Progressive Muscle Training

Regardless of your level of experience, the overall design of Vocal Fitness Training will teach vocal technique efficiently. You will not find fancy or complicated exercises. Rather, the scales and tunes of the exercises are simple so that you can focus on learning how to do them properly for the best outcome.

Remember, by deliberately focusing on progressive muscle training, Vocal Fitness Training goes beyond the traditional approach to teaching singing. When you look at it this way, it creates an entirely new paradigm of the process employed to improve your voice. By shifting the idea of vocal training to something tangible and attainable, it changes your understanding of what is possible. Confidence emerges as you gain an understanding of what steps you will take to improve your vocal production.

Developing Stamina and Strength

Unfortunately, many singers are frustrated with vocal problems and may fall victim to maladies such as injury, vocal strain, hoarseness, and even voice loss. A properly trained voice, on the other hand, can support the physical demands placed on it and avoid those problems. Would you play a sport without having trained your body to maintain a level of conditioning and endurance? Of course not! The same holds true with singing. You must properly prepare the parts of your body involved in vocal production so your voice is strong, healthy, and reliable.

Vocal Exercise

Vocal exercise is an athletic activity, since you are moving, stretching, conditioning, and strengthening muscles. The difference between singing and working out is that the muscles engaged for vocal production are much smaller than those larger groups you would train at the gym (e.g., quadriceps, biceps, or hamstrings). The focus is the same though, because we are also training for strength, stamina, endurance, and flexibility.

Well-trained muscles for singing easily produce clear tones throughout the range, improve the overall stamina of the voice, and bring the entire instrument into balance. However, like working out at the gym, you must regularly practice the exercises with the correct form and execution to realize these kinds of measurable results.

It is vitally important to understand that in order to strengthen and isolate specific muscles for singing, you must make sure that the form for the exercise is correct, including such things as lip posture, mouth shape, and tongue position. If your form and position is incorrect for any type of body exercise, there is risk for injury or for incomplete, ineffective, and inadequate muscle movement. The same thing holds true with vocal exercise. As long as the vocal instrument and its muscles are in proper alignment and balance during the exercise, there is less opportunity for either injury or poor vocal production.

Body-Weight and Resistance Training

Our goal is to stretch, strengthen, and engage the vocal-production muscle systems in a physical workout, but it does require a different approach than for other parts of the body. When we work out at the gym, we can challenge our muscles by using additional weights and resistance, such as dumbbells.

Certainly, we do not have any external weights we can use to train the muscles that operate our vocal instrument! However, there is an alternative—body-weight exercise. Using the body for strength training is a common approach widely used in traditional fitness workouts. Push-ups and squats are good examples of this, as they use the body’s own weight to place force on the muscle to improve its strength. Vocal Fitness Training’s exercises use an approach similar to body-weight resistance training by challenging the right muscles and moving them through their full range of motion.

There are three distinct muscle groups that need our attention:

• Muscles used for the articulation of the vocal sound (tongue, lips, etc.)
• Muscles of the larynx and throat (including the vocal cords)
• Muscles used for respiration (rib, abdominal, diaphragm, etc.)

You can move some of these muscles intentionally, but you will have to learn to release others, so that their own unique movements will cause them to strengthen. These include, but are not limited to, the internal and external laryngeal and respiratory muscles. Vocal exercises, when done properly, will indirectly and reflexively move, stretch, and strengthen these muscles in coordination with vocalization.

With this approach, the muscles that you intentionally exercise create freedom for the others and encourage coordination of all three groups simultaneously. As you might imagine, it is very important to know where to focus your efforts in order to receive the best possible benefit, and Vocal Fitness Training’s exercises will guide you through this process.