The "Hairball" exercise is a good one to pair with the Six Steps to Perfect Posture warmup. I often need to do it in the summer, when the humidity is making me feel crappy. If you're finding it difficult to inflate your chest enough in the Six Steps, or if you're tired, try this exercise. Both the Six Steps and the Hairball help you to hyperoxygenate a bit, which will wake you up. The Hairball will trick your body into taking a deeper breath into your chest.

The "Scoop and Deposit" exercise will loosen up your back and align you so that your upper body doesn't have to do as much work. This is a great exercise for growing kids and for adults who have piles of tension in the back and shoulders.

This exercise is also great for dancers. When I was teaching tango this summer I was talking to another instructor and heard a different version of this exercise that doesn't include any bouncing. I think the bouncing is key, though. Please give it a try.

Sometimes I call this "Scoop and Deposit" because you scoop your stomach in, up, and "deposit" it onto your chest.

Why play the violin? I spend a lot of time as a teacher working on technique, but in every lesson I try to stress that everything you do when playing the violin should be something that makes your body feel good.

I used to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with the violin: I would have some music I couldn't play or something I couldn't do, and then I would lock myself in a practice room for hours at a time, trying to conquer whatever piece or technical item it was that needed conquering. Sometimes I would be successful, and sometimes not, but it always took a lot of practice time. These days, post-MS, I don't particularly feel like wasting time doing tedious or painful things. Violin practice has to be a comfort and a joy for me to want to spend time doing it, and I want my students' practice time to be the same way.

Playing the violin transforms me. I can be having a crappy day, be exhausted from teaching high school, and come home dreading the 5 violin lessons I have yet to teach that afternoon. But then I pick up my violin, and do some breathing exercises, and gently warm up. And 30 minutes later I'm in a wonderful mood, am energetic, relaxed, and ready to teach. One of my adult students said to me one day, "no one is allowed to talk to me when I come home from work until I've played the violin." Exactly.

Breathing, posture, setup...all of these things make playing the violin so much easier than it ever was for me that I feel like I can really start to express myself through the violin, like it's a part of my own body. I see it in students and call it the "woohoo" moment, when everything just starts feeling comfortable and the music sort of floats through the violin, as if the violin is just a vehicle for expressing human emotion. That's what it's all about, isn't it?

Tonight a student said to me, "I was so mad at my husband, I couldn't even play the violin! But your peeing exercise finally worked it out." I'd sort of forgotten about it, since I hadn't done it in a while.

This exercise was inspired by the amazing Argentine tango dancer Luciana Valle, who vastly improved my tango technique by saying "pee, pee, pee..." as we all danced. :-)

What this does is relax your lower back, putting your spine into better alignment. A lot of dancers learn to "tuck" their butts. That's not the motion I want, because the act of tucking doesn't invite relaxation. This exercise is great to do when you feel physically tense or emotionally stressed-out, which basically amounts to the same thing most of the time.

"Set Yourself Up for Sucess" is the same as when I say "Shelf, Neck and Knees". It's how I get ready to play.

First, a note on tossing the violin up onto your shelf: Put your left thumb on the nose of the violin, and the rest of your left hand on the front of the violin. Get as much of the violin into your hand as you can. This position will make it easier to quickly toss the violin up, and will leave your hand in a good place once the violin is up.

1. Take an easy breath through your mouth, using it to "float" your chest. Kind of like in the Six Steps exercise, but just open your mouth and let the air rush in. This is the "float your shelf" step. You may breathe in and out, but leave your shelf right where it is.
2. Toss your violin up onto your shelf, but do not put your chin in the chinrest. This is the "float your violin on your shelf" step.
3. Now pretend that your head is floating 10 feet above you, like you are looking down on yourself playing the violin. This is the "float your head" step.
4. Keeping your floating shelf, let your chin settle into the chinrest.
5. Relax your mouth.
6. Relax your eyebrows.
7. Check that your knees are still soft.

Now that you have an air-filled shelf (you are breathing, right?), take a few moments to "settle in", so you feel like you and the violin are comfortably connected.

Emma requests a post on how to set up the left hand. This is how to set up a beginner hand, with your hand in contact with the violin neck at all times.

Prerequisites: Set Yourself Up for Success

The first thing you need to do is to find your touch point. Do this by turning your left palm towards you and locating the crease just above your base knuckle. Your touch point is on that crease, slightly to the inside of the hand. Mimi Zweig calls this the "magic X".

1. Set yourself up for success.
2. Since you tossed your violin onto the shelf, your hand is now on the body of the violin. Smoothly and quickly slide your hand, with the touch point touching the neck, away from you until you clunk against one of the pegs.
3. Swing your left elbow a bit to make sure your left armpit is relaxed.

If your left armpit is not relaxed, it's probably because you're lifting your left arm using the front of your shoulder. You need to counterbalance. Look for a post on that soon.

You should still have your beautiful shelf and relaxed neck and knees. Repeat the whole thing until it feels like a little dance...the shelf inflates, the violin floats, the head floats, the chin settles in, the hand slides away from you on the touch point, the elbow feels swingy. Beautiful floating shelf! Bouncy knees! Wheeee!

OK, once you have the motion feeling good, and you have the touch point on the neck so that the neck of the violin is kind of nestled on top of your base knuckle joint, how do you know exactly where along the neck your hand should be when in first position?

During the past 2 weeks I've been talking to a lot of my students about counterbalancing. When you're holding the violin, you have a violin and an arm sticking out in front of you, so in order to be in balance, you have to sit back a bit and feel like you have weight in back of you to counterbalance the violin and arm sticking out in front.

If you're playing the violin, you can still play fairly well if you don't do this. If you're playing the viola, though, you absolutely have to counterbalance. It's the difference between a violist who looks like she's playing an instrument that's too big for her and a violist who looks like her viola is dancing with her body. Give it a try:

This is an exercise to help you hold your bow naturally. You will use a fork because:

• The flat handle of the fork gives you a lot of surface area so your fingers will feel secure


• The fork is very lightweight


• You can eat with a fork

For one week (or more!) you will be eating with a salad (short) fork held in a special way. Let's get started. Click on the photos to get a larger view.

#1: Hold the fork in your left hand by the tines. Start by flipping the fork over and placing the tip of your pinky at the base. (Note that in this picture, I'm not holding by the tines because I needed my hand to snap the photo).

#2: Now lay the handle of the fork against your forefinger, between the first and second creases. Keep your right hand comfortably curved and relaxed. You are still controlling the fork with your left hand.

#3: Let your other fingers curl around the handle. You are still holding the fork with your left hand.

#4: Take your thumb and place it on the handle so it lines up with your middle finger. To do this comfortably, it will have to contact the fork on the corner of the thumb that is closer to your forefinger. Now you can release the fork tines from your left hand. It will look like this:

#5: In order to eat while holding the fork like this, your right shoulder/armpit must be completely relaxed. Try and you will see that this is true. Can you eat like this and keep your right hand and shoulder relaxed? I bet you can! :-) To get it to your mouth, you'll need to swing your elbow in and let it carry your hand around so the fork faces your mouth.

This allows you to practice your bow hold in a controlled way while doing something you already have to do: eat. Do this for at least a week.