if only for one or two minutes.
After that, take another short break if necessary.
In this way, you can gradually spend your usual hour around the instrument, even if you are not playing continuously the whole time.
After a few days, your mind and body begin to remember the old routine, and practice becomes much easier again.
Do not confuse discipline with forcing yourself
Regularity matters, but that does not mean you need to sit at the piano without a break at any cost.
Discipline is primarily about returning to the process.
If you are tired, rest.
If you lose concentration, switch activities for a few minutes.
If you can do less today, still keep some contact with the instrument.
Sometimes it is far more useful to return to the piano several times within an hour than to force yourself to sit there continuously until you are completely exhausted.
After a break, the main task is not to restore your previous workload immediately, but to make practice a natural part of your day again.
Once the habit returns, concentration, endurance, and enjoyment of the work gradually return as well.
We regularly discuss topics such as practice organization, piano technique, motivation, and musical development in Slakva Piano Circle, my community for pianists on Skool:
Coming soon