Tuba Playing as Excersize?

[bill]

Watch out, here comes the monkey wrench! I am 67 years old, have been playing for 59 years, practice a minimum of 2 hours a day (average over 3) and have been doing this for years. My playing improves with my practice routine and seems to have nothing or very little to do with my physical work out. I am 5'10" tall and weigh about 155 or so pounds but this has been only in the last two years. Prior to this, I weighed as much as 320 lbs. My tuba playing was neither improved nor hurt by exercise; it remained the same if I did the same practice routine. If I changed practice routines, the playing changed. Right now, for exercise, I walk about 4¼ miles a day in about an hour. I have done this for 357 out of 362 days so far, this year. I have been doing this for two years. I am in pretty good shape but play not much better than when I was in my 20s, did no overt exercise and was playing professionally 5 nights out of 7 every week.

Physical exercise, especially walking, is wonderful for your overall health and tuba playing is simply wonderful, so I do them both but I don't think tuba playing does much for my cholesterol, weight or blood sugar and I don't think walking does a lot for my tuba playing. ymmv, I am a small sample in what should be a larger study to draw any conclusion.

[TubaRay]

try this this is a sure fire way to make tuba playing count as exercise.
step1 set your music and metronome on the tread mill control panel
step2 stand on tread mill with tuba(sousaphone preferable)
step3 start tread mill and start walking

step4 crank up the speed and blast out die Walküre.
I'm sure you'd loose weight then.

If I tried this, I would lose more than just a little weight.

[Albertibass]

Since i was born, i have pretty much been a small guy. Freshman year of high school i was 4'11" and very skinny. I started playing tuba and over two years i grew to 5'11" This could just be me hitting a growth spurt late and hitting it all at once, but my band director seriously believed that it had something to do with the tuba. He said that he read in the instrumentalist (i think it was that or another magazine), that some university actually did a study on why a majority of tuba players are big guys. Anyone else here something similar

[Wyvern]

Since i was born, i have pretty much been a small guy. Freshman year of high school i was 4'11" and very skinny. I started playing tuba and over two years i grew to 5'11" This could just be me hitting a growth spurt late and hitting it all at once, but my band director seriously believed that it had something to do with the tuba. He said that he read in the instrumentalist (i think it was that or another magazine), that some university actually did a study on why a majority of tuba players are big guys. Anyone else here something similar

I like that - "Increase your size playing the tuba!"

Jonathan "who at 12Ib 4oz was born a tuba player (maybe even a BAT player)"

[TubaRay]

I like that - "Increase your size playing the tuba!"

And all this time I've been responding to those confounded emails and never gotten any results. LOL