How to save time and make faster progress with warm up exercises

Raise your hand if you warm up by playing scales and other well-known technical exercises such as Hanon.

Most of us do. And while I don’t have any problem with practicing scales—scales are wonderful to learn – I’ve noticed something important during my many years as a teacher, adjudicator for the International Federation of Festivals, and examiner.

People spend lots of time learning scales and exercises that are completely unrelated to the piece they’re currently trying to master.

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Why Traditional Warm-Ups Aren’t Always Efficient

Here’s the truth that most teachers won’t tell you: it’s much more efficient to take the most challenging parts of the music you’re learning and create your own warm-up exercises from them.

In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how to create these custom warm-up exercises so you can make quicker and better progress in your playing.

The Power of Writing It Down

Before we dive into specific exercises, I want to encourage you to spend time writing out your own exercises on manuscript paper. There’s something powerful about the physical act of writing that many adult learners underestimate.

By writing things down:

• You’re much more likely to carry out that action
• You form a stronger connection with the music
• You help encode the information, making it easier when you come to play the notes

Practice is anything related to helping you make progress.

Recent research shows that you can make almost as much progress by practising away from your instrument through visualisation and memorisation exercises (if done correctly) as you can through physical practice. These mental approaches activate the brain in a very similar way to physical practice.

So you can make much more progress than you might realise without physically playing a single note. Writing things down ensures you’re prepared for your practice and have a clear focus.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

It offers great mindset tips to help overcome resistance to changing your ways.
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Remember, the brain likes to feel comfortable, so it naturally resists change. Why? Because change means exerting more energy, and the brain’s primary function is to keep you alive, not to help you play a musical instrument! This is why we need strategies to develop a growth mindset.

The Purpose of Warm-Up Exercises

The purpose of warm-up exercises is twofold:

1. To improve your technique to make learning a piece easier
2. To physically prepare your muscles for the workout they’re about to receive

Let me show you some examples of how you can take ideas from your current piece and create targeted warm-up exercises.

Not all of these examples will apply to your instrument or the piece you’re learning, but I encourage you to try at least a couple of these approaches and see how they work for you.

Creating Your Custom Warm-Ups: Step by Step

Step 1: Identify the Technical Challenges

Take your piece of music and make a list of all the technical challenges—places where you think you might make mistakes. This requires a heightened sense of awareness, which is essential for effective practice.

Set yourself a timer for 10 minutes and write down all the challenges within the piece, such as:

• Articulation challenges: Staccato passages, legato lines, or perhaps one hand playing staccato while the other plays legato
• Dynamic contrasts: Areas where you need to clearly differentiate between louds and softs. Learn more about creating better dynamic contrasts here.
• Scale patterns: Sections that follow scale patterns that could be isolated
• Awkward fingerings: Passages that feel uncomfortable under the fingers
• Difficult intervals: Stretches that are challenging for your hand size
• Register changes: Notes that cross between different registers of your instrument
• Complex rhythms: Syncopations, unusual patterns, or rhythmic contrasts

The idea is to identify potential errors before you start practicing so you can create warm-up exercises that address these challenges.

If you’d like more practice tips that work, then grab your FREE guide here.

Step 2: Design Exercises for Specific Challenges

Let’s look at some examples from real pieces to illustrate how you might create custom warm-ups.

Example 1: Mozart’s Minuet – Articulation and Slurring

In this piece, taken from notebook for Nunnerl, the first three notes have a slur, with the third note being a quarter note (crotchet) C that’s then repeated on the next beat. A common mistake is to detach that C, making it staccato when it should be sustained.

To address this:

1. Create a warm-up where you play just these notes as quarter notes
2. Focus specifically on maintaining the full value of that third note
3. Then practice with the correct rhythm, emphasising the correct articulation

Example 2: Mozart’s Minuet – Octave Jumps

In the left hand of this piece, there’s an octave jump from C to the C below that often causes players to hesitate.

Create a warm-up exercise where you:

1. Practice stretching to that octave in advance before you need to play it.
2. Work on moving your thumb to prepare for the next note
3. Isolate just the movement between those specific notes

Example 3: Mozart’s Minuet – Contrasting Rhythms

In bars 5 and 6, the same three notes (C, E, G) appear with different rhythms—first as two eighth notes and a quarter note, then as a triplet. This rhythmic contrast often causes confusion.

Create a warm-up where you:

1. Practice counting in the smallest note value (eighth notes or triplet eighth notes)
2. Use a metronome at different speeds for each rhythm
3. Alternate between the two patterns to clearly distinguish them.

Step 3: Apply Similar Approaches to Other Pieces

Let’s look at another example from “A Media Luz,” a traditional Argentinian song:

Example 4: Syncopated Rhythms

For the syncopated rhythm at the beginning:

1. Double the note values to slow things down (eighth notes become quarter notes, etc.)
2. Practice gradually increasing the speed using a metronome.
3. Apply this rhythm to a scale related to the piece (like D minor)

Check out this post if you want to learn scales more effectively and quickly.

Example 5: Mordents

To practice mordents evenly:

1. Start by playing the notes of the mordent as quarter notes
2. Gradually speed up to eighth notes, then sixteenth notes
3. Practice different mordents from your piece each day for variety

Example 6: Arpeggios

For the D major arpeggio in the piece:

1. Practice it with different articulation patterns from the piece (all staccato, slurred in pairs)
2. Try it at different dynamics (loud, soft)
3. Combine different elements (soft with staccato, etc.)

Endless Possibilities for Customisation

When it comes to warm-up exercises, the possibilities are truly endless. You could focus on:

• Coordination between hands or different parts of your instrument
• Simplifying chords and building them up gradually
• Chord transitions, starting slowly and speeding up
• Dynamic contrasts between consecutive bars
• Rhythmic patterns that appear throughout your piece

Your Warm-Up Challenge

I’d like to give you a challenge: Create five warm-up exercises specifically designed to help you learn the piece you’re currently studying.

Remember to write these exercises out on manuscript paper – don’t skip this step! I know it takes extra effort and your brain might resist it (preferring to conserve energy rather than exert it), but this method will save you time in the long run.

If you find yourself procrastinating or avoiding this task, remind yourself that this approach is about working smarter, not harder. The few minutes you spend creating targeted exercises will save you hours of frustrated practice later.

If you’d like more practice tips that work, then grab your FREE guide here.

The Mindset That Makes It Work

Remember that 80% of making progress has nothing to do with physically practicing your instrument – it’s about making shifts in your mindset. When you approach your warm-ups with intention and creativity, you’re already halfway to mastering that challenging piece.

You can watch a video presentation of this post below.

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