At the age of eight, Henriette Gärtner was what some call a "piano prodigy": She has performed all over Germany, won a number of competitions and also given concerts internationally, for example together with the chamber orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Strings in Switzerland.

What particularly distinguished her career: she was also successful as a competitive athlete.

There she became five-time German champion in twirling, the athletic twisting of the stick, which requires maximum physical performance.

In 1993 she was even in the final of the world championships in this sport.

But Gärtner did not see it as a double burden, as she says today at the age of 46.

On the contrary: "I drew strength from music for sport, and vice versa, sport helped me with music," says the concert pianist from Spaichingen.

Later, she also brought the two worlds together in her training: she studied sports science in Konstanz and then went on to study piano at the Accademia Pianistica in Imola, Italy.

"There are many techniques from sports to better focus and prepare that you can also use very well as a professional musician," she claims.

The curriculum vitae of the pianist from Baden-Württemberg is an exception.

And yet her story is an example of a finding at music colleges that has become increasingly popular in recent years: mental training, performance coaching, music physiology, stage presence and body awareness are increasingly present in the training of young musicians.

So far, the question of how professional musicians can benefit from the methods of professional sports has received little attention.

Because both professional musicians and professional athletes have to perform at their best, be it in an orchestra concert or the Olympic competition - and they have to prepare for it professionally.

At the beginning of February, a symposium of the Center for Professional Musicians (ZfB) in Hamburg was dedicated to this topic: The sports psychologist Michael Kellmann from the Ruhr University Bochum, who researches stress and recovery management in competitive sports and how a lack of recovery can lead to a can lead to a drop in performance.

"In sport, we have a very systematic monitoring of the athletes, and a trainer can use questionnaires to say exactly when a load is dragging on for too long," says Kellmann.

Mistakes are often made without professional monitoring: If the athlete notices that his performance is dropping, he trains even more and harder to compensate.

"But that can be exactly wrong and, in the worst case, lead to overtraining or underrecovery,"

says the sports psychologist.

Like sport, professional music is also based on the premise: the more, the better.

"Repeat, repeat, repeat": That was also the monotonous triad that Henriette Gärtner heard during her training.

“In the 1990s and shortly after the turn of the millennium, most professors only talked about sound and rarely how to find it,” says the pianist.

“In music, compared to sport, a lot is unstructured.

Many musicians practice to themselves without making a well thought-out and professional practice plan that is tailored to the next concert or audition,” observes Gärtner.

In order to keep the stress under control, she advises from her own experience to actively deal with physical and mental methods and, for example, to consciously incorporate breathing and meditation techniques into the exercise sequences.

Other "mental trainings", some of which are already taught at some universities, are: autogenic training, progressive muscle relaxation and imaginations, in which the musician imagines the situation of the performance in a positive way and puts himself in an optimistic attitude.

"Methods such as Ideokinesis, Feldenkrais, Dispokinesis, Yoga, Pilates, Qigong, Aikido, Gyrokinesis and many others are also very helpful," says Gärtner.

"Unfortunately, it's still very common in the industry that we musicians focus too much on our mistakes," says Gärtner.