Road Routines: How Touring Musicians Keep Mentally and Physically Healthy Away from Home

By Cliff Hall | From the July/August 2026 issue of Strings

There is a version of the touring musician’s life that looks glamorous from the outside: the stages, the cities, the applause. What that picture leaves out is the red-eye from Frankfurt, the hotel bed that is never quite right, the shoulders that ache from hauling cases through terminals, the creeping loneliness of being constantly surrounded by people and rarely, truly, still. String players make their living with their bodies, and the road is not always kind. Most figure out how to manage this—alone, through trial and error, and usually after something has already gone wrong. I asked four players—cellist Joe Kwon and violinists Ryan Meehan, Jennifer Johnson, and Danbi Um—what they’ve learned.

“As a touring musician, keeping up with my daily routine on the road can at times feel like an insurmountable task,” says Kwon, now celebrating two decades of playing cello for the Avett Brothers on a specially reinforced Wilhelm Klier instrument built for the demands of touring. One of the most road-tested string players in any genre, Kwon has thought hard about what keeps him functioning—mentally and physically—through the incessant grind of touring. “I’m constantly in different time zones,” he says, “but with a little effort, I find my head and body in the right place for the performances.”

“Touring is one of the most mentally and physically demanding experiences a musician can have,” agrees Meehan, violinist of the Calidore String Quartet, who plays a ca. 1775 Vincenzo Panormo. “The change in time zones alone can completely throw off muscle function and clarity of thought.” His answer has been to build a physical practice strong enough to absorb the disruption. A daily yoga routine—anywhere from ten to 40 minutes—centers his focus and releases accumulated tension. The breathwork he’s developed has become a performance tool, a way of harnessing adrenaline rather than being overwhelmed by it. More recently he’s added calisthenics and weight training to build core stability and shoulder strength.

“I’m no longer physically drained at the end of a concert,” he says, “and I find it much easier to be in a state of flow during performances.”

For many players, the physical toll begins even before the flight takes off. Johnson, a violinist and licensed body mapping educator, has spent years helping players understand how travel works against the body before they reach the gate. Hauling heavy bags through airports pulls the collarbones down onto the ribs, restricting arm movement and breathing—the kind of damage that accumulates quietly and shows up onstage. Her solution is disarmingly simple: small rolls of foam tubing cut from pipe insulation, tucked into the armpits during the flight.

“Because they restore the space in the underarm and return muscles to a released neutral, I call them spacers,” she explains. She is equally particular about how she sits—standard airplane seats push the head forward of its natural balance, forcing neck muscles to grip for the duration of the flight. “When the heavy head is pushed forward for hours, superficial neck muscles have to grip more to hang onto it.” This, she adds with dry humor, explains the prevalence of massage therapists in airport terminals. Her fix: a travel pillow placed not behind the head but behind the upper spine.

And when she has time between flights, she goes one step further, practicing what is known as constructive rest—lying on the floor, knees bent, feet flat, breathing slowly while gravity decompresses each vertebra of the spine. “I have occasionally done this in airports if I have a layover and can find a clean enough patch of carpet, with my coat thrown down as a bit of a mat,” she says.

Once you’ve made it through the airport and to your hotel, the next challenge is keeping the body moving. “It takes the thinking out of figuring out what I should do,” says Kwon, describing the subscription workout app he relies on to keep his training consistent on the road. He travels with a portable gym setup and supplements it with hotel gyms when that’s not available. When no gym is accessible at all, he laces up his walking shoes and heads out—around the venue, around the block, anywhere—and he recommends bringing a bandmate.

“It can be a venting session or just a ‘what are you excited about?’ walk,“ he says, noting the payoff is more than physical. “Something that’s not really spoken about on tour is how lonely it can get, even though you’re with people all the time. Finding those moments to connect helps keep my head on straight.”

If connection feeds the spirit, what goes on the plate feeds everything else. On the road, where catering is unreliable and meals are often an afterthought, eating well requires the same intentionality as any other part of the job. “Nutrition plays a vital role in how I feel, so I try to plan ahead—finding healthy options wherever I’m headed or bringing food with me when choices are limited,” says Meehan, for whom a healthy diet is as non-negotiable as yoga.

Sleep gets the same systematic treatment: naps capped at an hour after red-eye flights to Europe, doses of sunlight immediately after waking, cold showers to reduce inflammation and sharpen mental clarity. Even when schedules compress everything, Meehan refuses to abandon the basics.

“Sometimes I’m limited to five to ten minutes of breathing exercises in the green room,” he says, “but something is always better than nothing.” The body that walks onstage is the sum of every decision made in the hours before it gets there.

And once the music starts, a different kind of discipline takes over. “Playing the violin is not the most physically natural thing for the body,” says Um, a Korean American violinist and Menuhin International Violin Competition silver medalist who performs on the 1683 “ex-Petschek” Nicolo Amati, “so I am constantly re-examining my posture and technique so that any unnecessary tension or movement is reduced.”

The road compounds the problem—passion and adrenaline conspire against relaxation, and tension accumulates without a player even noticing. “It is easy to develop tension—especially when emoting passionately in the music—and to maintain its level without realizing it,” she says. “I try to consciously release the physical tension, even for a few seconds, and return to neutrality.”

For Um, the goal is a productive paradox: intense expression that looks effortless. The vibrancy she chases—she calls it “sizzling fingertips”—lives in the hands and fingers, while everything else stays visually relaxed. “All the great violinists I admire seem to exert so little force, yet you can see and hear intricate nuances,” she continues. “What I try to avoid is looking like I emote without actually sounding like it. I would rather beautify my sound with a range of colors and sizzle, while visually remaining relaxed.”

None of this, in the end, is really about the miles. It’s about what itinerant life reveals—that the body keeping score offstage is the same body that has to deliver onstage, and that the distance between those two places is shorter than most musicians want to admit. The good news is that the distance is also bridgeable, one foam spacer, one walk around the block, one patch of airport carpet at a time.