Practice Tips
Part II
This week we start a new series of tips about practicing.
In last week’s Vocal Fitness Friday message, we discussed two exercise physiology training concepts, overloading and specificity. Today, we discuss two more key concepts from exercise physiology that relate to voice training: individualization and reversibility.
Individualization is all about you. Really! While specificity (mentioned last week) involves training the unique skills required in a performance through carefully tailored exercises that target those skills, individualization involves matching training to meet your needs, capitalizing on things you do well and strengthening aspects that need to be addressed. Individualization is making sure your training meets you where you are and guides you towards your goals.
Here’s an example: if you are a classical treble (soprano or alto) singer, you would spend time doing exercises which smooth out the primary register transition just above middle C on the piano. You would want to use patterns and vowels and repertoire excerpts which facilitate a gentle shift from your lower to higher register. But if you are a singer of certain contemporary styles, you might want to use a more abrupt transition as an expressive effect (think of last week’s discussion of yodeling, for example), or you might delay making the register shift to a higher point than used in classical singing. Depending on your performance goals, you might use very different kinds of training.
Reversibility is the exercise science way of talking about the common maxim, ‘use it or lose it.’ If you’re a person who works out regularly, but you take a vacation with family or friends and miss two weeks of workouts, what happens when you go back to the gym? The weights you could lift easily before your vacation are unusually difficult again, and you find yourself breathing hard on your cardio at a level that you found very comfortable just a few weeks before. What happened? Reversibility. The stimulus (exercise) that helped you make fitness gains was removed, and as a result, you deconditioned.
The same can happen with your voice. If you recall in last week’s newsletter, we talked about a piece with lots of long phrases, using overload to make the phrases easier to achieve. What would happen if you stopped practicing that piece for two months (and all the overload training, too), and then decided to sing it again after a two-month layoff? Those long phrases might be very taxing once again, as the muscles involved have deconditioned due to not being regularly challenged, to say nothing of the coordination between the respiratory (breathing) and phonatory (voicing) systems. Are the skills lost forever? No, but it will take time again to regain fitness.
Combining these two new principles with what we discussed last week about overload and specificity can lead you to new vocal discoveries!
Next week, we discuss motor learning concepts and voice training.
Happy practicing,
Your SonoVoice Team
Next Week: Practice Tips Part III
You are a vocal athlete!
Athletes put superhuman demands on the human body. They practice to stay in shape, get better and prepare for the event. No athlete expects to perform at their best without working on their technique, practicing skills, and preparing for the game.
The same goes for you as a vocal athlete. Practice will help you be prepared for your event: performance. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut! If you want to be at your best as a singer, you’ll need to establish a regular vocal exercise and practice regimen.
In our weekly Vocal Fitness Friday email, SonoVoice's team of experts in science-based voice training will be sharing information about how the voice works, tips on keeping your voice healthy, and ideas for vocal exercises for peak vocal fitness.
