Ep 7 Live Q&A – April 4, 2019 – How does posture affect your voice?

Mike: Awesome. Great advice. Guys, cool down at the end, all right. Do the good warm-ups. Then do your singing, do your gig. Don’t forget your cooldowns. Okay, so next question we’ve got … Thanks, Ashley, that was a great question by the way. Question number five, how does posture affect your voice and actually, there are two questions. I’ll read them both. How can you help to not lose your breath while singing?

Matt: Good. Well, so, Ashley, now that you’re bringing up posture, that’s another element we ought to touch on on warmups as well.

Mike: This is from [Callie 00:26:54]. Callie, thank you.

Matt: Yeah. So Callie, one of the things you want to do at first is stretch your body, right. So many times we just stand up to sing and if you’ve been sitting in a weird position all day, you might realize that you’re getting in some weird positions and then when you go to sing if those weird positions carry over, then you’re going to have problems getting your optimal vocal tone.

Matt: So I would definitely do some side stretches. You want to specifically try to stretch out these side abdominal muscles. They attach to your rib cage and when you’re breathing, if these are tight from sitting in a weird position, they’re going to affect what you feel. Now remind you, you need to hold a stretch for 15 to 30 seconds.

Mike: Oh, shoot.

Matt: So make sure that you’re holding that stretch, and not just bouncing back and forth like

Mike over there.

Mike: It reminded me when I was captain of the track team my senior year that we had to call out the counts, we’d call out the stretch. “Okay, we’re going to do this stretch, we’re going to do that stretch.” We literally would count it out loud. Now we didn’t do 15, we did 10. Maybe things have changed, I’m not that old, but things have changed. You’re saying hold it for 15 seconds at least when you get to that stretch, stretching …

Matt: Yeah, 15 to 30 seconds is the spot that science typically sort of says is [inaudible 00:28:04]. Beyond 30, doesn’t necessarily have any beneficial effect. So you want to bend side to side. You want to bend over and try to touch your toes and help release all of your back and shoulder muscles, let them release. You want to stand up and maybe get into a lunge where you have one foot forward. I’m not going to be able to do it and get off-camera, but if you put your right foot forward, stretch your left leg back and then reach your arms up and stretch backward like this, so you’re going to reach all the way back, you’re going to stretch your psoas muscles. And your psoas muscles connect to the same vertebrae as your diaphragm. And if they’re tight, they’ll mess up your respiration. [Crosstalk 00:28:38].

Mike: Can you give me a diagram of that? We could drop that in later ’cause I’m trying to imagine.

Matt: Drop that? Yeah, sure.

Mike: Yeah, maybe we could try that, you said put your right foot where?

Matt: So let’s say you stretch your right foot forward like you’re going to do a lunge, then stretch your left foot straight back, right? So I don’t know if I can do it, but yeah, right foot forward, left leg straight back and then you want to bend backward as far as you can.

Mike: Got it. Okay.

Matt: Like that, yeah. Exactly. I’m trying not to fall over here on camera, Mike, right. So the stretch backward, and you’re going to help not only stretch out that front, rectus abdominous muscle, which again it can interfere with your singing, but you’re also going to stretch your muscle inside called the psoas muscle that connects up around the same place in your body as to where your diaphragm does, okay. So you want to do that psoas stretch. If you want to look that up, it’s P-S-O-A-S spelled a little funny, P-S-O-A-S, psoas muscle. Check it out. You’re going to do some psoas stretches.

Matt: Then you want to stretch your neck, so you’re going to want to lean your right ear over into your right shoulder. You’re going to want to try to stretch out these muscles over here. Now my colleague, Ting-Yu Chen, she’s one of our dance professors, she likes to torture the singers by having them take their thumb and you start it up here around behind your ear and you scrape this muscle as you’re stretching it, right? It’s the platysma muscles, which are on the surface and the sternocleidomastoid muscle, which is the big muscle, it’s right here, goes down to your sternum. It doesn’t feel great when you’re doing it, but when it’s done, you’re going to find a lot of releases, okay. You can do that to the other side here, lean your head over, scrape these muscles, right. If you’re like me and you’ve got some hair in there, you got some beard hair, you might want to put some lotion on your thumb to help stretch it out, okay.

Mike: Or you can just buy a razor, Matt.

Matt: You can do that, too, right? But do that and then do some looking up the sky, stretch out your tongue and your neck. So look up and get that ah-stretch kind of like the lion going ah, right. Get everything out of the way. Then also another great exercise you want to stretch out the cervical vertebrae in your neck. So you’re going to put your tongue on the roof of your mouth like that and then you’re going to tuck your chin, and then you’re going to hold that and you should feel all those muscles in the back start to let go, okay.

Matt: So we want to do those physical warmups as well as doing the vocal warmups that we just talked about for that last question, okay. Because if your posture is off, it’s going to, first of all, affect the way that your rib cage moves. When we breathe, we have muscles that help lift that rib cage up and at the same time that rib cage lifts up, our diaphragm moves down. Now when that diaphragm moves down, it moves what’s called your viscera, which is a fancy name for your guts. It moves your guts down and up. Well, if you’re all hunched over and your diaphragm’s ending up pushing backward, there’s not a whole lot of room for you to expand so you’re going to find it difficult to take a full breath, okay. By the same token, if you’re up and you’re at some weird angle, your rib cage is not going to be able to fully expand and you’re going to have difficulty taking a full breath.

Matt: The other part of this that you want to look at is the cervical vertebra. So if you bend over, you’re going to feel a knob somewhere back here on the lower base of your neck. That’s the connection point between those thoracic vertebrae, the vertebrae that connect your rib cage and then the vertebrae that connect to your neck. And if you run up your fingers up your spine up here, you’re going to feel that you have seven vertebrae and they’re connected right here into the base of your skull. And that’s the point at which you can rotate your head, turn left and right, and up and down. The problem is that these muscles can also cinch forward like this, which is how a lot of us type on our computer all day. And when that happens

Mike: Yeah, yeah. I got to go to the chiropractor to get that thing adjusted.

Matt: Exactly, right. And when you get your neck into that position, it twists your vocal tract. So it’s kind of like taking a flute player’s flute and bending it over to your knee and then handing it back to them and expecting it to sound good. Not going to work, right. It’s going to sound bad.

Mike: That’s a good image.

Matt: So if I stand up here, and I’m just going to sing an [O vowel 00:32:35] and I’m going to move my neck, you’re going to be able to hear the difference that poor posture in the cervical vertebrae affects your sound, right? So I’ll do an ah instead. We’ll do (singing). So all I’m doing is moving my neck, and you can hear that it gets really bright and kind of strained and then it starts to come back into more of a neutral.

Matt: The other thing that people do sometimes tuck their chin and if you tuck your chin, it’s going to muffle your voice. So if I come from here, (singing), and then I tuck, (singing), you can hear my tongue kind of shoves down and I get this weird funky sound to it. So the posture can affect not only the respiratory system but the shape of the vocal tract. And once you start messing with the shape of the vocal tract, you start to alter the tone quality of your voice and usually not for the better, okay.

Matt: So what we want to do is try to find a place in which starting at those lower lumbar vertebrae, which are the shock absorber for the system, right, you want those lower lumbar vertebrae to support the rest of your body and just allow all those spinal pieces, those little vertebrae to stack on top of one another so that the rib cage can move freely, your head can balance on your cervical vertebrae so you have complete freedom to make whatever sounds you want to make.

Mike: Love it. Okay, great. So I think that handles

Matt: No, well, we have how to not lose your breath while singing. That was the other part of that question, right? It’s a two-part question? It was on the bottom here. We haven’t touched.

Mike: Oh, hello, hello.

Matt: We touched on that a little bit at the beginning about how not to lose your breath while singing.

Mike: Hey, guys. I think we just lost Matt there. We’ll give him a second to come back.

Matt: I’m here, Mike.

Mike: We have another question here. So Matt, are you there?