Vocal Warm Up Mistake

Singers, stop stretching before you sing.

My name is Selina, I’m a physiotherapist, and one of the most common mistakes I see people make when preparing for an activity, be that exercising, doing sports, or singing, is that they spent ages stretching their muscles.

Now stretching is great, it is one effective way to help alleviate the feeling of muscle tension, it does so via calming, soothing, and quieting your nervous system, to help facilitate a state of rest and relaxation.

A state of rest and relaxation. This is the key.

When you are about to do something that requires you to tap into your function and your performance, you would want your brain and body to be awake, alert, and energised. Which is far, far away from a state of rest and relaxation, right!

So when you spend a lot of time stretching before you sing, you are essentially preventing yourself from priming to the level of readiness you want to have.

All that stretching can also inhibit your muscles’ function and performance.

So what to do instead? Instead of stretching before you sing, I encourage you to do active range of motion movement.

So, for example, instead of holding a classic neck stretch, go through your neck’s available range of motion, like so. Nice and slow, in all the directions that your neck can move.

This one too. About six to ten times in each direction.

Now the beauty about this is that it works everywhere in your body, any part of your body that you feel like is holding excessive tension, movement can help get rid of it.

And remember most of our joints can bend, extent, we have side bending, or side bending this way, we also have rotation, more rotation.

Movement sends signals of safety to your brain, and when your brain is assured that all is well, there is no need for it to guard, no guarding, less tension.

And because you are actively moving, you are energising your body, helping it to prime to the level of readiness you want to have for your awesomeness.

To learn more about how to optimise your body to support your singing, check out this playlist here. ‘Til next time, Be Free In Your Movement™.