How to Warm Up Your Voice Properly (What Most Singers Get Wrong)

Most singers think warming up their voice means running scales — but that’s only part of the picture. In this episode, Sarah breaks down the difference between warming up, conditioning, and actually preparing your voice for what you’re about to sing. She walks through a step-by-step approach to warming up efficiently, depending on your vocal demands, and explains why a one-size-fits-all routine doesn’t work. If you’ve ever felt like your warmups aren’t helping (or are making things worse), this episode will completely change how you approach your voice.

It's that time of year: DISCOVER TIME!

Most singers get stuck at some point

Not because they lack talent…
But because they don’t fully understand their voice.

Most singers are stuck in a cycle of:

– trying random exercises
– searching for answers online
– hoping something finally works

Without knowing what their voice actually needs, progress feels inconsistent and frustrating.

Inside this episode, we break down why that happens — and what’s actually missing.

If you want to go deeper, I’ve made something available for you:

Discover — a mini course that teaches you how to:

– hear what your voice is doing
– identify your vocal tendencies
– understand what your voice needs to improve

So instead of guessing, you can start making clear, intentional progress.

For a limited time, Discover is available completely free.

🗓 Access runs from March 20 – April 10
After that, it returns to a paid course.

👉Access DISCOVER for FREE HERE 🔥

If your voice has ever felt confusing, inconsistent, or frustrating…

This is the place to start.

Have you loved these episodes? Leave a 5 star written review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot and send it to singerspath@gmail.com to be entered to win a FREE private lesson with Sarah! Winners to be announced at the end of spring! *You MUST email a picture of your screenshot to be entered!***

Reminder- if you HAVE already submitted a review for the podcast or other products from SB Vocal Studio- send an email with a screenshot and let Sarah know so you're eligible to win a FREE lesson!

Make sure to follow Sarah on Tik Tok and Instagram @singwithbish

Questions or Topic Recommendations for Sarah? Know someone who would be a perfect guest on the podcast? Fill out the form below!

Contact Sarah HERE

Want to check out the associates at Sarah Bishop Vocal Studio? 

Learn more about associates Lily and Jeremy here!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

If you're tired of not making progress and you're ready to be the artist you know you're meant to be, you're in the right place. You're listening to the Singer's Path Podcast. The Path or Performing Artist Training Hub will cover everything, including singing tips that actually work, advice from top industry professionals, and life-changing mindset shifts. Out with the starving artist and in with the thriving artist. I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, professional singer, actor, educator, and entrepreneur. I'm not afraid to speak the truth and stop the gatekeeping of quality information so you can actually become the artist you dream of being. So let's get on the path, shall we? Even though we're all on our own journeys, it always helps to have a guide. Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Singer's Path Podcast. It is me, your host, Sarah Bishop, and I am tuning in to you from my in-law's basement in Albany, New York. You know, it really this is becoming a traveling podcast in a sense. It's like, where is Sarah today? Is she in New York? Is she in Pittsburgh? Is she in Albany? Is she in the depths of the jungle of Costa Rica? Who is to say, I don't even know where I am at any given time at this point? But today I'm so excited to tune in um to answer a big question that I see from singers online. It is one of the most searched things that singers ask about. And it's something that even I questioned and wondered for a really long time. But you know, I'm all about giving you that good, good information. Um, now that I have moved from singer to professional voice teacher, let's bridge the gap on this one question that I just get all the time. What are the best warm-ups for my voice? How do I warm up my voice? Okay. The first thing that I have to say right off the bat, that's a really important distinction, is that warming up is actually a bit different than conditioning or working out your voice. All right. So I'm gonna not that singing is like a straight comparison to fitness, because um, these are really little tiny muscles, um, the vocal cords, okay? So it's not, it's not exactly the same. Like you don't ever want to work out your voice to the point of like ultimate fatigue, right? Like you would if you were like doing bicep curls or something. It is approached a slightly different way. But I'm going to be talking about um levels of vocal athleticism and just using that analogy to help be a little bit clearer in my delivery of what I'm about to say. So warming up in general, like say you're like, you know, the average person about to go on a walk or about to go on a run, like the warmups that you do, you you might just kind of stretch, you know, kind of you do a hamstring stretch and kind of move your shoulders around and do just a really basic movement to get your body like moving a little bit before you go into a jog or even heck a full sprint. Okay. So, like the average Joe about to do a workout class, or you're gonna put on your Pilates video, or you're gonna, you know, go on a jog around your neighborhood, right? The type of warm-up that you would do for that is gonna be a little bit different, right? You're probably just gonna kind of like shoulder roll, you know, do a little stretch and then be on your way and do the thing, right? What I like to train you guys though, and it and it doesn't really matter if you're like a professional level person, but to give you a little bit more information and knowledge on being more similar to a vocal athlete. Because I will tell you this if we're again talking about athleticism, when I went to college, um, learning to be a professional dancer, which I did do for a while in musical theater. I was in a couple professional gigs, like primarily dancing and then oddly enough, playing my trumpet. It was a very weird combination. But when I was at school and you're really learning to train as an athlete, warmups actually look a little different than maybe what you were taught in gym class and high school or like for the average Joe. Okay. Warm-ups actually do involve a little bit of charging the muscle or conditioning slightly with more maybe ballistic exercises. Um, I say charging because um, like say you're about to go do a dance routine or something really intense, like you're about to do cats, okay? And you're about to dance really intensely for the next two and a half hours. Um, in order to get a better stretch from the viewpoint of an athlete, like an actual dancer, you would want to quote unquote like charge the muscle by maybe doing some kind of you know, weightless hamstring curls, some kind of movement that engages the muscle before you actually stretch into something that's more held, which is called static stretching. Now, again, gonna be clear, the vocal world isn't exactly the same as ballistic versus static stretching because it's it doesn't work exactly the same way, but that's something that I want to keep in mind as I'm giving this distinction between stretching and conditioning. Like vocal warmups, actually, like I think in the broader sense, are really just an attempt to wake up the instrument so it's somewhat ready to use. However, if you're about to do something very vocally athletic, right? You're not just going to like sing at your church choir, you know, in the morning on Sunday and you're just kind of doing something easy. Say you're about to open your community theater production of guys and dolls, and Adelaide's a hard sing for you. You might need to approach your warm-up with a bit of conditioning and balancing so that you are better prepared to actually do the show or the more vocally athletic event. So the first thing I'm determining, right? Warm-up, people are gonna argue about what that actually means. In general, it's about stretching the instrument so it's somewhat ready to use. However, because we're not basic girls over here, okay, I want you to keep in mind what you are about to do from a vocal athletic level to actually inform what is necessary for your voice to do that thing. Okay. I'm gonna give a couple different examples. So we already used the church example. All right, I'm about to go sing Sunday morning and um I'm gonna do some hymns and maybe do a little bit of sexual leading and we maybe had rehearsal, and it doesn't really feel that challenging for me because I'm on the alto line, it's not a whole lot. So for that, for just like, hey, I'm going to do something kind of simple. Um, I just need to wake up my voice. I was just sleeping. I just need to get going in the morning. Okay, especially if we're thinking about morning activities. Um, this would always be the first step anyway, uh, whether you are even doing something more athletic or not. If you have just woken up in the morning and you're about to use your voice at all, this is how I would tell people to actually approach warming up their voice. First thing, do some gentle speech-like things, right? Like so humming, hmm, hmm, good morning, good morning, just speaking in a gentle, spoken, clear sound, right? Watching, good morning, good morning, getting good vocal efficiency and nice even resistance, but doing it in a very gentle way that is just going to warm up your speech pattern. And the reason I'm not having you jump right into like a stretching buzz, like something like that, is because sometimes I equivalate equivalent, I equate it, that's the word. I equate it to getting right out of bed and then going into a split, right? You don't need to stretch to the highest point of your voice as soon as you've risen to the world. You just need to get your body warmed up in the place that it's usually used to speaking, and then we can stretch from there. Okay, so this is like again, straight up I'm warming up at all, or I've I've just woken up and about to use my voice in the morning. First step, humming and speaking. Hmm. Then using some spoken like words. Good morning, good morning. Hmm, hmm. I would do small intervals, either a third or chromatics, meaning half steps. Mmm, I have no idea what pitch I'm on. I have no piano around, so God bless. Okay, excuse if I'm like between pitches, okay? So that kind of, oh, let's just slowly wake her up and what she's used to, right? Treat your body like how you would want to wake up. Would you want to wake up with someone throwing water on your head? Or would you want to gently kind of roll over and like open your eyes and see the sun coming into the window? Okay, treat your body the same way, right? Treat yourself, okay. So we have some humming. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Good morning. Then we're gonna start to move into that longer stretch, but you're gonna go a little bit slower. If you're feeling really crunchy, again, moving into some kind of SOVT. So an SOVT, uh, I have a whole episode on this, but it stands for semi-included vocal tract exercise. And it's something that helps assist the voice to move easily and in a way that feels almost therapeutic and gentle and gives it a little bit of aid and the back pressure of getting the vocal folds to vibrate in an efficient way. Okay, so all that fancy words, some examples of SOVTs that you could start to stretch the range on, either either on an octave or an octave and a half scale, would be a lip buzz, a tongue trill. You can even do a blowfish where you like puff out your your cheeks like a like a fish, and then you have a really little hole in your lips, and then that creates a lot of back pressure, right? We talked about um kind of pretending like you're gonna kiss your hand and then kind of doing the blowfish to create some of that back pressure, right? And so all of those are examples. Oh, oh, one more. Sorry, ADD brain. One more is the V. Just easy ways to get efficient cord closure. Okay. So then once you've kind of warmed up your speaking voice with some humming, gentle things, little movements, then we're gonna do some maybe octave stretches first and then move into octave and a half. So pick your favorite SOVT that I just named tongue, lip, raspberries, any of those things. And let's do some octave slides together. So right now I'm just kind of sliding. You can do an official octave if you want. But if sliding sometimes feels a little bit more comfortable because it's not um as set, and again, it's kind of just wakey wakey, eggs and bakey. Let's just kind of get the voice moving and grooving, okay? Um, so that's those are like the two standard. I am just beginning to use my voice for the first time. We got a stretch. Um, let's do one of those wider scales, like say it's been later in the day and you do need to sing kind of high. You've already been talking. So then I'd probably recommend again the SOVT on a 1.5 scale. So giving you a longer stretch quicker, but that's also like I wouldn't do that first thing in the morning, right? Slow movements, slow stretching, so that we eventually get to the high notes, but we gave ourselves the dignity to wake up a little bit first. So that long 1.5 scale that I was talking about, after you've kind of got her going a little bit, that's when you're gonna stretch your range. Okay. Now, if range is something that you've been wanting to focus on, again, I have an entire episode on this. You can also throw in some vocal function exercises. So again, it's basically using SOVTs, but doing it in a way that the focus is actually starting to stretch the range. Okay. So say you are singing something pretty high and you do need to get into whistles or something like that. Maybe doing one of these exercises first before you then pivot into what we're gonna get into, which is the vocal conditioning element of this, um, will be the next most logical step. Okay. So just a brief introduction to vocal function. You're gonna do three sirens in either direction, okay? And you're gonna feel like your voice is on a roller coaster on a loop-de-loop, okay? Pick the SOVT of choice. I'm gonna try the blowfish because right now, for me, today, that feels like the appropriate amount of back pressure. You can also do all of these if you're feeling extra crusty with a straw and a straw in water blowing bubbles, especially, is really, really, really therapeutic. I get super triggered when I hear like voice teachers that like quite literally don't know what the fuck they're talking about, telling people not to do straw work. Straw work is everything. Straw work is life, okay? Shrek is life, okay? Because of how therapeutic and the benefits of it. So don't let anyone poo-poo you. If you don't like it or don't understand it, that doesn't mean that it wouldn't help you. Okay. So doing these vocal function exercises or even those stretches that I recommended with straw is going to be extra therapeutic if you're just really feeling under the weather. Okay. So this vocal function scale is a loop-to-loop like a slide. So again, if I was to do blowfish, we're gonna do this three times from bottom to top. Now I'm gonna do it again, and I'm gonna think of trying to start a little bit lower and then get a little bit higher as I go up. Okay, last time again, a little bit lower at the start, a little bit higher at the top of it. So that's a gentle movement, a gentle stretch towards actually having a little bit more of an agenda than just warming up because now we're starting to practice a little bit. Oh, can I stretch my range without grabbing? Okay, or trying to squeeze the sound out, right? Can I just, you know, lean into efficient airflow, lean into my belly a little bit, and have that range stretch up. And again, have it be gentle and therapeutic, not like harsh. Okay. Um, then you would do that that same exercise three more times, starting from the top, kind of going down. Woo, right? And you would do that three times, okay? Again, a gentle version of let's see what our range is up to today. Now, if if again you were doing something gentle or you're just using your voice, or hey, even if you have a really long vocal day ahead of you, okay, because this is important to keep in mind how you are setting yourself up for success. If you have to do a two-show day and you're singing the entire score of La Miz because Jean Val Jean, um, you're not gonna actually want to do a really long vocal warm-up because what you're about to do is a marathon. So we also, when we're doing this, want to keep in mind we don't want to blow our load before we get started. Okay. So this is why it really depends on what you're about to do. Something gentle, you're just using your voice, say you're a music teacher, you're just going to work, you're gonna be talking to kids all day. Even just doing the stretches, the warming up, like the speeching, speaking voice and the vocal functions, probably enough to get you started, right? That might even be enough to get you started what we just did. If you have something crazy long marathon coming up and you don't want to like overexert. Okay. Now we're going to focus on hey, so maybe what you have to do is going to be a little bit more vocally athletic. And in order to feel actually warmed up, your priority needs to be balance, right? Like you need to find your voice in the right pocket. You need to find, quote unquote, the right placement to be able to sing the thing. So say you're doing Jean Valjean and you know that you might need a little bit of extra help so that you're finding the right resonance strategy that you're going for. Okay. You're finding the vocal balance so that the rest of the score is easy. Then you're gonna have to do more of what I was telling you earlier. You're gonna have to think a little bit more like a vocal athlete and do something that's a little bit more strategic in vocal alignment, right? So instead of just like doing a couple hamstring stretches and shoulder rolls and calling it a day and going out on the run, you might need to think more specifically about what your body needs to get through that. So, for me, example, for example, if I was about to go dance for two hours, I would need to do kind of almost PT strengthening exercises, right? Doing some resistant bands. Like my my husband had a shoulder injury and he uses resistant bands to warm up the muscles around the injury more than the average across the body shoulder stretch, right? So you're gonna want to do something for your body that is specific to your needs so that you find those quote unquote sweet spots, resonant pockets, or really your vocal alignment, your vocal balance, okay? And this leads me to something that is really important that I share with you today, real quick, um, because it ties directly into what I'm about to talk about. If you ever feel like, okay, that's nice, but I have no idea what that exercise you're speaking of, Sarah, actually is. Like, if you ever find yourself wondering why, like maybe you are trying a bunch of exercises on the internet and nothing seems to actually work for you. And you kind of get what I'm talking about with this vocal conditioning, but like you don't seem to be able to understand what are those actual exercises that your body needs to target the thing that your body needs, right? So you're you're trying everything with your voice, nothing's consistently working, or you're constantly searching for answers online and you still feel confused, or even like again, you know, something's off. You know you're supposed to do something so that you can sing Jean Valjean, but you don't know what that actually is. The only time that you feel vocally aligned is maybe with your voice teacher. And then like every other time you are like so in the dark about how to get your voice feeling that good. And I want to tell you, that's not because you're actually doing something wrong. It's because you've probably never been taught how to actually understand your own voice to the point of knowing how to detect your own vocal needs. What does your voice need specifically to find alignment? And that is exactly why I created Discover. Discover teaches you how to hear what your voice is doing, recognize your vocal tendencies or your vocal habits so that you can pinpoint what your voice, your voice actually needs. So instead of guessing, and again, throwing spaghetti at the wall, being unsure how your teacher got you there in the lesson, and just feeling like you never can feel as good as when you were in there, you finally have some clarity so you can help yourself sing more efficiently without the need of your voice teacher being right there. Some of us are a little codependent with our teacher, okay? Let's be honest. And another point of honesty: if this has been something you've been consistently struggling with, this discover is a very obvious next step. And I'm gonna tell you why. Because I made Discover for a very limited time, completely free. Right now, you can get this information of how to hear exactly what your voice is doing, like a voice teacher, be able to understand what the vocal needs are, and then be able to understand what to do about it. That is completely free, which I do not do often. This is maybe once a year thing. If that, I honestly can never guarantee when I'm gonna do this again. And here is the other catch you only can access this for free until April 10th. April 10th is the cutoff. So you actually need to get it and watch it in completion before April 10th. After that, it's gone. And when it's gone, it's gone. Okay, so unfortunately, if you're listening to this episode retroactively, and it's after April 10th, 2026. Unfortunately, it's not available to you anymore for free. Um, but hopefully you're getting this in time where you can take advantage of this. So, and I now reason I say this, like after April 10th, it's like literally revoked, deleted. You cannot have it, you cannot get it. I'm telling you this because I don't want you to be the person that signs up like you initially are like, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I'm gonna do it. And then it's sitting in your email, either, and then you sabotage, like you don't go through the opt-in in the email, right? Or you don't actually get the course and watch it, you don't finish it. I want you to be the kind of person that's you know what you you know that this is something you need to do, that you actually follow through on it. You're the person that finishes stuff, okay? And this is the kind of thing I'm emphasizing this so strongly because this really is the kind of thing that can genuinely change how you approach your voice for the better. I promise. And I've seen it with hundreds of people, people all over the world love Discover. Okay. So if you're like, that sounds like the bomb, you can get it by swiping up the link in the show notes. Please get Discover. You must watch and finish it by April 10th so that you can truly benefit and get all of the information. Plus, I always love seeding some exclusive discounts, some gifts, some things in there that you're gonna want to know about. Okay. So go go through that, go get it, finish it, and actually give yourself the clarity that you've been missing and you've been, you know, having a hard time with. This is the solution. Okay, so discover. All right, that's the thing that teaches you to understand. How to actually find the sweet spots in your voice, how to get that vocal alignment, how to detect what is actually going wrong so that you can actually fix it. Okay. So as a vocal athlete, as we're starting to condition and warm you up to a place where it actually feels good and efficient to sing, Discover is a no-brainer for this step to actually happen. Okay. So say you have the Jean Valjean thing, you're about to go do a big sin sing. In order to not tire yourself out, I would maybe do, I don't know, one or two balancing exercises. And again, we talk about this a lot more in Discover. But doing those balancing exercises, the ones that work the best and get you there the fastest, are gonna probably be enough to get you really ready to go, but without warming uh wearing you down, wearing you out. Okay. Um, but say you're like someone that's like, oh, I'm just going to class, but I'm about to sing something really hard. Like, I'm gonna go sing Little Women, or I'm gonna go sing My Days from the Notebook. Then you might want to do actually part of your warm-up might be taking exercises that really fully vocally balance you. Okay. Again, we talk about how to understand what these warmups are in Discover. When I talk about vocal balance, again, I explain this more in Discover, but vocal balance is actually the true feeling of being warmed up and completely aligned all the way, right? It's the way you feel when if you have a good voice teacher, some of you don't, but if you have a really good voice teacher, it's it's when you feel you're like, oh my God, I can sing anything, right? It's like that feeling of everything is lined up and you are finding all the resonance pockets, you know the placement, you know exactly where you're going, and you can sing anything your heart desires. That is what vocal balance is, okay? And again, Discover teaches you how to identify what your voice needs so you get to vocal balance. But again, if you're more of a vocal athlete, you want to balance your body before you go do something cray. All right. So that's where the discrepancy of just warming up so that you can use your instrument at all, like I would warm up your voice even before you try to balance, okay? Stretch it before you try to do it. Um, now, how much you vocally balance will depend where you are in that journey of finding consistent balance. I will tell you when I was first studying as a voice teacher and was first starting to understand this concept of vocal balance, or another synonymous word would be like masterfully mixing evenly throughout my range. At that point, I really needed to spend more time on it because it was harder for me to find the balanced feeling. Okay. So I would have to condition for maybe 15, 20 minutes, kind of cycling through exercises that you would learn how to detect and discover. Um, or if you wanted to go deeper, doing a pillars routine, a pillars conditioning program so that I could find it. Now I will say, after longer periods of time of doing that all the time and learning, you know, how to ebb and flow with my changing vocal needs and um being able to anticipate what I actually need to get my voice to vocal balance, that window of time got a lot shorter. Got a lot shorter. I got a lot better um at finding balance, maybe with one or two exercises, and then not having to do a full routine to find it and feel that good. So that's gonna depend. Again, the reason I'm like, oh, how much are you conditioning, how much are you balancing is gonna depend on how good you are at finding balance or how automatic, how muscle memory is that for you now. And I will say over time as you practice that, it gets a lot easier and quicker to find it. So, and and I'm not gonna tell you specifics about what your voice would need to balance or find alignment or find your mix, because again, that really depends on your own voice, your own needs. So if you're like, well, I don't really know how to find balance, then again, go get Discover for free, especially right now. Watch it so you know how to actually do that portion of your workout. Okay. So again, recap. It A, it depends on what you're about to do. Okay. So don't blow, blow yourself out or, you know, do something that's gonna actually cause you to be more tired than not, right? Warm up appropriate to what you're doing. Then we are just warming up the voice to speaking and stretching as an actual quote unquote warm-up. Then we're choosing exercises specifically for us to balance. And the final thing that would be part of your warmup would then be again, finding exercises that are specific to the style you're about to sing. So say you're about to go do, you know, don't rain on my parade and it's a really big belty song. Then I would do a couple belt exercises. So doing some calling, um, adjusting your workouts so you find more vocal fold closure and kind of that pharyngeal, ah, that situation. Um, because that's gonna set you up then for the material you're about to sing. Say you're doing something more classical, even operatic. That's gonna help you pivot into that style by finding some exercises that are curated more closely to singing that style. So if it was more operatic, doing some kind of yawny, stretchy, um, soft palate activating exercises, so like snorting into a siren. Something like that. Um, using closed vowels to get that head dominant mix going. Or maybe some ooze. Maybe doing some octave stretches and then starting to open at the top. Woo! I'm trying not to blow out my level by doing soprano. But do you see what I'm saying? So then, so we warm up the instrument, we balance the instrument, and then we do some exercises to encourage the instrument into the alignment that we need for the material. Okay. That is like the pro way to go, right? And it includes like the conditioning aspect of it, the vocal alignment aspect of it is comparable to ballistic stretches or more of those like PT alignment exercises, than just, you know, the static held. Oh, I'm holding a squat or I'm holding my shoulder across my body, or I'm holding a hamstring stretch. So it's a combination of the two to get your body completely ready to do the vocally athletic thing. Okay. That is the most professional athletic way I can describe how to warm up. I hope that was helpful. Those specific steps and some examples of things that you can actually do for your body. Reminder, if you really want to take this seriously and fully like go for it and do it, you gotta sign up for Discover. Reminder, you have to watch it and finish it by April 10th. It will be revoked. I don't want that for you. And also, I want you to get all the special bonuses and stuff that live inside of that, like little Easter eggs. I mean, it's almost Easter time, so like bet, let's go. Let's get some little chocolatey treats, you know, that live in there. So make sure you take the time to actually watch that so that you're not sabotaging and missing out on this information. All right. If you love this episode, you love this show, make sure you go leave us a written review on Apple Podcast, give us a five-star written review. And if you email the screenshot of the review to me and you send it to singerspath at gmail.com, I'll also enter you to win a free private lesson with me, which we love. We love free stuff. Um, and all of that, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for taking your time to listen, and I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye. Let's work together to spread the joys of music. Until next time, I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, signing off from the Singer's Path Podcast. Thanks for listening.