Best Laid Plans

One of my favourite hobbies is triathlon. This year I was particularly excited, as I’d signed up to do an Ironman 70.3 (a Half Ironman) in Les Sables d’Olonne, in the west of France. The setting is beautiful and the course pleasantly flat. As we reached the middle of May, my training was going well.

Alongside running, cycling and swimming I’d carried on playing football with a few of my friends every week. It turns out that this was a mistake. After an innocuous twist as I tried to shoot, one of my knees gave out… shortly followed by the other.

Legless

I won’t bother you with the gritty details of surgery and rehab. What I will share is that recovery from my injury required me to spend a month with my feet up. My consultant and physio gave me various exercises to help me keep my body in shape during this period of enforced rest. Interestingly, one of the exercises had nothing to do with my legs, but instead involved me breathing deeply, using my diaphragm. This is similar to one of the voice exercises we recommend to our clients: the Beach Ball exercise. I wanted to share it with you.

Beach Ball Exercise

This exercise is fantastic for building vocal power and getting rid of wobbles in the voice if we feel nervous. It goes as follows:

• Pull your hands apart as you inhale, letting the breath go deeply into your body towards the stomach.
• As you breathe out, direct a “ffff” sound to a fixed point on the wall in front of you.
• Repeat with a long “aaaah” sound. Try to feel the voice coming from deep down, near the stomach, rather than from the throat or chest.

I first did this exercise after two weeks of mostly bed rest. It was a little shocking to notice my loss of vocal power. I also could only keep the sound going for around twenty seconds, significantly less than the thirty seconds plus I could do before the injury.

I did the Beach Ball exercise twice a day from then on. The results were:

• Bemused looks from my family
• Questions from our neighbours about who was singing so loudly
• My voice got back towards its old power levels after a little more than a week.

Benefits

The deep breathing exercise has many benefits for patients in rehab. It essentially keeps the lungs healthy. But for me, it was also a reminder of how quickly we can lose vocal power if we don’t use our voice well. On a much more positive note, we develop or recover vocal power and control pretty quickly with some focused practice.

If you have any experience with anything I’ve written about here, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’d like to work on vocal clarity and power (no injury required) then MSB Executive’s Head of Voice, Steven Maddocks, is a fantastic person to speak to.

And finally, while singing in the shower may be popular, singing in bed has its benefits too!