Overuse Voice Injuries

“If you have good vocal technique then you will never injure your voice” This comment pops up in voice forum a lot and many singers believe it to be true. Sadly, it is not true and here’s why.

It is not true because overuse, as the name suggests, happens when you use your voice too much, meaning overuse is a capacity issue. Let’s break this down.

Your voice is the living biological instrument, as such, your voice is subjected to the same biological convention like the rest of your body.

At any given time your body has a certain capacity for doing different things, for example, today, you have the capacity to run 5 km but not 6 km, lift 30 kilos but not 32 kilos, sing eight shows a week but not take on an extra gig on your one-and-only day off.

Overuse happens when you continually abuse your current capacity and your tissues first become irritated, then begin to change on the cellular level, and eventually the tissues fail.

When you overuse your body you can get overuse injuries such as tennis elbow, stress fractures, Achilles tendinopathy and many more.

Have you had any of these?

When you overuse your voice you can get overuse voice injury such as vocal cysts and nodules.

Overuse is easy to understand if you think of your capacity and technique as money.

You can have a lot of technique like you have a lot of money and still spend it all.

Having good vocal technique helps you spend less for more but if you are reckless with your spending you will still exhaust your capacity and end up in debt.

And singers “pay” for their debts with cysts and nodules.

This is why even singers with great technique have vocal cycts and nodules.

Vocal technique is important but technique alone is not enough because overuse is a capacity issue.

What you need is to learn how to manage your vocal load so you don’t overuse your voice, so you don’t abuse your capacity.

Now I know vocal load is an abstract concept, how do you even measure something intangible?

Thankfully in the world of physiotherapy we have very effective strategies for load management, I have used these to successfully help a lot of different kinds of athlete overcome their overuse injuries and build up their capacity to do the volume of training they want to do.

I have now translated all the nerdy maths and science into a simple yet powerful set of guidelines and created a very cute, easy-to-use, colour-coded vocal load planner to help singers manage their vocal load.

I teach all these in my vocal load management webinars to help singers get clear on what really is vocal load, how to measure it, how to record it, how to use this information to plan your schedule for work so your vocal load stays in the Safe Zone, how to safely come back to singing after time off for any reason, for any length of time, we get clear on how to safely increase your vocal capacity over time, and how to navigate unexpected spikes and dips in voice use which sneakily tip singers over into overuse or underuse.

I teach these webinars regularly throughout the year, if you want to learn how to properly manage your vocal load so you know how to make sure you have adequate voice recovery so you keep performing at your best, to promote the longevity of your voice use, and to reduce the risks of overuse voice injuries, you can get on the wait list for the next webinar using the link in the description.

I’m Selina, a physio and a singer. I help singers use sports science to augment their vocal technique and to unlock vocal freedom, if that is your vibe please subscribe.

This is a playlist I have made just for singers so make sure you check it out. ‘Til next time, Be Free In Your Movement.™

[blooper] I teach these rebinar rah rah… hehe I did it again