1 Exercise, 5 Benefits

Some of you have heard me speak at a live chat via webcam last December and may remember that I have a distinctive baritone voice. While this is in part genetic (most of the men on my father's side of the family have deep, resonant voices), it's also training. In high school, my voice started changing from a nasally child's voice and within the course of a year practically dropped into my stomach. I spent time cultivating this quality and have made it something of a personal quest to make my voice one of my... trademarks you might say.

Here's the good part: anyone can learn to develop a powerful speaking voice. In this entry I will show you one simple breathing exercise that if done for 5 minutes every day will dramatically improve the quality of your speech. There are many benefits to this. In fact, let's list them now.

1. Increased Oxygen Flow to the Brain
In the course of this exercise, your breathing will return to the state it was in as an infant. You will make better use of every breath and increase the flow of oxygen to your brain which will allow you to remain more alert, quick-witted, and energized.

2. Greater Speech Control
This exercise will help you to make the most of your lung capacity. You will be able to better control the rate of exhalation and sustain it much longer. This means that you can pace your speech more effectively and will no longer find yourself pausing in the middle of a sentence to take a breath.

3. Develop Better Posture
Keeping the skeletal and muscular systems aligned is very important in reducing stress. This exercise will help you to keep your torso and neck in proper, natural alignment, reducing fatigue and stress on your muscles as well as projecting a more confident demeanor.

4. Project Confidence
See above. The greater control over the pace of your speech along with the improved posture will improve your image to other people. You will look and feel more confident. And since our emotions check in with our bodies to make sure everything is consistent, you will actually begin to feel more confident as your brain tries to make sure it's in sync with your body. Weird how that works, no?

5. Fill the Room
Though not the entire secret to building resonance in your voice, proper breathing technique strengthens your sound, making it more authoritative. When you can remove unnecessary softness and airiness from your voice, people are more likely to take you seriously and listen to what you have to say. They subconsciously believe that you believe in what you are saying.


Sound good? Let's actually do the exercise. To start with, you're going to need to break a really bad habit you've picked up. Take a deep breath in right now. As deep as you can, then exhale. I'll wait...

Did your shoulders lift when you breathed in? You need to stop doing that. By lifting the shoulders, you're creating tension in the neck and chest that greatly restricts your lung capacity while creating unnecessary air pressure on your throat when you breathe out.

Lie down on your couch on bed and put a book on the point where the abdomen meets the sternum. In this position you'll be unable to move your shoulders. Breathe in deeply through your nose and visualize pulling the air down into your gut. You'll see you're doing it right when the book rises and falls evenly.

What's happening is that your diaphragm is activating. The lungs don't actually suck the air in the way we conventionally think of it. The diaphragm is dropping down, causing the lungs to pull air in and inflate to take up the newly available space. To do this, it pushes your guts down and out so that the abdomen expands slightly in all directions.

Now as you breathe in, imagine this expansion starting in the abdomen and slowly going up the body into the ribs. Your ribcage isn't expanding in the way that the abdomen is, but your floating ribs (the cartilaginous ones at the bottom) are. Also, the lungs are fully expanding slightly, creating a sensation that the chest is lifting independent of the shoulders.

You may feel light-headed the first few times you try this, but you'll eventually get used to it. What's happening is that you're getting more oxygen into the bloodstream than you're accustomed to. In our day-to-day lives, we actually don't need to exercise our maximum lung capacity very often. However, you want to keep exercising it for the same reason you work out your muscles. Most people don't have jobs that require them to deadlift several hundred pounds at one time several times a day. But if you don't exercise, doing basic tasks takes more out of you than it would if you had made a habit of going to the gym.

Once you get used to this, do the exercise standing. Breathe in deeply, pause for a beat, then exhale evenly. If you've met your full lung capacity, then you actually won't feel the need to breathe back in again for another second or two. Practice this for about 5 minutes a day and you'll see a noticeable difference before long in the strength of your voice and your ability to sustain sentences and passages without taking a breath.

I should make a final note. The reason you inhale through the nose is because all that air is going directly into the lungs. When you breathe in through the mouth, you run the chance of accidentally swallowing some air. That will cause your stomach to become bloated and be very uncomfortable before long. Singers undergo training to minimize and prevent this, but in everyday conversation, you're better off just breathing through your nose and keeping your mouth shut. Unless of course you want to wander around all day looking like you're stoned or doing an impersonation of Kristen Stewart.