In this lesson I will explain how to boost your learning curve by ten fold by teaching the art of concentrated relaxation. You will be able to make bounds not only in your technical prowess but improve your ability to learn more quickly than ever before.

But first in order to be motivated by this concept it's important that you understand why it works. There are some basic principles of muscle memory which are important to know. For example the more you use a muscle in one particular way, the better it will get at doing it that way. For example, when typing this lesson my muscle memory helps my fingers move to the correct key on the keyboard without me really having to think about it. If it were not for muscle memory then things like sports would be very difficult. Let's take basket ball as an example. Imagine having to always think about where your hand and fingers need to be on the ball while you dribble it, having to think about where you place each foot in front of you as you move through the court, and then trying to calculate how much force you need to put on the ball when you go to shoot it. This would obviously take far too much time and chances are you wouldn't be an NBA player. These things do not cross the mind of a professional player because they are using muscle memory. The similarities of typing or an NBA player's moves are that each skill was practiced hundreds if not thousands of times. The muscles were programmed to act in a certain way on command.

The implications of this, however, means that there is a downside to muscle memory. If you train incorrectly then your muscle memory will be programmed incorrectly. For example, if your practicing consists of fast and sloppy drum fills, then when you perform it will be fast and sloppy. If you practice stiff and tense, you will perform stiff and tense. The more you practice the wrong way, the more you are programming your muscle to react in the wrong way.

So what does relaxing have to do with this? Well, by practicing your technique or action while in a relaxed state your muscles are now being given literally less complex information about what you want accomplished. When you concentrate too much then tension sets in. Tension can come from the brain sending incorrect signals to your muscles. This will make them stiff, slower, and less efficient. When ever we first learn something, this tension is apparent. We are slow and stiff to begin with but with practice we relax and then can move much faster. The more you practice relaxed, the better you will get at sending the right signals to your muscles and the better they will become programmed to performing perfectly.

Studies with PET scans have shown that the brain uses more oxygen when it first learns something new. At first, the brain struggles to take in all the stimulus and make sense of it for later. However, once the task has been practiced and refined the brain uses less oxygen to do the same task even better. The following is an illustration of how a PET scan image reveals how a person first learning a laguage uses more oxygen than one who has already been trained. It seems logical to conclude that this process would free up some of your brains capcity in which might now be used to make your performance better.

By concentrating on relaxing your whole body and only moving exactly what is necessary to get the job done you will be training your muscle memory for efficiency. You may not realize the fact that your knuckles turn white from squeezing the stick so tightly during that crazy fill, or that your back muscles become tense during a performance. From now on you must begin to concentrate on all your muscles from your toes to the top of your head while practicing. Your muscle memory may have been trained over the years to remain tense in this way because this was how you practiced. Next time you practice, quickly identify which ones are tense and then turn them off. If you can't then slow the tempo down and concentrate on relaxing your whole body. You may have to readjust your throne or reposition your body. This must be a concerted and ongoing effort in your practice routine. Identifying tense muscles and relaxing them is a skill that must be trained regulary.

I believe that just as the brain becomes more efficient at executing practiced skills we should also become more efficient at using our muscles. By becoming more efficient in the things we do, we will naturally acquire the ability to do them better and faster. For those of you who want to become better players, take it from your brain and relax.