Your breath is the foundation of a beautiful sound. How often do you notice yourself hearing your friends breathe? Unless you both have just completed an hour of Cross-Fit, probably not very often. Why then, do some singers make an audible gasp when taking in breath to sing?

The sound of someone gasping is defined as, “the strain to take a deep breath.” To put the complexity of your body mechanisms attempting to function together simply: You are fighting yourself! One of the most obvious- and loudest- ways to check if your breathing is… messed up… is to record yourself and see if you gasp between phrases for air. Sorry to say guys, this absolutely needs to be addressed.

Because a gasp is the result of tension in your body, the solution is to release this tension.

Simple enough.

However, your body considers these tensions essential to existence; without habitual tensions, your body believes it cannot produce the action you are demanding of it: standing, walking, sitting down, and of course, singing. For this reason, stopping yourself from gasping is not a matter of merely telling yourself not to do it. Rather, you must use Alexander Technique and personalized vocal exercises to change the way your body supports itself while strengthening intercostal muscles (also called the singer’s support).

Now you ask me:

But, isn’t it enough to just practice singing and it will go away on its own?

I wish I could tell you yes! But, I also would by lying if I said definitively no!

And herein lies the frustrating truth about singing: No two bodies are the same, no two singing journeys are the same, and the speed at which you and Bob beside you progress are highly dependent on the extremity of your natural habits and whether your teacher understands exactly what your body needs. Let’s look at Bob first.

A Singing Case Study: Bob v. You

Bob has some nasty habits: His posture involves pulling his neck forward and down while his shoulders slump forward, and back curves over. As a result, his voice is compressed and his throat must work extra hard to create sound- this is why Bob finds it difficult to talk for extended lengths of time and gasps when he takes a quick breath. Bob is going to have to change his posture entirely if he hopes to sing without pain and use his voice in a healthy way. Bob understands that he cannot use strength of will to force a good sound out of a twisted instrument and so goes to work with an Alexander Technique teacher for 8 weeks. He spends time learning how to change his relationship with his body so that when he goes to sing, he can ask of it what he needs to support and play with sound.

Now lets maybe look at you? You are commended often on your posture, you exhume a regal air and are known for being able to project across large halls. It seems that all you need to work on is loosening some tension in your chest (likely established from holding that posture without an awareness of the space that should exist within your sternum and back even when standing straight!) But luckily, you are not nearly as twisted as Bob. You take singing lessons focused solely on scales, trills, and sighs without any specific body work or Alexander Technique, but your teacher mentions you are a bit stiff and should try yoga. A few months later, you are a better singer with less tension and have achieved the goals you set out to: This is a possible outcome! Alas, the story could easily go the other way, where the absence of body work has actually made you even tighter, and now you have lost your ability to project across large halls.

Bob, who incorporated both body work and vocal exercises into his learning, now has a job as a voice over artist for Disney.

So, What Should You do To Ensure You Improve And Stop Gasping?

Don’t leave anything to luck. Treat your body like a cellist treats his cello- keep it in top condition and watch for any broken strings. Work with a voice teacher who has training in Alexander Technique or another form of body work or complement your training with your current voice teacher by doing sessions with an Alexander Technician.

When you go into the practice room, go in as a detective. Spend time just breathing and preparing to sing- before you make sound, see where in your body you feel tight. Make notes and take this to your teacher. Lessons and practice times should be exploratory. No one is inside your body but you, and if you try to improve as a singer by simply repeating the same act over and over again, you are neglecting the most obvious and yet forgotten fact:

Your body is your instrument.

Be like Bob.

Stretching Cannot Help Your Voice

We are about to bust open one of the trendiest fitness routines of our generation and answer the question: Does stretching help with singing?

The short answer, No. Stretching does not inherently help improve your singing voice.

So…Yoga for singers, why do it?

To feel more present in the body? To allow space for breath? To improve flexibility? To help posture? To relieve pain?

There are some really amazing benefits of yoga. Do it for your mental health, to stimulate a part of your body when you wake up, you could even do it for the positive correlation it induces between heart health and your resilience to stress, but please:

Don’t think you can change the way you breathe and sing by increasing the time you spend stretching.

A necessity for “breath work” often derives from a teacher observing compensating movements in the upper body as the student inhales. In the pursuit of moving a singer’s breath out of the shoulders and chest and into the intercostals and back muscles, singing teachers often use creative metaphors, hoping to trigger a psychosomatic change in their student: Think of a sigh of ecstasy! Be like a monkey!

Sometimes, these images work, and the student re calibrates their perception of singing with a new, more accurate sensation . More often, students walk away with a cognitive understanding that their breath is too high, that their shoulders move too much, and somehow they need to get the tension in their chest, back, and hips to release to make room for a deeper breath.

Enter stretching.

As we stretch, there is a pleasant sensation of expansion and release which we often mistake for beneficial change. In reality, this is merely a moment of awareness as your mind registers a sensation in an area of the body where there previously was none. Numerous studies have demonstrated that stretching not only fails in achieving most of its perceived benefits, but can actually have a negative impact on performance and alignment including a decrease in lower body stability by 22 percent!

Certainly, overall flexibility can improve from stretching, but most stretchers don’t suffer from limited movement, in which case overdeveloped flexibility serves no beneficial purpose. Now, what if your intention is to release tension in a tight muscle you believe is impairing your breathing? Every muscle in your body has a resting level of tension set by the nervous system. Over the course of your life, your posture, repetitive movements, and stress teach these muscles to remain tight. While static stretching temporarily lengthens muscles by reducing the activity of the stretch reflex, the effect is short-lived. Our muscles typically start tightening up within a few hours as the stretch reflex regains normal function. Whatsmore, many of the key muscles involved in singing are unstretchable! 

Most of us will hit the end of the natural range of motion of the joint long before we’ve stretched anywhere near as hard as you can stretch other muscles. In other words, some muscles are just biomechanically awkward to stretch. I call them “the unstretchables” — a bit of hyperbole, but true in spirit. Although these muscles can be elongated, they can’t be elongated enough to create the satisfying sensation of good stretch.*

When singing a difficult phrase requiring sustained support or powerful vocals, you must engage the expansion of your back and intercostal muscles. The intercostal muscles, located in the chest between the ribs are nearly impossible to manipulatively stretch. Their role in singing is one of coordinated release and lengthening achieved through inhibition (or an accurate body map in the students mind) which invites a correlated relationship of expansion from the lower back muscles. And what about post-workout soreness, those days where you have to perform vocally but that lower body session from two days ago has you feeling stiff and vocally blocked? Won’t stretching help to loosen these knots? No.

Your best option is to practice a level of awareness in your workout wherein you monitor proper form, not as it is explained with the end goal of lifting a heavy object, but from an alignment and muscle engagement perspective: Any compression of the spine and lower back or tightening of the psoas and related respiratory muscles will need to be released to its natural resting length throughout every movement and at the end of every session to minimize the impact of workouts on the function of singing.

The deep soreness that follows a hard workout (“delayed-onset muscle soreness” (DOMS) or sometimes just “post-exercise soreness”) is very uncomfortable and it does impair performance. Many people believe that stretching can prevent or relieve it. But this definitely doesn’t work. Basically, nothing touches DOMS — nothing anyone has ever claimed as a treatment for it has actually passed a fair scientific test.*

The deepest problem for singers and non-singers alike lies in our tendency to only become aware of an issue in the body when a tension or misalignment has progressed so far as to cause pain and discomfort. Then, an attempt is made to eradicate the nuisance and yet no question of WHY is posed. Simply stretching tight muscle tissue without addressing the habitual irritant will only result in further misuse of the body and myofascial discomfort. Often, the culprit of our tensions and pain is our own posture and the manner in which we use our body habitually every day of our lives.

Muscles are “dumb”; they do only what they are told to do. I’m constantly pounding it into my patients’ heads that the nervous system controls everything and muscles don’t contract unless the nervous system says so. If a muscle is chronically tight, there’s a reason – for example, the body trying to provide stability to an unstable joint.

-Linsay Way, Dynamic Chiropractic

Chiropractors now suggest warming up your body by doing the exact moves your exercise routine calls for. Thus, in the case of a singer, warm up your connection to deep breathing through… breathing.

Careful- Herein lies a cyclical problem.

When I ask you to breathe, you have an instant reaction of what it means to breathe: How you perceive this action and what you feel while doing it is called your sensory perception. If a faulty sensory perception of “how to breathe” is causing you to follow a habit wherein your body is misaligned and holding tension, a warm up of breathing will never change your habit!

A 2010 paper in Physical Therapy identified our nervous system’s ability to learn how to allow greater movement. This means that a reduction in malleability anywhere in your body is actually a neurologically imposed limitation, not a physical one! The only way to change the resting level of muscle tension being set by the nervous system is through active psychosomatic movement. Improper movement, or habitual movements, can increase undesired tensions, posing a critical need to address faulty sensory perception and re-educate the student’s nervous system through Alexander Technique. Numerous studies back the Alexander Techniques’ efficacy, such as these two randomized studies that show the techniques as less expensive but equally effective, if not more than massage and even yoga in dealing with a full range of issues.

What we can take away from the way athletes approach their warm-up today is using a more gentle, focused piece of the ‘action of singing’ before diving into full belting, opera, or other styles that will call for maximum support. When the coordination and resulting movements are done properly, with a reliable sensory perception and coordinated release and expansion of the body, starting our session as singers by simply practicing breathing and gentle sound production is the absolute best way to warm up! Through this work, you are awakening the psychosomatic relationship integral to singing between your intention, your musicality, and your physical instrument.

Singing students often feel guilty when they haven’t sat down and put in hours of uninterrupted practice every week. The thing is, there are ways for you to improve your singing just by having some self-awareness throughout the day! This article will teach you how to improve your singing everyday.

If our bodies are our instruments, then their habits must be worked on to improve sound. What you do throughout your day directly impacts your singing ability.

Connect To Your Voice When You Wake Up

Where does your day begin? The few feet from your head resting on the pillow, to sitting up in bed, to walking to the bathroom. If you live alone, maybe you don’t utter any sounds for a few hours; if you have housemates, a ‘good morning’ or conversation over coffee could be where you begin to vocalize. However, you are not really aware of how you are connecting to your voice here. If you sleep on a mattress that hurts your alignment, if you have naturally damaging habits, or if you spent the previous day dehydrated, you may start to speak in a damaging way!

Change up your morning routine.

When you wake up, do vocal fry on a few exhales. Do it while you brush your teeth and make coffee. If you have the time, lay on the floor in Alexander Technique’s Semi-Supine or Active Rest position for five minutes while performing vocal fry.

Take Those Breaks At Work

It has been said time and time again, take small breaks throughout the day to move your body. This improves focus, body soreness, and mental health. Now let’s add one to the list: It helps your singing too!

Try to take two to three small 5-10 minute breaks throughout the day to check in with your body. Ask your neck to to be free, your head to come forward and up in relation to your spine, and the spine to lengthen and widen in all directions. Simply sending these requests invites your psycho-physical relationship to improve and the body will respond, if only in small degrees at first, more drastically over time. Whatever tensions you are holding throughout the day don’t magically go away when it is time to sing.

Bring body awareness into your breaks at work. Take five minutes a few times a day to check in and give yourself a request to release. Feel your feet in contact with the floor. Think of your ankles extending deep into the ground with your head growing gently up from here, in relation to your back, which lengthens and widens as you sense your true height.

Renew these directions several times while breathing.

Jaw Tension Hurts Singing Ability

To all my teeth grinders and jaw clenchers, now is the time to become aware of your habit! Like all muscles, the more you use them, the stronger they get. Opening your mouth to sing is then restricted. It can be uncomfortable to try to stretch it open farther, and yet a free jaw is essential when singing as it must be able to move according to where in your register you are singing.  Just like stretching any other muscle, you cannot will your jaw to be free and elongate to its maximum potential on the spot! Jaw tension is something a vocal coach in Montreal could help you undo.

When you brush your teeth, wash the dishes, or are working at your desk, check in with your jaw and invite it to release one percent more. Do this repeatedly throughout your day and week to gradually stop jaw clenching and enable the muscles to loosen.

Bad habits and good habits are ingrained in our bodies the same way: through repetition.  We cannot force our body to do the opposite of what it considers its normal 24 hours a day. However, we can permanently change how we use our body during daily activities and in turn, improve how we tap into the body’s abilities during vocal production. How?

By using body awareness and patience to gradually replace bad habits with ‘good use.’

Want to talk to a vocal coach and identify your negative tensions? We can help you create a vocal workout and body awareness program to improve your singing.