The micro practise

Welcome back to Chooseday! If you are new to Chooseday you can catch up on the previous posts here (It’s ok we’ll wait while you catch up). Done? Great!

This week I want to chat about the simplest practice you can do. It’s an amazing way to supplement (not replace) your normal practice as you can do it nearly anywhere*.

It’s called a “microwave practice” or a “kettle practise”.

I can see a few of you looking at me crazily, with puzzled expressions (well except that one reader who knows exactly what I’m talking about #highfive).

Effectively what I’m talking about is a mini drill session that has a fixed length of time that fits into something you do every day. You could so it to almost anything… the kettle boiling, the microwave running, waiting at the pedestrian lights to cross the road, during an ad break on TV, anywhere really!^ The key to making this work is picking a task you do every day so it becomes a habit.

As a student of the Salimpour School we have lots of drill tools to help us work with small amounts of time, which gave me the idea of finding a way to use a similar idea that could use a more compressed amount of time or even allow me to not need an audio device nearby to hear the prompts.

For me, every evening after my girls go to bed, I make myself a cup of tea to wind down before bed. So while the kettle boils and then while my tea steeps (which takes between 5 and 10 mins overall) I will spend that time doing something physical related to dance. It might be 4 minutes of a bodily movement drill that isn’t working well for me (1 min slow, 45 sec medium, 15 sec fast with a repeat and a stretch for that muscle set at the end), or a run through of one of my choreographies or just a segment which is a bit sticky.

In short, it doesn’t matter what the movement is, so long as you are focused for that time. It’s not what you do that’s the important part here, it’s doing it regularly that is most important.

Check out a micro practise i recorded for you so you could see how it works.

* As with all exercise, please check with your physician before commencing any new workouts and also consider a mini warm up or cool down to ensure you do not injure yourself.
^ Please think about the safety of where you do these drills. We do not endorse or suggest doing anything that distracts you whilst driving or operating any item or in any space .