Why "sing from the diaphragm" won't help you hit the high notes (and what will)
- Camron Williams
- Jun 22, 2017
- 8 min read
If you’re struggling with a note or a phrase, whether you’re an experienced singer or have more recently started to learn, you’ve no doubt been told that you need to "sing from the diaphragm".
This conventional wisdom for struggling singers is a focus on technique and centers around breathing the right way. The idea is that if you aren't singing something well enough, it's because your technique is incorrect. (You may have also been told to just "give it more support" when struggling for a big note - which belongs to the same family of advice but is even more empty of utility).
The thing is - if your experience has been anything like mine - you’ve tried all the techniques they’ve thrown at you, done your breathing exercises, given it more support, then tried to be more relaxed, and still none of it has helped you sing the way you want to sing.
If that’s the case, I have good news for you: you’re probably not doing anything wrong. In this post I’m going to talk about why such a focus on breath and support technique is a hollow approach to vocal training. I can offer you a better and much simpler solution.
Strength matters
We know that having good breath support is crucial to having a good voice. There's no debate there. But what if I told you that struggling to hit a note isn’t necessarily a problem of lacking technique but about lacking strength?
Now, we know that breath support means working against the force of the air trying to exit your lungs, and that this involves muscles. So, imagine someone handing you something really heavy and telling you to lower it to the ground slowly - if you’re weak you’ll just drop it, but the stronger you are, the more slowly and more controlled you’ll be able to put the object down. Now imagine one of those high notes you've been struggling to hit - its the same principle: the stronger your support muscles, the more control you'll have over the note and the less likely you'll be to "drop" it.
Although technique is important as a foundation, no amount of technique training will help you advance if you simply lack strength in the muscles you need to use.
---
If you want to jump higher, throw farther, or lift heavier things, you need to build more strength and power into the relevant muscle groups. Likewise, you breath in and out with muscles and you support your singing with muscles… so if you want to hit the big notes, you need better strength and power in the muscles that power the voice.
---
After trying every technique under the sun with hours of traditional breathing and support exercises, and barely making any improvement in my singing ability - it was a strength training regimen that allowed me to finally make consistent, predictable progress towards the voice I was after.
My capacity for hitting the notes I wanted to hit directly correlated to the strength gains I was making at the gym with the muscle groups relevant to singing. No one told me that I was simply lacking real strength where it mattered for vocal capability. Working out is just not something we really consider in the singing world.
I think it’s time we did.
It’s funny because so often now I hear singers say, "your body is your instrument" and that we are “vocal athletes”. It is true but I see so much more talk than walk. Yes, things are changing but for the most part, optimal physical conditioning for singing is still vague. And when it is talked about, it’s either to suggest safe and mild exercise like yoga or swimming, or to caution guys to not strain their vocal cords in the gym.
But I promise you that it's entirely possible to lift heavy weights without hurting your voice.
In fact I now believe that lifting weights and doing targeted body-weight exercises is the quickest and most effective way to improve our singing. We need greater levels of resistance training than yoga or swimming can provide. Not that those forms of exercise are bad or don't do anything, but we can get much more bang for our buck with strength training that targets the muscle groups associated with singing.
Ask yourself: is my instrument built like a grand piano or a “my first piano”?
---
Don’t worry, I don’t intend to get all “gym bro” on you - as singers, we tend to not be associated with the athletic types of the world and that's fine, there's no need to become a bodybuilder to reap the benefits of strength training (and besides, bodybuilding is a full time job anyway). It's in no way necessary to become an Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Frailty as a starting point
Talking about strength training for singing is relatively new and there are only a few people talking about its necessity, so I’m going to start to explore a bit more of the logic behind the argument here and continue to do so in future blogs. Herbert here will help us.
What does a frail person sound like? They (or their voices specifically) sound weakened, right? This is because voices weaken with a persons physical state. We understand this reality intuitively but we tend to not think of it as occurring at both ends of the spectrum - i.e: if a weaker person results in a weaker voice, a stronger person should generally produce a stronger voice (unless they are very inflexible and have terrible posture).
On a similar note, when someone gets seriously sick and weakened, their voice deteriorates alongside their physical state.
The underlying assumption in the singing teaching world seems to be that, as long as a person doesn’t look frail and sick, belting out some Whitney Houston is just a matter of various technical adjustments. It should be becoming clear now that this just can’t be true. You need to be more than just ‘not frail’ in order to sing beautifully and powerfully.
The reality, and the beauty of it is, everything becomes easier as you become stronger. Everything that involves muscles (which is all physical activity) becomes less and less effortful as we develop stronger and more powerful bodies. This is where “more support” becomes redundant. You don’t need to give a note anywhere near as much physical effort (support) if you just get stronger.
So don’t give it more support, build more support.
(How? Check this post out)
Multi-tasking muscles
There are many muscles that have either a direct or indirect role in supporting vocalization but I won’t be giving you a science lesson on what muscle does what, and the thing is, I’m not an expert in this anyway. Although I could point you towards the right information, I don’t believe you need to know the names and functions of these muscles in order to use your body well.
I’ve encountered too many teachers who thought that teaching the science of the voice equaled teaching people how to sing - it doesn’t, so I won’t go down that route.
For the purpose of understanding the necessity of strength training for singing though, it's helpful to understand that the muscles that are involved in singing support have multiple roles. First and foremost, they exist to keep you upright and balanced, help move you around, help lift things, and of course, keep you breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide.
...Beautiful singing can only come after these things are sufficiently taken care of and when we have enough energy and flexibility in reserve.
Here's an illustration of the point:
What do you instinctively do if you're puffed and out of breath after a run or a sprint? Bend over and rest by putting your hands on your knees, right? We do this because our brains are instinctively favoring getting oxygen into our lungs, and by resting on our knees, we've somewhat liberated our diaphragm from its other big role of trunk stabilization in order to free up more energy for breathing.
So it makes sense that, if we want the energy and strength to sing well, we need these muscles to be strong and functional enough to perform their main roles with minimal fatigue first.
If these muscles are too weak, too inflexible and/or not operating along the postural lines they evolved to operate along, they’re going to be using unnecessary amounts of energy on day-to-day existence, and they won’t have enough in reserve to accommodate big singing. They’re essentially too ‘tied up and tired’ with their main roles to accommodate another physical task - that being singing.
How to stop constriction and the forcing of notes
One of the main observable symptoms of lacking core strength is constriction and the forcing of notes that are outside of what's called the 'speech inflection range'. As we move outside of the range of our natural speaking voice, the air pressures at play require ever greater amounts of regulation by our support muscles.
A lack of strength in your support muscles means that you are unable to adequately regulate the outflow of air from your lungs - so in order to maintain the note you're trying to sing, you end up making your vocal cords do too much work. As many of you may have experienced, we also recruit other throat muscles to help force those vocal folds together.
The singing process just isn't designed to sustainably and effectively operate that way.
Essentially, there is a limit to how much air can pass between active vocal folds before they can no longer effectively close back together over top of the air exiting your lungs (because of complex physics - check out the resources below if you're really keen). Constriction is you trying maintain a note in spite of physics not being on your side.
And of course, the way we deal with this is to increase the strength of our support muscles! But is it breathing in or breathing out that we need to strengthen?
It's not so much the muscles that make us breathe in that need the work, it's the muscles that regulate, or slow down, the breathing out that we especially need to strengthen. This is because (without getting into the physics of it all) when you're closing and then reopening the vocal folds at high pressures, the air wants to escape - it wants to run away on you. So in order to counter that force, we need muscles that are strong enough to hold that air back.
The quickest and most effective way to do this is to practice lifting heavy things without closing your throat to stop stop the air escaping - I give an overview of how to do this here.
Someone getting too technical should be a red flag
As I touched on at the beginning, many teachers get so detailed about what the best breathing technique looks like. In my experience, when everybody is offering conflicting, elaborate opinions on a subject, there’s probably a simpler approach that trumps them all. When everyone is getting technical, and it isn’t giving you results, there is probably a simpler solution out there.
In this case, when all the little tips, tricks, and breathing exercises aren’t delivering results, maybe all you need is more core strength.
And no, breathing exercises don't count as strength training. Take the "sss" exercise for example: all you're doing is slowing down the exit of air with your tongue pressing against the roof of your mouth (like you'd do with your thumb almost completely covering the end of a hose) - you aren't actually training any strength into your core muscles.
I wouldn't say that breathing exercises are all useless, it's certainly useful to acquaint yourself with your breath, as any improvement in mind-body connection is a good thing. The key is that strength training for your breath support mechanism does what breathing exercises claim to achieve, except ten times quicker and more effectively because strength training also improves strength in your core muscles to serve those other roles we talked about just before.
So, next time you’re singing and you feel like you’re being beaten by the song and the prescribed technique, I want you to stop and consider that you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong… it just might be that you need to be a bit more strong…
---
Click here for part 2 - where we get into how to build the right strength for singing (and how to do it safely).
---
Useful resources:
Comments