Singers Are Athletes, Too!
Photo: Brian McConkey
Hi! For those of you who haven’t met or worked with me yet, it is important that you understand this one thing: I love to sing. I love to sing along to songs at the grocery store, I love to sing on stage, I love to sing Disney while I’m cleaning, and I love to rock out in my car. I love to sing and want to be able to do it forever. I have been interested in and passionate about being able to sing for my whole life. And when I say that I want to be able to sing for my whole life, I mean until I’m a bajillion years old, looking like the Face of Boe, and sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch. I want to be the singing old lady at the grocery store, at the bingo game, or at the nursing home. This is one of my life goals. However, to achieve it, I needed to learn all I could about how to sing healthily, no matter the style.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to keeping a voice in the best shape possible. Before I dive in to the first one, I want to preface by saying that sometimes vocal damage happens. I don’t want anyone reading this to feel bad or ashamed or scared or anything like that if you’ve had a vocal issue. There are so many ways to assist in vocal recovery now, but that is a blog for another day.
To use a term that was made prominent by Wendy LeBorgne and Marci Rosenberg, we are vocal athletes. I love this term because it not only encompasses what we actually are but there are some really wonderful parallels to athletes in general. Let’s say you want to run a marathon (I’ve only ever done a half, so I’m already impressed). You aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and be able to run a marathon, at least not without hurting yourself. What are you going to do? You are going to start your workouts with walking to warm up your body. You are going to schedule in short runs, sprints, and long runs throughout your training. Then you are going to make sure that you are cross-training with spinning, yoga, Pilates, swimming, and weightlifting. You are going to make sure that you cool down and stretch at the end of every workout, so you are ready to go again tomorrow. And you are going to fuel and hydrate your body accordingly.
Your voice is no different. Your vocal folds are muscles and need to be taken care of as such. They are surprisingly small muscles considering all that they do. Depending on the person, your vocal folds can vary from the size of a dime to the size of a quarter! So, if you want to go out and sing an audition for Jagged Little Pill and then The Music Man, you need to train for it. You need to warm-up and stretch your vocal folds, work your different registers, play a bit in your mix, try some exercises that correlate to the pieces you are working on, and then cool down as needed. Just like a runner, you need to cross train too!
Every voice is different and unique. Every performer is going to be working on or towards their own goals. Taking care of YOUR voice so that you can accomplish anything and everything that you wish is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. Never forget that the vocal folds are muscles and as a performer we are demanding a lot from them. They need to be trained and treated as the vocal athletes they are so you can sing your whole life long!
