Transcript Summary
Gentlemen, I couldn't introduce him the other day because he wasn't here.
His dad's been very, very ill, and he's been down taking care of him as a surgeon.
One of the best cardiovascular surgeons in the world.
And I used to brag when we'd go back to the New York conference, I'd tell him,
I said, it's kind of a successful time of year to carry your own surgeon with you.
And he was always with me.
I didn't want to be introducing him as a surgeon or a doctor because he's a trouble player.
And he'd rather be a trouble player than a doctor.
And he really would. He really would.
The only trouble is you can't make quite as much money.
He's going to talk to you today on a very important subject, and also tomorrow on another important subject.
But we're going to split it up and just have one subject today and one subject tomorrow.
So make your notes. What he's going to tell you is very important from a medical standpoint.
And his medical advice on brass playing is not garbage.
Like he's not going to tell you that, like the French horn article I read,
he's not going to tell you that 35 were done and it was very dangerous.
You know, there was even one professor here, he was out in North Texas State,
and then when he came out here to lecture, he was in South Carolina, somewhere.
And he was telling the class that you could blow holes in your neck.
Were you there on that there?
He said, it's very dangerous because you can blow holes in your neck.
And with a gun.
So of course, Dave Evans, he doesn't, stick around, I'm going to see you in a minute.
So Dave Evans got up and I told him, don't ruffle anybody's feathers because it looks bad.
Dave got up and he said, you mean to tell me that you could actually blow a hole in your neck?
And he said, yes, you could.
And I guess Dave really pinned it down.
It made him pretty embarrassed. But that's pretty silly.
There's no way you're going to blow a hole in your neck by playing.
And to cite the example is, who was the black player at the end with the bell?
Yeah, Gillespie. His neck comes out like this.
And we have lots of students that do that.
It's a weakness of tissue muscle somewhere.
Like one doctor told this student of mine, he says, does it hurt?
He said, well, what are you worried about that?
He said, yeah, but it looks bad.
He said, oh, I put a kerchief around your neck.
I'll tell you another funny story.
You talked about lip, which I talked about this morning.
I tell you that you've got to keep the corners tight and all this.
This kid would, well, I had several of them like it, but this one in particular,
when he'd get up above high C and up, you could see his teeth.
His mouth would separate on both sides and you could actually see his teeth.
It's the same thing.
Somebody says, yeah, but how do you keep the air in?
All that's in your cheeks is excess air.
What's playing that horn is coming right down the center of the tongue.
It doesn't mean anything.
It gives you something to worry about.
So right now, I'd like to introduce Dr. Larry Miller.
Let's have a nice hand.
Wonderful play.
Thank you.
How are you?
Well, it's kind of hard to catch on in the middle of the week
because by now you guys have all figured out that you're in the Claude Gordon mafia
and it's pretty hard to break through to that.
But the thing that's neatest about association with Claude
and the playing that goes on with that is that it covers the whole ground of your being.
It's not just exactly your trumpet playing,
but you become involved with Claude mentally and physically
and I should say not just your brass playing.
And one of the things that Claude and I became interested in early on
was trying to find out why some of the original statements
about diaphragmatic breathing didn't really make sense to us.
And that's kind of how he and I became associated was
I work in a human performance laboratory
and at that time I was really deeply involved.
And we began setting up some studies to try and test our thoughts in that regard.
But from there we've traveled all over and realized that
as we talk to different university students and brass players
there's a wide interest in the physicalness of brass playing.
And this lecture I usually give after we've gone through the diaphragm thing.
So it's out of sequence.
And I give you this introduction just so you know where we're coming from.
How many of you are first time people here?
I see a lot of familiar faces.
So there's a fair, there's a good number of first time faces.
So we'll talk as if it's not well understood.
The trumpet is really a physical endeavor.
And of course your ability with playing the trumpet
corresponds well with your physical abilities.
And so it becomes very important to take care of the real instrument which is your body.
And the trumpet merely magnifies the frequency vibrations that we set up
by the use of our lung power and our bodies.
So what we want to do is help you learn how to take care of this body that you have.
And the lips are really just the reed as you probably already learned.
And so there's some muscle and neuron pathway control
that has to do with learning to tighten the muscles at the sides of the jaw
and relax the embouchure so that it's not under tension.
And it's kind of like patting your stomach and rubbing your head.
You go through these neuron pathway gymnastics that if you follow Claude's method
will become automatic without you even thinking of some of these things.
But we want to talk more specifically about some of the health hazards
that trumpet players get into and how to avoid it.
The way you've been playing for quite a while will probably notice that when you're not feeling well
you don't play as well.
One of the first things I notice is that if my range begins to become more difficult
it often has to do with the fact that I'm not keeping up my breathing exercises.
And I'm not doing the regular running that I do.
And that directly will affect your range very quickly because the wind power is so important.
So what we're going to be talking to you today about is how to develop your physical self
to meet the demands of trumpet playing.
Trumpet playing really is not a cardiovascular fitness kind of exercise.
The popular term is aerobic.
In trumpet playing even though periodically your heart will get up high
if the adrenaline is flowing the heart rate will pick up and that sort of thing.
But it's not the kind of thing that keeps you in aerobic fitness.
And lots of our endurance comes from aerobic fitness.
If you've played a long job and had some tough things to play
you'll notice that probably playing correctly your back muscles are sore and tired.
And especially as you're developing to play over a period of years
you'll notice that the muscles that you're using will become sore from holding the horn
and from taking the big breaths and keeping the chest up and playing.
So we want to make the body as physically efficient as possible.
Make this machine as efficient as possible.
And that means you've got to get cardiovascular fitness.
So some of the things that we'll talk about will be redundant to those that are physicians here
because it's basically how to write yourself an exercise prescription
and get this real instrument in shape.
Some of the benefits for getting yourself in physical shape
in addition to the trumpet playing is that your blood pressure will drop.
Your weight will drop and correspondingly your risk for heart and blood vessel disease will drop.
In addition with aerobic fitness the risk factors for coronary and heart and blood vessel disease all drop.
As you exercise your lipids the fats will drop.
You get a sense of well-being from the endorphins that are released with aerobic exercise.
And really I believe after having really looked at what Clark was trying to get going
when he started this breathing exercise thing
it was more than just going out and breathing ten steps.
It was to involve the whole being in the sense of well-being that comes with being physically fit.
And that's what we want you to do.
Now let's talk for a minute about some of the other side issues
before we get into writing an exercise prescription that affect trumpet players.
One of the things a lot of folks notice even here at camp
is changes in humidity will affect the way the reed vibrates.
And I know when we were over at Isamada for some reason it seemed drier there
just a few hundred feet down maybe it was in the wind in the valley.
But after a couple of days of playing your lips would get really stiff.
And that has to do with the tissues in the lips drying out.
There's another phenomena after having talked with thousands of trumpet players
that I'm convinced of and having experienced myself.
Medication affects the way the lips vibrate.
This isn't something that I can document with actual studies
but I've talked with enough trumpet players who tell me when they take medication
certain medications affects the way the lips vibrate.
I know I play in a quintet and I was told to take some medication
for a TB test that converted to positive.
And they like you to take a drug called INH for a whole year.
And I got about two weeks into the medication and I could barely play a high C.
And it just knocked the top off my register and it became really difficult for me to play
and everything was getting harder and harder and I hadn't changed anything.
And I called Claude and we talked about it and he said,
are you taking any medications or anything?
And I said, well the only thing I'm taking is this INH.
And he said, well from my experience medications always affected me
and I sure know it has other trumpet players.
So I stopped and it took about a week and everything just came right back.
And since I've had that experience several times
so that when I have a job to play that's really important
I make sure I'm not taking a decongestion or anything else.
I've noticed if I take a decongestion for a sinus congestion problem or something like that
it affects the way the reed vibrates.
And so we want to play wet and the reason we play wet is to make the reed vibrate.
And if everything is dry, which is what a decongestion is doing, it's not going to vibrate.
Another thing that I have, I always carry some sort of lip salve with me.
Vaseline, it seems to work really great.
I keep vaseline in my car since I play in my car a lot.
I keep vaseline on my sink at home and it's just a thin coat.
A lot of guys will get these little sores at the top of your lip.
They're like little pimples if they put too much vaseline on.
It comes with playing your trumpet and maybe not having shaved for a day or so
and the little hair follicles become inflamed right at the top of the lip
and it'll get like a little puff spot there.
I've had lots of players ask me about those things.
I've experienced those things when I get too wet
and I've used vaseline on both the upper and lower lips.
I found that just actually putting a thin layer of vaseline when you're dry
on the lower lip just a little bit, not on the upper,
and it'll automatically transfer to the upper and you won't get those little puff things.
If I use vaseline on both or any kind of lip stuff, I end up getting those puffs
and they really bother you after a while.
Cold sores are another thing that can really get in the way of trumpet players
and this is a herpes virus, a herpes simplex virus that we all carry with us.
It's the same probably a relative of chicken pox
and it'll come out under stress and it'll come out when you've been in the sun
and that sort of thing.
There are some medications that we use for those sorts of things.
Zovrax, which is an antiviral thing that's been developed for herpes II,
which is the genital herpes.
And it seems to be fairly helpful if you really get a bad cold sore.
Usually those things will really put a quick stop to your trumpet playing.
Zovrax, it's a prescription medication, Z-O-V-I-R-A-X, I think, Zovrax.
I should also say a bit about the teeth.
When I learned to play, I had already chipped a tooth when I was six.
I chipped a tooth and I learned to play and it never bothered me.
But about a year and a half ago, I chipped another tooth,
much less than I chipped the initial tooth.
Everybody used to always say that this chip in the front made it easy to play high.
Well, I found out really quickly that the chip on the other tooth sure didn't
because I could not blow.
And it was just the most frustrating thing when you've been used to playing easily
and everything is an enjoyment all of a sudden, just overnight, to not be able to play.
And I thought, oh, fooey, I'm just going to work through this thing.
And I played several jobs and did several things that I had to do on the horn.
And it was just terrible.
The range was work and I could tell the difference.
Most people listening could, but if you were a trumpet player,
you could tell that you were really working.
And it was terrifying.
So after about six weeks, I gave up and went to the dentist and had him cap this front tooth.
And we didn't have any molds or anything made, so we just had to play with it.
I took my horn into the dentist's office and we spent an afternoon just getting that thing right.
And all of a sudden, it came back.
But it took another six weeks for it to start really feeling as good as it was before.
So if you're a serious trumpet player, I'd have an impression of your upper teeth made.
I have an, I guess they call it an impression.
He just stuck a bunch of yuck up in my mouth and made an impression so that if it happens again,
it'll be easy to replace and I won't go through almost three months of not really being able to play easily.
So if you have that availability, I'd sure do it.
I know Dave Evans has just been through that and Larry Sousa has been through it.
I really thought they were blowing smoke until it happened to me and I'm convinced that it really...
Claude's never had it happen to him, so he's the one that tried to talk me into playing through it
and see what happened and he said, well, it may or may not work,
but he'd been through with a lot of students who had ended up, all of them, having to have a cap.
Did you have that?
I had one.
I was talking to him and he asked if that's been bonded.
Straighten out the profile.
Didn't change anything.
The two business shining out.
Did it, how did it affect your playing?
Not at all.
Didn't?
Not at all.
I had an impression that was real frequent all my life.
Dennis finally said that the overbiting has got to push the bottom one out and lose the bottom one
so he patched it.
I think you can play better, but whatever happens is it's a change
and it's that change that you have to go through that period of adjustment.
Your tongue is so sensitive, especially for the real super high register up front.
I noticed that since this is capped, it has a different feel.
It's kind of rough, it doesn't feel exactly the same even though it's pretty close to the same.
But I think you can get used to anything with time, but I think it pays to protect your teeth.
The other thing that it pays to protect is your lungs because they are your wind machine
and tomorrow we'll be talking in my lecture more about the musculature and the lungs
as the source of your air, the billows.
But you want to protect your lungs from the kind of harm that smoking most certainly does.
And I think that it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that nobody smokes and plays the trumpet anymore.
Very few people are smoking anymore anyway, except I guess it's rising in the teenage females.
But lung disease also in the females who smoke is almost equal to males in lung cancer now.
So on jobs you're going to be in places where there's lots of smoke.
That's a difficult one because there's lots of evidence that breathing secondhand smoke may be as bad or worse as smoking yourself.
But I'm sure I don't have to belabor it.
In camps ten years ago where we had a lot more smokers, we used to spend some time talking about how to get off cigarettes
and some of the things behaviorally to do.
But I doubt, are there smokers in the room?
There may be one or two.
At any rate it doesn't make sense.
And that's not a personal put down, that's just a medical opinion.
One of the things that I did as an aside was we've done some studies doing pulmonary functions on professional trumpet players
because a lot of professional trumpet players have been told they have emphysema.
They develop a kind of a barrel chest and they look like, to a physician, they look like they would be emphysemitic.
And Rafael Mendez was told that and Manny Klein was told that.
Maynard Ferguson was told that.
And we all were talking one year at the New York Brass Conference about these different things.
And each one of these guys had had spirometries done by different doctors and they said they'd had that diagnosis made.
So I got a hold of all their spirometries and they were all abnormal.
But it was really hard for me to believe that these guys who played so well and who were obviously not really short of breath,
you know, climbing stairs or anything else had emphysema.
So one of the studies that we did, and we really never reported at the Brass Conference,
was to study professional trumpet players.
We took some pretty young, healthy guys.
Larry Sousa was involved with it when he was about ten years younger.
And we did reproduce a spirometry that was abnormal.
It showed an FEV1 that was consistent with mid-flow airways disease.
But we did total lung volumes and residual volumes were way down.
And because these guys squeezed out so much more air from their lungs, they actually were able to utilize more,
even though the graph would show that they were slow getting the last bit of air out.
And so I think that's why trumpet players have been told they have emphysema.
I think trumpet playing correctly really changes the anatomy of the chest.
If you'll look at people who played for a long time, I didn't understand what Claude was always talking about,
and Manny used to too, when they'd talk about when you develop.
I thought, what do you mean? When I met him, I was in my late 20s, I thought I was developed then, you know.
But they were talking about when you develop the musculature to play.
And if you look at Claude, even now after all of his illness, the neck muscles,
and some of the things we'll show you tomorrow, you'll see the anatomy of the chest and how those muscles have developed.
The neck muscles particularly to hold the clavicles up, to increase the AP diameter, constantly having been up like that.
I know coat sizes change and neck sizes change when you're playing correctly.
Your coat size goes up a couple of sizes in your neck also after you begin that sort of development.
So we're talking about the whole, protecting this whole breathing mechanism and taking care of yourself.
One of the other things that I've seen quite a bit about is chest pain in trumpet players
when they get to be middle-aged, they think they're having heart attacks.
I got so much pain one time that I thought I might have coronary artery disease because it was always aggravated when I ran.
And it came right through my chest and it was just muscle strain from blowing and breathing,
holding that chest up so much during the developmental stage.
I went and had a thallium stress test and the cardiologist kind of laughed at me because he knew I ran
and he knew that I really tried to stay in shape.
But he said he'd do it for me anyway and it was perfectly normal.
But I've had calls from all over from guys who think they're having heart attacks.
A guy on Count Basie's band, I don't even remember his name, he called me and he says,
hey, you injected the wrist on the bass player on our band.
He told me, he said, you knew about trumpet players.
He said, I'm having this terrible chest pain and he described this chest pain.
And you're always worried that you're telling a guy who's really having a heart attack that he's not.
So I said, well, probably isn't.
But why don't you go to the emergency room and get it checked out?
I'll bet you it's muscles.
And sure enough, they didn't find anything else wrong with him.
But you can have chest pain if you play long jobs or and you're really having to squeeze and you're working a lot.
I get pain right medial to the scapula right there.
Those muscles will start to spasm sometimes in the pectoralis area.
I think a lot of it has to do with holding the horn in the left hand and holding the chest up and breathing.
So I don't know.
Any of the others of you, I've had a lot of trumpet players complain to me about it.
All the time.
All the time.
Yeah.
It's a fairly common phenomena.
The old guys don't seem to get it as much.
I think maybe, you know, they get permanently set like that.
They're just a little tougher.
They're just tougher, yeah.
Although I'm becoming one of the old guys, so I can't compare myself like that.
Another interesting thing that I've seen go through trumpet sections is infectious diseases.
Carl called me one time from Las Vegas.
Carl Leach.
I guess you've all met Carl by now.
And he said, man, I just feel terrible.
He says, I don't know what it is.
I'm running these low grade fevers all the time.
And he said, I got a sore throat and everything.
So I called a lab down there and had him run some lab tests and he had infectious mononucleosis.
And I said, well, Carl, is anybody that you know had mono?
And he says, yeah.
He said, about three months ago, the second trumpet player had mononucleosis.
And I said, do you guys ever blow each other's trumpets?
He says, oh, yeah.
He says, I was trying his horn out.
So you want to be really careful.
You know, it always scares me when you go to one of these brass conferences.
You've got all these horns from every horn maker out there and everybody is playing them,
especially in New York where all these guys come wandering in off the street.
You know, you wonder what they've been, where they've been.
And you're picking up that horn and blowing it.
I won't do that anymore.
As much as I like to try out new horns, I'm not real happy about picking one up right away.
Because I think you could probably pick up some other things.
I know another trumpet section passed infectious hepatitis, hepatitis A, back and forth for a while.
And that's not a good thing to do.
Well, you know, I think it does.
I've never cultured the horn after I've cleaned it, but I've cultured it before I cleaned it.
And I sent it into the lab and the lab guy called me with a panicked value.
He said, man, you are growing things that I have never seen in years.
You know, all the anaerobes and gram-negative stuff, pseudomonas and just all kinds of terrible stuff.
If you ever, you know, I mean, when you clean out your horn, have you looked at that garbage that comes out of the lead pipe?
It's awful.
You know.
So could you re-infect yourself?
Well, I would think you probably could.
I think it makes sense to keep the horn clean.
Yeah.
I've had problems where a lot of times, mostly in the winter, I'll have a hole and it won't go away.
But if I wash my horn after, mostly my mouth bleeds.
Yeah.
And in a few days it can be gone.
Well, I don't know if that's it exactly, but I know that I have upper respiratory difficulties if I don't clean my horn regularly.
And it's hard for me to clean it.
You know, as much as we play, you probably need to clean it every week.
I don't know what Larry told you.
But it's hard for me to get time to clean my horn.
I mean, I'm fighting to get time to practice not to clean my horn.
They've got these, I don't know if Larry talked about it.
I want to ask him, have you ever seen these little balls that you blow through the horn?
I can't.
I blew one of those strings out and it blew a bunch of yuck out.
But it might be kind of a quick way to clean the lead pipe.
You know, I've cleaned it out with that chamois that goes through there, but it doesn't seem like it'd be very disinfectant.
After cleaning it, go to the bathtub and turn on the hot water and let it run through.
Yeah.
I think probably it's going to be just...
You might still smell a slight odor.
Yeah.
Well, if you get a guy, an infectious disease physician, to look at those things, you know,
they're always looking at cultures and trying to get excited about what they see.
They went crazy when they saw this stuff that I cultured.
I took it around in the hospitals, having a great time with it.
So...
Okay, we talked about mono.
We talked about hepatitis A.
I don't know, you know.
I think hepatitis B is a very good possibility that way, too.
And hepatitis B is more worrisome because it gets into the chronic active kind of hepatitis that cause permanent liver damage.
And so I think it's really smart not to play someone else's horns.
I've seen numerous times strep throats pass back and forth from people playing trumpets in the sections, usually.
One of them you treat with penicillin, and he gets better.
And then unless you treat them all, it's like treating a family who has beta strep.
If you don't treat them all, they give it to each other.
And the worry about that is not so much that you can't get over it,
but there are some side effects from long-term strep infection.
You can get things like rheumatic fever and you can have kidney problems develop and that sort of thing.
So it's not just a simple sore throat that you might think is not important.
With all the things that are going around about infectious diseases,
I sure don't want to get AIDS from some guy that plays a trumpet.
And I'm sure that they're anxious to disprove the sputum particle transfer of AIDS,
but it's hard for me to believe that it might not be possible if it can come from other body fluid passing back and forth.
And we know that you can get hepatitis that way, and AIDS seems to follow hepatitis in the way that we pick it up.
I only throw that out because you want to really be protecting yourself about infectious diseases.
Let's talk a little bit about the nutrition that you need to do,
because trumpet players are great junk food junkies.
Gig food is coke and potato chips, you know,
something that you can chew quickly and won't go through the horn and something that will keep you awake.
One of the habits that I see a lot of guys doing is coffee and the trumpet, you know,
to just kind of slow things down and that sort of stuff.
I like to see people get away from the caffeine, if they can,
because the caffeine raises your blood pressure, raises your heart rate, and raises lipids.
We know that it raises the level of cholesterol in your bloodstream.
So if you can drink the decaf, you're better off.
And the same with the cokes and that sort of stuff.
To say nothing of what constantly bathing your teeth in the Coca-Cola and that sort of stuff does for a trumpet player,
you don't want to lose your teeth.
I know people that have had, you know, haven't learned to play on false teeth,
Maynard plays on a tooth that's bored into his, I don't know what they call it, an implant, I guess,
that goes into his jaw.
And, you know, you don't have to lose your teeth.
Nobody should lose their teeth if you take care of them.
If you floss and you brush and all those things and the Coca-Cola and stuff.
Bruce?
I've heard there's a phosphoric acid that goes into the soda pop.
Does that attack your nails?
Boy, I don't know.
I'm not a dentist, but it sounds reasonable.
Anybody here know about that?
Yeah.
There's definitely, you know, we're kind of like a battery when you think of it.
When you think of it, we got the acids in our body and we got the mouthpiece up here,
which is metal, you know, and it makes sense that there would be some sort of electrolyte transfer.
I've seen some guys with brass poisoning from playing, you know, just on the brass mouthpiece.
In fact, when I was in high school, we used to sand off all the finish so you just played on the brass
because you could get that feel.
And more than one guy got brass poisoning that way from playing that way.
So you don't want to do that either.
What you do want to eat are things that are complex carbohydrates.
You probably know by now that the old idea of having lots of protein in the diet
is not as well thought of as it used to be because most of these proteins carry fat.
So we want you to eat lots of pastas and lots of starches
and things that we used to think were terribly bad for you.
Probably 60 to 70% maybe of your diet could be complex carbohydrates.
We'd like to see your diet be less than 30% of it in fat.
And of that diet, we'd also like to see 10% or less of it be saturated fat.
That's pretty hard to do and it requires some real behavioral modification
because we're eating prepared foods and things that are high in saturated fats all the time.
Some of the substitutes for the high protein stuff have kind of missed the boat
in that they're high in salt, so you've got to watch out for that.
And some of them are high in fats too.
So it's not always a protein substitute, but complex carbohydrates are the way you want to go.
The other things that you want to do while you're doing the complex carbohydrates
is you want to add some bulk to your diet.
You all probably know now about the brand and the different kinds of brand, the fat soluble and insoluble.
And the debate is how does it lower the risk for coronary disease.
And it lowers the lipids probably by washing them out or maybe by attaching to them.
But it does make a difference.
Cancer of the bowel is also affected by how much bulk we put through the GI tract.
And so for that reason you want to be doing some green leafy vegetables and some of those things,
the broccolis and that sort of stuff that add some bulk and give your bowel something to work on.
It also decreases some of the other diseases like diverticulitis that affect the large bowel.
I'm really giving you in a quick nutshell a whole lot of stuff that we don't go into detail with.
But that I think are important nutritionally.
I don't think you get this kind of information from most trumpet players, most trumpet camps,
because they're not concerned with that so much.
But because Claude's real philosophy is that you are the instrument.
That's why we put all of this together.
Let's talk then specifically how about setting up an exercise program.
Aerobic exercise essentially means continuous exercise that keeps the heart rate up and gives you a training effect.
What do we mean by a training effect?
We mean an effect that increases your strength and your endurance.
You can go farther and go longer when you're properly aerobically trained.
If you're translated into trumpet playing, it means your endurance and your ability to play gets better.
I know those of you that have played long enough to know that when you're getting tired toward the ends of a job,
if you'll sit up, and boy there's two things I do when I start to get tired,
and that is I sit up and take a big breath and I start thinking about tongue position.
Those things have saved me so many times from the fatigue of it.
I know that when I'm physically in better shape, I don't get fatigued as quickly.
It doesn't come down on the mouth like it used to when you thought about lips.
It just doesn't all fall out right in the panic.
At least it's a fatigue, but it's not a fatigue because you wonder if it's going to vibrate.
It's a fatigue because the mechanism is tired.
What we want to do is teach you how to build a mechanism that will play better with more strength and more endurance.
When you do this squeeze to use the air, you've got more strength and more endurance.
We want a training effect. We don't want to tear down what we've done.
If you go out and exercise improperly, you're very likely to decrease your functional ability
rather than increase it if you don't do it correctly.
We want to increase the volume of oxygen that you can utilize and move through your body's system.
The body is a tremendously amazing homeostatic mechanism that balances all the problems that occur in it.
We can train it to be even more effective by doing our part, which is take some effort.
Getting in shape takes some effort, and it's something that takes a high priority.
It needs to be up there right.
The reason I put it together with your trumpet playing is that I know that's high priority.
If you want your trumpet playing to be better, you've got to have your physical fitness be as high priority.
We talk about VO2, volume of oxygen.
That's what we mean when we talk about how much oxygen can the body process.
You'll hear metabolic equivalents talked about.
I throw this out because I know some of you are educators.
When you give this to your students, it's important to be able to know the buzzwords that are around.
Metabolic equivalents are really just a term to help us understand how much oxygen the body is able to use.
If I put a person on a treadmill and exercise them,
I can calculate their fitness by knowing how many milliliters of oxygen they are able to move.
We define one metabolic equivalent, or one met, as the amount of oxygen it takes the body to process just to sit in a chair.
That's 3.2 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute.
If we're talking about fitness, we want to see you get up into the 15, 16, 17 met level.
You can move that much oxygen and be that effective.
Training, you can do that.
Most good athletes are around 13, 14, 15.
Average, I'm just speaking in general for a young to middle-aged group,
average fitness is going to be around 12, 13, something like that.
There's always room to push that forward, but you'll hear that term used.
When we talk about writing an exercise prescription, we use some terms that you want to know.
The reason I include this is that I've had teachers over the years include this
after we discussed it after our lecture, and they were not always really clear on it,
but it was something that the students really seemed to want to know more about, so that's why we include it.
Has anybody seen the chart?
Well, okay.
No chalk, so I'll just tell you, and then maybe when we find some chalk,
I'll write it on the board and we can leave it there for a while.
We talk about some general areas in terms of exercise.
We talk about the mode, the intensity, the duration, and the frequency.
All exercise programs need to have those four parameters considered,
and basically the mode of exercise is just one that you pick to be aerobic,
and that needs to be continuous, running, swimming, bicycling.
I find for motivational purposes, you need to do something that you enjoy and that you want to do.
I don't like to run, but it's the only thing I have time to do.
I can run anywhere I am, and I can always get it in, and even though it's boring to me,
I've kind of learned that it's my best way to do it.
I'd rather play racquetball or do something like that,
but the mode of exercise determines whether it will be aerobic or not,
so it needs to be aerobic, continuous.
So what I'm getting at is if you walk from, a lot of people say,
well Doc, I don't need an exercise, I work in my garden, or I do, I'm running errands all the time.
That doesn't do it.
You'd be surprised how much energy you can put out and not get a training effect if you don't do it aerobically.
Then we want to talk about intensity.
And by intensity, we're merely talking about what your training heart rate should be.
How far do we need to take you?
So I'm going to put down here THR, for training heart rate.
I don't even like that.
Training heart rate.
And I want you to know how to calculate this just for your own general information.
Most of you probably already know how to do this.
Basically, it's been found that if you'll take your age and subtract it from 220,
you'll get what's called your predicted maximum heart rate.
By knowing your age group, we can know pretty much the fastest heart rate your heart will be able to go.
In order to get to a training rate, we need to know the maximum heart rate.
So the max, take your age and subtract it from 220.
If you're 20 years old, your maximum expected heart rate,
when I put you on that treadmill, I'd expect to get you up to around 200.
So your maximum heart rate is gotten from taking your age from 220.
Now, the reason we need to know that is we want to get to this training heart rate here,
so you'll know how to exercise.
And we do that by taking your maximum heart rate,
which you got from this first step up here,
and we subtract from that your resting heart rate.
Now, your resting heart rate is just the pulse that you get sitting in a chair.
Now, we want to multiply that now by 80%.
That just means that you're going to be training using about 80% of your reserve
if you take this here.
Then you have to add that back to your resting heart rate again.
Not as clear as mud to get your training heart rate.
This equals your training heart rate.
For general purposes, that occurs when you're about to the spot
where you can't quite talk comfortably to the person you're running with.
That's about where your training heart rate occurs.
If you take your maximum heart rate, you subtract your resting heart rate,
and you multiply that number by 80%, then add it back to your resting heart rate,
you'll get your training heart rate.
Then we want to talk about duration.
It's pretty well been shown that you have to exercise a certain amount of time
to get any benefit from it.
Your heart rate has to be in that training rate for at least 20 minutes.
There's lots of things that happen when you exercise.
You'll probably notice that you don't really get into this training range comfortably
until you've exercised about 10 minutes.
We talk about a warm-up period for about 10 minutes.
I'll start out jogging myself.
If I just take it easy, stretch and walk around, and then start to jog.
In about 10 minutes, I can feel where that maximum heart rate
or my training heart rate kind of seems to sit.
It feels comfortable. I'm getting a workout.
I can't run and talk, but I know where that belongs.
You want to go 20 minutes.
That needs to be at least the frequency down here.
It needs to be at least three times a week.
If you look at this, the exercise itself is going to take 20 minutes.
The warm-up is going to take 10.
Make your old age much more tolerable,
because you don't have to get the quadriceps to get so tight
you can't get out of a chair and you can't move around.
The quadriceps muscles don't have to weaken.
They've done some interesting things with the elderly,
finding out, can they build muscle?
They can, but they get stiff.
If they don't stretch, they can't use the muscles.
Stretching before and after is really important.
Let me just write this down, and then we'll talk here.
10 minute warm-up
and a 20 minute exercise
and a 10 minute cool-down
are the way you want to go.
Basically, that's about all I wanted to get into,
except that by this point we've usually talked about
the Claude Gordon chest-up accordion squeeze.
Has anybody mentioned that yet?
That's an acronym that we put together
after we did the original studies with the diaphragm,
just to make it easy for everybody to know how to do this breathing.
What we're really talking to you about in this lecture
is how to make the body better able to do
the Claude Gordon chest-up accordion squeeze.
Taking care of your physical well-being,
I can guarantee you, will make you a better trumpet player.
It'll definitely make you play more easily,
and it'll make your trumpet playing more efficient,
and therefore a better player.
Why don't we end there? If you had a question, I'll take that.
I have another one. In California, we have a pesticide malathion controversy.
Are you here at all with what that might do to you?
I'm really not a pulmonologist,
but I definitely know that those toxic things can affect you.
I think malathion isn't an anticoenergic,
and so it would affect the sympathetic nervous system
and parasympathetic, I guess.
Yeah, parasympathetic.
I don't know if it would be toxic to your lungs,
but it would sure do some other things.
I've heard that swimming frequently in a highly-chlorinated pool
and inhaling those chlorine fumes can damage your lungs.
Do you know anything about that?
I know that chlorine gas can affect the lungs, that's for sure.
I've had some patients over the years from the First World War,
who are now, most of them are dead,
gas with phosgene gas, and boy, those guys have terrible breathing problems.
Any toxins or industrial things, I think you have to watch out for.
You know, dust.
I hate to go out in my Jeep sometimes,
just because I'm getting so much dust in my lungs,
and I look at these x-rays of all these people with silicosis and fibrosis,
and I think, boy, if you live long enough, you're probably going to get some.
Any other questions?
Okay, well, I think the next thing that's on the agenda is four times dinner.
Six.
And we've got a great time tonight.