How to Avoid Vocal Damage

AKA... How NOT to end up like Mariah Carey, Julie Andrews, Adele, Justin Timberlake, John Mayer, Keith Urban, Meghan Trainor, etc etc etc. Often these great singers are overworked and aren't able to give their voices or bodies TLC and rest. This leads to vocal injury. Here's how you can avoid that situation.

1. TAKE CARE OF YOUR VOICE. This means: drink a lot of water, avoid caffeine and alcohol which dehydrate your vocal folds, avoid smoking, eat well to eliminate acid reflux, don't scream and yell a lot (especially if it hurts!), don't sing when you are sick, use a healthy speaking voice, budget your voice use, and give your voice a rest when you start to feel vocally tired.

2. ALWAYS WARM UP BEFORE YOU SING AND COOL DOWN AFTER. Lip trills, humming, and singing through a straw, gliding through your voice from the lowest to the highest notes, are a few good things to always start with when warming up and to end with when cooling down. Breath engagement exercises, such as "Sh sh shhhhhhhh," and a slow, long sustained "ss" are also great. Like with any sport, the muscles and tissues of the voice need to be stretched and warmed up to function optimally. If you don't properly warm up, you'll end up compensating and squeezing the wrong muscles to get the volume you want.

3. NEVER ACCEPT PAIN AS OK. You should NEVER feel tension, squeezing, or pain around the neck or in the throat. When you feel discomfort, be responsible about the health of your voice; stop and change something! You can try to loosen up by singing with your tongue sticking out of your mouth; stretching your tongue (stick the tip out and down, to the sides, and up to your nose; you'll really feel a stretch); gently moving your head side to side and up and down while singing to loosen up the neck; massaging the jaw; tossing and catching a ball and pacing while you sing.

4. SUPPORT WITH YOUR BREATHING MUSCLES, NOT YOUR NECK OR SWALLOWING MUSCLES. Many people try to reach higher notes and higher volumes by squeezing the neck and raising the larynx (via the swallowing muscles) uncomfortably high. This squeezes the vocal folds together and tenses the tissue so that it can't vibrate freely, leaving your vocal folds smashing together with too much force, which is what creates nodes, polyps, and other physical damage to the vocal folds. This also creates a thin as opposed to rich timbre to the voice which may lead to greater strain. This squeezing around the throat and neck is often a compensatory strategy for not enough engagement of the breathing muscles. When you need greater volume, it helps to think of EXPANDING into your lower back as you get louder, rather than squeezing your abs really tight. Good ways to practice feeling the muscles of the lower back are to sing while bent over on a bench (shoulders and back should be flat, no rolling the shoulders forward) and to do squats on trouble notes. I like the wide-stanced sumo squats the best. To get your other core muscles engaged, try singing while doing half-boat pose (Google it for a good image if you're unfamiliar). These moves will help shift the focus away from your throat/neck muscles.

5. DEVELOP YOUR "HEAD VOICE."

Your "head voice" usually sounds really different than your speaking voice because your vocal folds are vibrating in a very different way and using a different muscle coordination. When you speak you dominantly rely on your Thyroarytenoid (TA) muscles to control your vocal folds. In "head voice," your Cricothyroid (CT) muscles take over. These muscles are important to develop because they allow you to sing with accurate pitch and without shouting as you go higher up your range. While the TA muscles thicken and shorten the vocal folds to change pitch, the CT lengthen and thin them. Your vocal folds can only shorten and tense so much. Employing your CT lower in your range helps decrease the tension in the vocal folds, which is less damaging to them over time. If your head voice is very weak, this means your CT needs to be exercised. Practice singing "koo koo koo" and singing on an "ng" (like in "sing"), letting your voice be light and aiming for a nice ringing sound.

Extra bonus: DON'T TRY TO SOUND LIKE OTHER PEOPLE. TRY TO SOUND LIKE YOURSELF. Trying to imitate other voices tends to lead to unnecessary tension, especially tongue tension, that is just not good or comfortable for your voice, and may push you to sing in a range that isn't natural for your voice type.

No TLDR on this one. This was a LONG READ! I'm impressed if you made it through. I hope you find this useful in your singing endeavors. -Makaela