Yoga for Drummers.

By Nat Grant with Holly Norman. Originally published in Drumscene Magazine in 2018

Yoga for Drummers

Nat Grant with Holly Norman


Holly Norman is a Melbourne based drummer, percussionist, and yoga teacher. She’s passionate about the links between yoga and music making, and finding ways to combine the skills she’s learnt in each field. Holly first started doing yoga in 2010, and over the past 7 years her yoga practice has developed into a daily habit. Here she shares her journey as a yoga student and teacher, and her own yoga sequence tailor made for drummers. 


“I wasn’t even allowed to do ballet when I was little because I was so uncoordinated… so it’s ironic that I’ve ended up being a drummer and a yoga teacher!” says Holly. She emphasises that you don’t need to be particularly fit, strong, or flexible to start a yoga practice. It’s a concern she hears often from musician friends who would like to try yoga but are worried they won’t be ‘good’ enough. Holly has been approached by instrumentalists and sound engineers alike, who say “I’m really sore, do you think that yoga could help?” This is why, she says, “I’ve become more interested in linking the two.”

In her first year as a percussionist at WAAPA (Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts), Holly was “practicing orchestral excerpts with 20 inch Germanic crash cymbals, and I was getting a lot of shoulder pain, because I didn’t have any supporting shoulder or arm strength… it was agony. And somebody suggested pilates.” She worked one on one with an instructor to build strength. “I began to learn about shoulder anatomy and how to strengthen my muscles to prevent some of the pain I was experiencing. Once I jumped ship and began taking yoga classes, I found this foundational understanding of my body really helped.” 

Holly started with Bikram yoga and practiced this style of yoga for three years. “I was enjoying Bikram,” she says, “but I wanted to experience different kinds of yoga. Just by chance I ended up learning with a teacher where I was living in Perth who taught vinyasa or ‘flow’ style yoga (in the western world we often use the word vinyasa as a descriptor for a style of yoga in which movement and breath are linked)… I was practicing maybe three or four times a week and I began to notice a whole range of benefits beyond the physical. I felt calmer, more attuned to myself and better equipped to deal with stress.” Nowadays, Holly incorporates many styles of yoga into her teaching, including Ashtanga (dynamic, traditional style) and Yin (longer holds and more passive postures). 

“When I started, definitely I was more geared towards wanting a workout: that’s what I wanted from it. Whereas now I’m definitely at the opposite end of the spectrum where my favourite part of my practice is the breath work (pranayama). But when I first came to yoga I didn’t breathe - I couldn’t breathe to save my life!”

Holly suggests that a lot of drummers and percussionists probably don’t breathe as well as they could during practice or performance, “because we don’t have a reason to - there’s no mouthpiece or embouchure or requirement to use breath to control tone, we don’t have to do that.” Linking breath and movement is a big part of Holly’s yoga practice. “At the end of the day,” she says, “if you’re practicing only the poses (asanas) without breath control or mindful awareness, you’re just stretching - it’s not yoga!” 

Holly became interested in taking a teacher training course, and completed her initial 200-hour qualification in Bali in 2016. She now teaches weekly classes in Melbourne, and ran an introductory Yoga For Drummers session in early 2017, offering “specifically targeted movement concepts for people that play our instrument. Because each instrument has it’s own set of… perils. I definitely don’t think drums is the worst because at least we get to be symmetrical … It all really works together in terms of your core awareness as well. Core is this very vague word!” She says: “I feel like people hear the word core and they picture a six pack, which is not what it is! And I think lack of core awareness and core strength is behind a lot of performance related injuries. And also incidental ‘loading your gear into a venue’ injuries - obviously we all know that if you don’t lift correctly you can hurt yourself but the reason for that usually is because you don’t have that core connection. And that can be a really hard one to get. I don’t think you’re gonna get that in two or three classes…”

Holly aims to integrate her yoga practice as a tool to improve her relationship with the drums: “I would do my yoga practice or I would do a meditation then I would do my music practice… In an ideal world where I had a lot of time that would be what would happen. And I think you can put yourself into a more focused space by setting yourself up that way.” She emphasises that it’s important to not just warm up our hands but also our minds and the rest of our bodies. “I try to be aware of my posture as well,” she says, “and also where my mind is at, if I check out mentally during a practice session or gig.” 

Holly recommends that drummers develop a daily ‘toolkit’: “getting on to the floor is good and just doing some simple movements, with breath awareness. There are lots of upper body things that you can do - you want to work to open the front of the body – because we all spend so much time seated or hunched over our phones or computers”.  

The take away - “the best lesson that you will learn with a yoga practice is self-acceptance – your body is different every day, some days you feel strong and others days you feel weak and you just have to be cool with that. You might have poses that you’re working towards, but it’s about the journey of getting there - (exactly the same as music practice). Don’t worry about how ‘good’ you are or if you’re worthy … So many musicians come to physical pursuits with the same sense of competition and a desire to achieve that they apply to their musical practice. And I feel like yoga is different because it’s an internal thing. It’s not a performance. And it’s just about your own experience. Which can be a weird one to grasp at first. But it’s just really nice to have a space where you don’t feel like you’re being judged, and you’re not judging yourself.”


Drummer’s Daily Yoga Sequence 

Physical health is a huge component of our ability to practise and perform. Nowadays there is a wealth of information out there relating to the prevention of RSI (repetitive strain injury), tension, fatigue and muscle soreness from playing the drums. However, many musicians only seek advice after experiencing injury. Just like your immune system, prevention is better than cure when it comes to physical mobility. Yoga is a system of physical postures or asanas that has become well known in the western world as a means to promote joint flexible and muscular strength. However, yoga offers us something that simple stretching does not: a focus on mindfulness and meditation, accessed through breath work (pranayama). By combining simple movements with conscious breathing, yoga provides a complete workout for the body and the mind. Below is a simple yoga sequence that drummers can use before and after gigs, or as a break during practice sessions to promote mental clarity and bodily awareness.  The sequence has been designed with the key ‘complaint’ areas for drummers in mind: lower and middle back, shoulders and neck, hips and hamstrings, and core strength.  
 
 
SEATED PRANAYAMA
Start in seated position. Establish breathing: inhale for a count of 3, exhale for a count of 3. Breathe in and out through the nostrils. Try to make the breath audible by pressing the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, creating a raspy sound in the back of the throat (ujjayi breathing). 2-3 minutes
 
NECK STRETCH
Sitting upright, gently tip the head to one side with the opposite side. Hold for 5 breaths. Change sides and repeat. 1 min
 
SIDE STRETCH
Extend one hand into the air and lean to one side. Try not to lean forward or backwards. Hold for 5 breaths, change sides and repeat. 1 min
 
​

CAT COWS
Stack the hips over the knees, and the shoulders over the wrist. Inhale to drop the belly and draw the chest forward (cow). Exhale to round the upper back and tuck the tailbone (cat). Repeat for 5 rounds. 1-2 mins
 
BROKEN WING
Lying on your belly, extend your right arm out to the side. Roll your body to the right, so that you are rolling over the right shoulder. Hold for 10 breaths, change sides and repeat. 2 mins
 
DOWNWARD FACING DOG (Addo mukha svanasana)
Spread the fingers wide and externally rotate the shoulders. Life the hips high. Knees can remain bent to maintain a straight spine. Hold for 5-10 breaths. 1-2 mins
 

​HIGH PLANK (Utthita chaturunga dandasana)
Roll forward from downward facing dog, stacking the shoulder over the wrists. Keep the belly and legs engaged. Hold for 5 breaths, then press back to downward facing dog. Repeat 5 times. 1 min
 
DANGLING
Walk your feet towards your hands and hang here with the knees bent. Relax the head and neck. Lean forward into your big toes. 2 mins
 
TREE POSE (Vrksasana)
Balacing on one foot, take the sole of the opposite foot to the inner ankle, calf or upper thigh. Draw up through the quadriceps. Extend the arms above the head and hold for 10 breaths. Change sides and repeat. 1-2 mins
 
BOAT POSE (Navasana)
Extend the legs in front of you and lift through the sternum. Engage your abdomen and pelvic floor muscles. Hold for 5-10 breaths and release. Repeat for 3 rounds. 1-2 mins

​BOUND ANGLE POSE (Baddha konasana)
Touch the soles of the feet together, and open the knees out to the sides. Feel a gentle stretch through the inner groin. 1-2 mins
 
PIGEON POSE
Place the right ankle behind the left wrist, and the right knee behind the right wrist. Extend your left leg out behind you and fold over the front leg. You should feel a stretch through the outer right hip. Hold for 1-2 minutes, change sides and repeat. 2-4 mins

CLOSING
Return to your comfortable seated position with eyes closed. Allow the breathing to return to normal. Notice how you feel. Do you feel different? Better? Worse? There’s no right or wrong answer.