Strengthening your voice is different than strengthening other muscles in your body. Burnout, fatigue, and pain might work for your biceps but it will not work for your voice. Keep watching to learn a few easy and gentle exercises for effective voice strengthening!

Although there are muscles involved in making sound, you won’t really feel them working. And strengthening your voice is more about learning coordinations than building muscle. However, we can feel our abdominal muscles working when we make sound, and engaging those muscles helps us get a stronger sound without strain. 

I want to emphasize that this should feel natural and gentle. It’s very easy to hear the words “breath support” and start squeezing your tummy, taking in unnaturally large breaths, and even holding your breath in a way that feels tense and stress-inducing. So what I want you to do is to feel how your abdomen naturally engages when you breathe. Start by breathing in and out through your nose, since it’s easier to feel your belly moving. Relax your belly so it expands as you inhale. Place a hand below your belly button and feel what happens as you inhale and exhale. 

Now exhale on a hiss and notice what changes. Most people will feel slight engagement in their low belly - perhaps a feeling of slightly flexing outward, slightly crunching inward, or just staying in that expanded “exhale” position. Whatever you’re noticing, bring your attention there and see if you can feel anything else in your ribs or back!

In order to transfer this feeling to our singing, we’ll use an exercise with partial closure, meaning we’re not just singing on an open vowel like AH. Instead, we can hum, sing on an NG sound, use a lip trill, or sing through a straw. Can you feel that same “hiss” engagement when you sing? Give me pulsing hiss, then something closed.

Lip trills, straw singing, and other types of partially closed exercises are amazing voice strengtheners because they encourage efficient vocal fold closure in a gentle way. Efficient vocal fold closure means you’re neither leaking air with a weak, breathy tone nor over-squeezing and tiring out. 

Many singers find it easy to sing on something closed, but they struggle to transfer to an open vowel or lyrics. Train with an exercise that flows right from an SOVT to an open vowel. You can sing the same pattern twice or open up to a vowel halfway through the pattern. Try both of those exercises with me to see which feels stronger for you!

Thank you for watching this lesson, and I’ll see you next time!