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Just as athletes need to do warm-up exercises before a race or a game, singers need to prepare their voices before a rehearsal or performance. Vocal warm-up exercises get the air flowing and relax your muscles to get ready for the more strenuous activity to come. It’s perhaps the most effective way to prevent vocal fatigue and overuse damage.

It may seem counter intuitive–more exercises to prevent overuse injury? Yes. Your vocal folds are controlled by tiny muscles, and when they’re warmed-up they are more flexible, easier to use, and less susceptible to injury.

Before starting your singing warm-up exercises, do some whole-body stretching and relaxation. Start with the “rag doll” exercise. From a standing position, bend forward at your hips, allowing your head and arms to dangle freely. Shake them a bit, then just let them dangle for another minute or so.

Follow that with a stretching exercise for proper posture alignment. Stand with your feet flat on the floor, about hip-width apart, and your arms at your sides. Bring your arms rapidly upward and across your body in a circular motion until they are over your head. Rising onto your tiptoes, take in a good, deep breath as you move your arms up.

As you slowly exhale, bring your arms back down to your sides and come back down to flat feet. Try to keep your chest up and shoulders back, as they were at the top of the stretch, after bringing your arms down. You are now ready to begin singing.

The first warm-up exercise uses a technique that goes by many names: buzz, bubble lips, lip roll, or lip trill. Exhale through puckered lips to create a vibration, sounding a bit like a motorboat or a “raspberry”.

You will do the buzz slide between three tones: the base tone, up a fourth, and back to the base (do-fa-do): in the key of C major, it would be C,F,C. Repeat, moving up a half step each time (C#, F#, C#, then D,G,D, then Eb, Ab, Eb, etc.). You can also do this on the syllable “ee” or “oo”, but the buzz forces you to use good breath support.

The next warm-up exercise is the fifth-slide. Start on the fifth tone with the syllable “wee” and slide down to the base (so-do): in C major again, it would be G, C. Repeat on the same tones with “zoo”, then move up a half-step and repeat, “wee” and “zoo” on  Ab and Db. Continue moving up by half-steps.

Next is the five-tone descending scale. Starting on the fifth tone, descend stepwise to the base: so, fa, mi, re, do. First do the syllable “na”, then “nay”, “noh”, and “noo”. Move up a half-step and repeat the scale on each syllable.

The fourth warm-up exercise is a descending 8-tone scale (do, ti, la, so, fa, mi, re, do) on the syllable “noo”. Again, move up a half-step with each repeat. You can also try other vowel sounds, such as “nah”, “nay”, “nee”, or “noh”, or use “m” instead of “n” as the initial consonant. Try to feel your mask, or upper resonance, as you do this.

Follow that with a descending arpeggio: do, so, mi, do, on the syllable “nah”. Repeat on “nay”, “nee”, “noh”, and “noo”, then move up by half steps and repeat on each syllable again.

The final warm-up exercise is the octave slide. Use the buzz and start on the base note; slide up an octave and back down to the base: do, do, do. Repeat on “oo”. Move up a half-step, do the buzz, and then “oo”. Continue moving up by half-steps.