“I would have warmed my voice up before the call but I didn’t know how!” This was the confession of a friend recently. So let’s make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else!
Warmups are generally designed to summon a behavior that has already been trained. You warm up for a run by stretching, not by learning to run. Singers and speakers (ideally) warm up by gently stretching and awakening the voice muscles. Any other training has, presumably, already taken place.
There are a myriad of options for getting your voice ready to perform, whatever that means to you. Here are the basic categories you want to tick off on your checklist:
Stretches
The voice is made by using about 100 muscles in coordinated way (yes, 100!). Muscles need to be stretched, toned, and conditioned to function optimally.
Full body stretches are helpful to wake up the breath and feel present in your body, the sound-making machine. Forward bends, side stretches, twists, and spinal stretches are all helpful.
Targeted neck stretches for the front, sides, back, and diagonal muscles impact the voice muscles as well as their neighbors. These also have a nice side effect of feeling good.
Rolling your shoulders and massaging your jaw and face is also part of the physical warmup for voice.
Connecting to breath
The human voice is a wind instrument, so using breath optimally is key. Breath is also the way we project volume. Not enough breath can lead to a tight or quiet voice. Too much can cause other forms of strain.
This free course on abdominal breathing is a good place to start with breath work. This post, “Talking from the diaphragm” is BS! goes into a bit more detail.
Do a few yawns where you sigh out on an “ah” sound as you stretch the back of your throat for the yawn. Feel the connection of your exhale to your voice. Ideally feel the relationship between the movement in the abdomen, the air, and the sound.
Warming up the vocal cords
If you have been talking all day, you might not really even need to warm up your vocal cords. Early in the day, however, it’s a good idea.
And even if the vocal cords are warmed up, you still might want to stretch them to create more dynamic pitch variety when you speak, and/or prepare the voice to be resonant and strong.
The simplest way to wake up your vocal cords is simple humming. Keep a little space between your teeth and see if you can feel a vibration in the bone above your upper lip. That’s where you want to “place” the speaking voice.
Lip trills (like a motorcycle or motorboat) throughout your range are great, and of course the straw kazoo outlined in my post What’s all this about using a straw for voice? is a terrific warmup.
Warm up your upper range too, even if you don’t plan to use that part of your voice. It makes the whole system work better.
Waking up the diction
The last part of talking is turning the voice into words. Diction (aka enunciation, clarity, not mumbling) is about being understood, and is also about presenting yourself in a particular way.
We all code switch when we talk, and sometimes the way we chat with a close friend is not the same way we want to present in a meeting. Sliding the lever of diction is one of the ways we up our professional presence.
You can find some good old-fashioned tongue twisters online and practice them, You can also record yourself taking to see if you really are saying all the sounds and syllables in words, or if you’re skipping some. My post Wanna stop mumbling? goes into some detail about enunciation.
I’ll also direct you to the entirety of my blog section – there are a lot of other posts that give deeper instructions. If you’d like personalized guidance creating a tailored vocal warmup, reach out for a session!
