Warm Up Before Singing
Post by: Leigh Toltz
Why Do You Need To Warm Up Before Singing?
1. Move and Stretch Muscles
Preparing to sing is similar to preparing your body to exercise. It is important to take the time to stretch the muscles and coordinate your vocal mechanism for singing. Warm ups that descend are generally better for your voice as they promote more airflow and a lighter mechanism. A great way to start your singing warm ups is to do a lip trill/lip buzz on a descending scale. Incorporating middle voice and stretch exercises also help expand your range. A voice teacher can help you create a vocal warm up regimen to practice with multiple times a week to help build your voice technique.
2. Energize Breath
Another reason warm up exercises are important is to get your body in the mode of taking deep breaths and releasing that air to support your singing. Breathing for speaking is a lot more shallow than breathing for singing and it helps to use some tools to get your body primed to breathe for singing. There are many breath energizing exercises your singing teacher can show you to get the air moving! Check out this video that shows the correct breathing technique for singing.
3. Work on Technique
Warm up exercises not only help get your muscles moving and breath energized but that is also where you and your singing teacher will be working on how you sing. The techniques are easier to implement in a supportive warmup to start. One you have warmed up and applied new techniques it is then time to apply them to the song you are working on. It is easy to continue singing a song with your body's default technique and much harder to implement new techniques if they aren't first practiced in the warm ups.
4. Expand Range
Warming up is also where you are going to be stretching your vocal cord muscles. This is going to help build the coordination to expand your range in a healthy way. It is important to have well designed and personalized warm ups that only take you one or two notes past your top notes to begin stretching those muscles. A warm up with the wrong vowels or range can actually sabotage your vocal progress. This is why taking voice lessons are so important to improving your vocal technique in a healthy and sustainable way.
5. Work on Agility and Flexibility
Depending on what songs you are working on they will all have different challenges to practice coordinating your vocal mechanism on. Warm up exercises will give your voice the chance to practice agility and flexibility that might not appear in your repertoire. It will also build your technique in a more ideal environment so that when you come upon a challenging section of a song you can apply those skills.