Complete Vocal Fitness: An Introduction

 

My book, Complete Vocal Fitness: A Singer’s Guide to Physical Training, Anatomy and Biomechanics is available for pre-order and comes out this coming Friday, June 15th. As I count down to the release, I’ll share some brief daily excerpts and hope they will inspire you to pick up a copy!

 

With soprano Kirsten Chambers during the photo shoot for the book.              Photo: Daniel Welch

 

Sport-Specific Training

Sport-specific training refers to exercise regimens designed to help athletes achieve peak performance. You might get better at your sport just by playing it, but coaches and trainers know that conditioning the muscles and drilling the movements required for your sport will accelerate your improvement and optimize your performance. 

Imagine that you play third base for a baseball team. Your job often involves throwing the ball long distances with speed and precision. This requires the ability to generate tremendous explosive force with your pectoral, anterior deltoid, and triceps muscles while stabilizing your shoulder, as well as generating rotational power and momentum through your legs and torso while stabilizing this movement with the muscles in your lumbo-pelvic-hip complex. 

Your sport-specific training regimen might include a dumbbell chest press to strengthen your chest and triceps, a sequence of movements to stabilize your rotator cuffs, squats to build power in your legs, and a Pilates routine to stabilize your core. 

Your strength training sessions would take place in a gym using tools like free weights and cables. 

For cultivating peak performance, it is equally important that you spend time in the field with a ball, a glove, and your teammates, practicing the actual movements and activities you will perform in an actual game: fielding, throwing, and catching the ball. Your training regimen includes repeating these movements over and over again, with a view to improving your reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and collaborative synergy with teammates.

Sport-specific training can be broken down into two categories: 

• Quality of force production and stability are cultivated in the gym
• Coordination, skill, and teamwork are developed in the field

To design a sport-specific training program for any athletic endeavor, you must analyze the skills involved and identify the type and degree of force production and stabilization required for each. You must also determine which of these skills are most effectively cultivated in the gym and which in the field.

When I compare traditional vocal education with the paradigm of sport-specific training, I find that singers’ regimens focus almost exclusively on movements best trained in “the field”—the practice room and concert hall—with little time and consideration devoted to cultivating the types of physical force production and stability that would greatly enhance key components of their performance: alignment, stamina, and stabilization.

The best teacher in the world can only teach a singer how to play the instrument they bring to the studio. 

• If a postural distortion of their cervical spine is limiting movement of the structures governing phonation and resonance, it will likely also limit the singer’s ability to apply techniques designed to improve range, registration, and tone.
• If muscular imbalances in the singer’s torso are impeding his or her ability to fully expand the rib cage, they are also impeding the singer’s ability to learn breath management.
• If the singer has not developed adequate oxygen consumption, the singer will not be able to sustain long phrases on a single breath despite excellent breath coordination.

If the source of a singer’s problem rests with alignment, it can only be resolved through improving alignment. The same is true for any physical habits or tensions entangling the breathing, phonation, resonance, or articulation. It is my aim to provide you with the means and confidence to cultivate an instrument that responds beautifully to the technical and expressive demands you place upon it. 

Rather than being fully formed, genetically determined permanent structures, all components of the vocal instrument can be trained in ways that expand and improve their function. If you’ve ever experienced a vocal breakthrough that gave you access to a wider range or fuller resonance, you have experienced firsthand the truth of this assertion. The purpose of this book is not to supplant techniques that have been facilitating valuable progress for you in the voice studio but rather to provide a biomechanical context for understanding how those techniques work while encouraging a more comprehensive approach to optimizing your instrument.

Comments

[Faiz Ismail]

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