Singers of all backgrounds, whether you are a beginner or a seasoned performer, may experience vocal fatigue or vocal injury at some point without proper voice care. The crushing feeling for a singer is to feel like their lost their voice. However, to make sure your voice is healthy again, here are the steps to get you there.
Why does this matter?
You only have the one pair of vocal folds, and they are very delicate. Taking the time to learn how to take care of your voice is important. It will help you sing stronger for longer.
Many performers go through intense shows with not enough time to recover. On top of performing, we also have to go through multiple auditions per week just to secure the next job. That's very taxing on the body. Remember that the voice reflects what the body is feeling. So, if you are stressed, tired, anxious, or injured somewhere, your voice will feel it. No matter how many lozenges or lemon honey tea you drink, those remedies will never replace good old fashion TECHNIQUE and REST. You need to build your voice and take care of those vocal cords from a foundational place.
Please note, this blog is not a replacement for medical advice from an ENT. If you are experiencing sharp pain, go see a doctor!
Here are the steps a singer can take to recover from vocal injury or fatigue.
HYDRATION.
Making sure you are drinking enough water throughout the day will allow the vocal folds to self-lubricate and become more flexible. Using a steamer or a nebulizer is a great way to hydrate the vocal folds directly. The water droplets seeps into the muscle for faster hydration. Another way to get more hydration is eating water content foods like strawberries, watermelon, cucumber, celery, soups, curry, ramen, pho, anything that has liquid!
WARMING UP AND COOL DOWN
Just like a car in cold weather, you must warm up before doing intense singing. Warming up your voice can be a combination of activities. Massaging your jaw, stretching your tongue, moving your larynx, doing vocal sirens, vocal slides, scales, and straw phonation can all help to create a warmup or cool down routine that gently moves the laryngeal muscles and activate the breath support muscles. This will promote a healthy way for your vocal folds to stretch and build strength over time. Just like going to gym, warming up and cooling down is a must to make sure your muscle can recover properly for the next day.
Check out this Youtube video to warm up or cool down when you feel vocal fatigue.
REST
Knowing when to rest is important. If you had a heavy voice day, know when to stop and take a break. Also, get enough sleep. Sleep is when your body goes into recovery mode, fixing up any muscle tears you may have from exercising the voice. Although you may not ideally get 8 hours of sleep sometimes due to everyone's personal circumstances (like if you have kids), try to get a few hours of deep uninterrupted sleep when you can.
VOCAL FUNCTION EXERCISES
Towards the road to recovery for vocal injury, singing or speaking through some vocal exercises may help with regaining voice health. Some of these exercises include slides, glides, sirens, straw phonation, and more. What these exercises focuses on is correcting posture, breathing imbalance, placement of sound towards the lips, mouth and bones of the face, and onset (creating a light but not breathy or harsh glottal attack).
VOCAL EXERCISES TO BRING BACK VOCAL STRENGTH AND HEALTH
STRETCH
Slide from your lowest to highest sound on the word WHOOP.
Place your sound. Aim for a wide-open throat with rounded lips, semi-closed, and glide from low pitch to a high pitch without losing connection of the vocal folds.
Then, slide from your comfortable highest sound to your lowest sound on the word BOOM. Place your sound. Aim for a wide-open throat with rounded lips, semi-closed, and stretch by gliding from a comfortable high pitch to your lowest pitch without losing connection of the vocal folds.
CORD CLOSURE
Sustain on the vowel EE for as long as possible. Start on the musical note F above middle C for females and F below middle C for males.
Take a deep breath. Place your sound. Aim for forward resonance and work on closure of the vocal folds by gently adding compression until the folds create a clean resonant sound. Avoid voice cracks, breathy tone, or overly pressed phonation.
ONSET
Practice your onsets, that means how you start a sound. We want to aim for smooth balanced onset when training the voice to get back to vocal health. The vocal folds should meet the breath and come together gently and efficiently to make a clean clear sound.
The idea of practicing proper onset when singing is to make sure we begin with excellent technique that can be maintained as we sing through a melody phrase.
A way to achieve smooth onset is to imagine both the pitch and vowel to be sung at the same time. Take a deep breath, open the glottis, and when you to go to sing, the breath flow should meet the closing of the glottis at the same time without pushing efforts.
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN RECOVERING
IT WILL TAKE TIME
Understand that recovery takes time. You may not be ready for an hour-long session of full singing yet, but you will get there. If you rush the process, that is where constant vocal issues keep coming up. You need the vocal folds to get back its strength, especially its closure strength before you add on more intense voice qualities such as belting.
START SLOW AND SMALL
When starting back up with vocal exercises, only do what you can handle at the time. Then slowly increase how much you can handle so that you give your body time to recover and build muscle. Even 20 minutes of very focused training will help your voice get stronger faster than wanting to drill a bunch of songs with no direction. A great way to do this is make an intention for each day. One day can be focused on stretching the cords. The next day can be focused on strength training the cords. The next day you can add onset practice on top of strength training.
The point is to practice in small increments and when you focus on small improvements every day, not rushing for the end result, you will become 1% better every day.
REPAIR YOUR SPEAKING VOICE
Although it is tempting to only do singing exercises, it is a good idea to bring your attention to your speaking voice. How you speak can also affect the health of your voice. There are speech therapy exercises that encourages healthy speaking habits. Try not to speak so loudly for long periods of time. If you do need to speak for a long time, be mindful of how you make sound. Remember how we talked about onsets? When you speak, harsh glottal attacks, especially on vowels, can lead you to excess vocal fold bruising and potentially lead to more serious vocal injuries. Be gentle with your voice, but that doesn't mean speak in a breathy and weak manner either. Find that balanced coordination when using your voice.
HEAL THE BODY
Your body's health has an impact on your vocal folds. If you are constantly getting sick, instead of grabbing more honey tea or throat sprays to cover up your illness, figuring out how to boost your immune system to with the root cause. The body goes through a lot of physical and mental activity throughout the day. If you are overly stressed, depressed, or anxious it can reflect in your voice. The body needs to be operating at optimum level so that you don't neglect proper placement of the voice, proper breathing, and proper posture. When someone is feeling tired, their posture is the first the go, therefore, compromising their breath support and thus, leading to an imbalanced of the vocal folds when they are trying to sing or speak.
What does it look like to heal the body? It could be anything for anyone as long as it is healthy and safe for each person. Exercise routinely, have a clean diet, get enough sleep, de-stress, and hydrate more.
There you go! Those are the steps to healing your voice if you are experiencing vocal injury or vocal fatigue. Any professional singer, even those who want to do it as a hobby, should invest in working with a vocal technique coach to constantly review proper habits while singing. When a singer is guessing if their technique is correct or not, that's where vocal issues can develop due to lack of a second opinion and not understanding more about how the vocal folds work on a foundational level.
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If you need personal guidance on your belting, book a lesson with Tina and she'll help you learn how to build your voice to become stronger and healthier so that you can sing any song you want, including the ones you might think were "out of your range."
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Tina Golden is a voice teacher who studies holistic, science-based, and brain-based training to help singers achieve their vocal goals without losing their voice.
She is continually researching methods and techniques to help all singers in any style. This ranges from Bel Canto techniques to Contemporary techniques. Through her research she has found out that there is more to just knowing the basics. There is science that we can rely on, therefore anyone can learn to sing in any style without hurting themselves. Although every singer has different physiologies, 1:1 coaching is how Tina can quickly assess what is going on with the singer and come up with solutions to help.
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