Healthy Habits for a Healthy Singing Voice

Your God-created voice is AMAZING! Your “voiceprint” is completely unique to you—it’s like a fingerprint!

Did you know that at every single pitch (ie different note you sing), your vocal folds are vibrating at a different speed (usually somewhere between 100-1000x per second)! For example, when your brain hears that you need to sing a C note (middle C), it tells your vocal folds to vibrate at a speed of 262 times per second, because that’s the exact speed that note needs!

Psalm 139 invites us to praise God for the way that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Take a moment to dwell on that—God truly deserves our awe and worship for His incredibly detailed designs!

Your voice is an instrument—and such a uniquely complex one because it’s part of your body. It’s inside of you, and so, it functions well to the extent that your body functions well.

We’ve been given one voice to steward. One voice to worship our King with. And we need to take care of it! So check out the tips below to learn about healthy habits that will help your voice function at its best. (Or watch a video version on this topic instead.) 

KEEP YOUR VOICE HYDRATED

Water is so good for your body, and thus so good for your voice—so get into the habit of sipping it all day long! 6-8 glasses per day minimum. 

Water doesn’t actually touch our vocal folds, so the time to hydrate isn’t right before you’re going to be singing, it’s much earlier. That’s why it’s important to be continually hydrating. 

When our body is hydrated, the mucus on our mucous membranes thins out. Our vocal folds are mucous membranes, and we want that mucus layer to be thin so they can vibrate freely and easily!

When our body is dehydrated, the mucus gets thick and the vocal folds end up having to exert a lot more effort to vibrate together, so they get swollen. You might start to feel a little hoarse, your singing might feel strained, or you might feel like you need to clear your throat from the mucus. Bottom line: we need to start hydrating long before we get to that place!

Room temperature water is best because the body can absorb it quickly, so especially if you know you’re dehydrated, opt for room temperature water. But… the best water is the water that you drink more of, so if cold water helps you drink more throughout the day, then drink it cold! However, in and around the times when you’re singing, room temperature water is best.

Using a humidifier is also helpful, especially if you live in a dry climate. By your bed is a particularly good place to have one, so that you can keep your voice hydrated while you sleep. 

EAT HEALTHY

Remember—our voice is a human instrument. Our whole body is the instrument, and food is the fuel for our body—it provides the energy we use for all of our body’s processes. 

The kind of fuel we put into our body will determine how well our body functions. So… eat healthy! 

Fruits and vegetables, along with healthy proteins and grains, give our bodies powerful nutrition and lasting energy. On the other hand, white sugar and heavily processed foods have a very negative impact on our bodies. They suppress our immune system and cause chronic inflammation, which is not good for the voice at all, because inflammation makes it more difficult for the vocal muscles and membranes to do their job well! These foods can also cause acid reflux, which is when acid from the stomach flows up the esophagus, and this can make your vocal folds dry and inflamed, because the opening of the esophagus is so close to your larynx. Sometimes you don’t even know it’s happening—many people struggle with “silent reflux”… you may not feel a burning sensation, but the effects of the reflux show up in your voice not working as well as it should. 

I used to have major issues with acid reflux, until I did a few (major!) things. I changed my diet to cut out sugar and highly processed foods; I started eating way more vegetables, fruits and whole foods; I lost about 150 lbs of extra weight I was carrying around; and I stopped eating before bed. 

It’s best to be done eating all food and drinks other than water and herbal tea 2-3 hours before laying down, so that your food has a chance to digest and so the acid doesn’t flow back up when you lay down. 

Eating healthy is a huge passion that Jason and I have. It was a big change that we made to our life in 2019 when we overhauled our eating habits, and we never want to go back! We feel so different—so much better! 

GET LOTS OF REST AT NIGHT

When your body is tired, your voice is tired. And when your voice is tired, it’s prone to injury—or at the very least, to not working and sounding how we want it to, so it’s really important to get lots of rest at night! 

7-9 hours of sleep is optimal. 

Sleep is where our body repairs itself, and there are so many essential processes that happen during sleep at night. 

Even if you don’t think you need that much sleep, you probably do. Most of us need roughly 8 hours of sleep at night; otherwise we become sleep deprived, and our body actually keeps track of the sleep debt. (For example, if you only get 6 hours of sleep for 3 nights in a row, that’s 2 hours of sleep debt per night that you will need to make up.) 

Sleep debt impacts our memory, our ability to focus, our mood, our immune system, and it can trigger inflammation in the body, which often shows up in swelling in our vocal tissues, which, similar to when our body is dehydrated, makes your voice have to work way harder to produce sound. 

A note for parents of newborns and other tough-sleep seasons: there’s so much grace! There are times when it’s not possible to get the sleep the body needs, and the Lord knows this and cares for us so deeply in these seasons. Have grace on yourself and your body—you’ll get back to sleeping full nights once again, even though it’s hard now! 

GET YOUR BODY HEALTHY

Your body is your instrument. When we sing, it’s so many things in our body coming together—a lot more than just our vocal folds and vocal muscles! We’re using our vocal tract (the open spaces in our face where the air resonates), jaw, tongue, lips, brain, lungs, ab muscles, diaphragm and more—and so, it makes sense that the stronger and more fit your body is, the more your singing voice is going to benefit, and the less in shape your body is, the more potential for there to be some obstacles for your voice. 

I definitely recommend that if you have excess weight to lose, work at that. I was obese most of my life, so if that’s you, trust me—I understand! I had very unhealthy patterns of eating, and for many years I dieted on and off. Finally, a doctor was very honest with me about my need to lose weight, and I’m really grateful for her honesty and for the eating plan she put me on. I lost a lot of excess weight and gained so much more health. I feel it in my body and I feel it in my voice!

But the thing is—you can be thin and not actually healthy. I remember the doctor telling me, “Charmaine, your body is being kind to you by showing up as extra weight.” I understand what she was saying. When I looked in the mirror, I knew what I needed to do to be healthier, whereas for others, unhealth doesn’t show up in the same way. That’s why what we eat is so important, because that’s what our body is using as fuel. 

And for all of us, incorporating exercise into our regular routines is super important and will directly impact how our voice functions. Our breath is the energy for our voice, so we want our lungs functioning well! Cardio exercise (like running, biking and swimming) helps our lungs function most efficiently, which means that we’ll be able to hold notes and phrases longer and have more breath control when we sing. Exercises that strengthen our core muscles also help increase our breath control. 

Strength training is also important, because when we build muscle, our body functions better. More flexibility, balance, strength… reduced stress, reduced inflammation—all of these things come with exercise, and will ultimately help us sing better because our instrument is functioning more efficiently. 

WARM UP YOUR VOICE

When I started singing, I didn’t warm up my voice at all. I didn’t really know that was a thing! But as I started to sing more and learn more about singing, I realized that doing vocal warmups was a complete game changer, especially for singing in the morning! Athletes who care about their body don’t roll out of bed and immediately start running fast or playing their sport full on. They jog and stretch—they get their body moving slowly hours before they have a race or a game. Otherwise, they may end up with an injury—or at the very least, they probably won’t perform well at their sport. 

Our muscles need time and slow, steady movements to go from rest to full speed. 

I want you to start thinking about yourself as a vocal athlete, not because we are performing as worship vocalists, but because we have a responsibility to take care of the instrument that God has given us to steward, and to treat with seriousness the role we have if we are leading people.

When we take our muscles from resting straight to singing songs, we can end up with a vocal injury—or at least, we’ll probably find that our voice is not working well…. the high notes or low notes might crack, we might sing off-pitch, or, our voice might sound hoarse or feel tired really quickly. 

I experienced this many times before I learned how to warm up properly… and when I don’t leave time to do a good warmup, my voice pays for it. I did that earlier this year—I didn’t budget time to warmup and my voice felt really bad after my Sunday service… compared to how it usually bounces back quickly when I’ve warmed it up properly. I had to repent to the Lord because I was not being a good steward of my voice and my responsibility as a worship leader.

Warming up, once you learn how, is a simple process that you can do while you’re getting ready for the day. It starts with things that are really easy and relaxing for your vocal folds and muscles, and moves into things that are more vigorous, more like the songs we sing. If you don’t have a solid vocal warmup routine, check out my training on how to warm up your voice.

EXERCISE YOUR VOICE

If you want to grow vocally—to be able to sing with more control, more range, more flexibility, more endurance, more of a seamless quality as you move up and down in your range—you need to exercise your voice. 

Just like you would go for a run or a bike ride to strengthen your heart and lungs, or you would lift weights or do pushups to strengthen very specific muscles in your arms or legs or back, in vocal training we do very specific exercises for specific vocal muscles. 

For example, when we sing a YEAH exercise, that’s strengthening the muscles used for chest voice.

When we sing a GOO exercise, that’s strengthening the muscles used for head voice.

When we sing a whiny, cry-like WEH sound, that uses our pharyngeal resonator to help our vocal muscles find a balance between head and chest (also called a mix voice tone!), which can go from low to high without breaking.

Here are a few workouts you can check out:

• Chest Voice Workout (Male Range)
• Chest Voice Workout (Female Range)
• Head Voice Workout (Male Range)
• Head Voice Workout (Female Range)
• Pharyngeal Mix Voice Workout 

These, along with many other exercises, are ones that I’ve been teaching in my courses and with private lesson students for many years, and they’ve been developed by incredible vocal coaches (like Brett Manning at Singing Success) who have studied the voice and know specifically which consonants and vowel sounds will help us get certain results in our voice. It’s not random—vocal exercises are very specific and intentional!

Why can’t we just sing songs to improve our singing voice? That would be nice, but… when we sing songs, we tend to fall into whatever habits we have when we sing, so it’s not actually a helpful way to re-train the voice and see change, and that’s what so many of us need. We actually need to get the voice out of its sense of “normal” and develop new muscle memory. And so, what these strategic exercises do, is they forge a new way for our vocal muscles and vocal folds to work—and over time, that does translate into our songs. More range, more control, etc. 

This process takes time. It works—I’ve seen it in my own voice and in so many singers’ voices, but it requires a lot of patience and a lot of diligence. It requires putting routines in place. Prioritizing. 

Vocal workouts don’t just happen unless you make sure they happen. 

I recommend doing a vocal workout 3-5 times per week, for 15-30 minutes. A little shorter or longer is fine, but that’s a really good length that will allow you to see results in your voice without tiring it out. 

If you want a step-by-step vocal training plan, I’ve designed my course lessons to help build your voice from the ground up. Slow and steady—building the right foundation! If you do the workouts diligently, within a few months (maybe even weeks!), you should see growth start to happen in your voice, particularly if you are also committed to looking at your voice holistically and to make any necessary changes to your health habits so that you give your instrument the overall health it needs.

USE YOUR VOICE WISELY

Our singing voice and our speaking voice are one and the same. It’s just one voice—one set of vocal folds and muscles. 

Which means that we have to be conscious of how we’re using our voice all the time if we want our voice to be in good health. 

A good rule of thumb is: if your throat hurts, feels scratchy, or feels tired, rest it. Don’t sing on it, and try to speak as little as you can. Sometimes even just 20 minutes of vocal rest can do so much good, but sometimes the voice needs a few hours, or a few days of rest. Trust me—this is worth it… to save your voice from serious damage where it may need a few weeks or months of rest!

A couple tips for singing on worship team: 

• If your voice is hurting, get someone to cover for you. If you absolutely cannot do that, make sure to warm up really well, sing lightly, and choose songs and keys in a range that is easiest for your voice. 
• When you’re singing with a sound system, make sure you can hear yourself well in your monitors. When we can’t hear our own voice well, we tend to push and strain a lot more than we should.

Some speaking etiquette:

Don’t whisper. Whispering is unnatural for the vocal folds, so it actually puts more pressure on the voice than speaking at a normal volume. If your voice is struggling, talk quietly, but in a clear tone. 

Don’t speak louder than you need to. This is really important to be aware of when you’re talking in places with loud background noise—restaurants, hangouts with family or friends, the hallway at church—often we don’t realize how loud we’re speaking, and it can be harsh and abrasive for the vocal cords. Try to get to a quieter place to have a conversation—but if you can’t, then try… 1) enunciating your consonants more (this will help others hear your words more clearly), and 2) talking with more of a nasal twang than is normal for you (this will raise your pitch and volume without more effort coming from your throat!). 

Don’t over-do vocal exercise. Vocal exercise is amazing for the voice, but don’t over-do it. One time through a vocal workout in a day, 3-5 days a week is a good amount, especially because if you do sing on a worship team, you’ll also have songs to practice (at least on some weeks!). But if on any given day, you intend to do a vocal workout and your voice isn’t feeling good, just wait for another day. Listen to your body—sometimes it’s saying, “I just need to rest.”

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1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says: “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (NIV) 

Isn’t it incredible that we are the dwelling place of the Lord?

Bottom line—we are worshippers who want to love Jesus with our voices, and one way that we can do this is by taking care of our bodies, which are His! 

Which healthy habit stands out to you? What can you do today to move towards greater health in one of these areas? How can you love Jesus with your voice?