As has been endlessly reported over the past 15 years, there is a growing emphasis on physique in the opera industry. Singers are taking an increased interest in the overall wellness and shape of their bodies. Opera stars like Joyce DiDonato and Lisette Oropesa openly advocate for fitness. DiDonato credits her yoga practice for her superior stamina and breath control, and Oropesa considers a four- to five-mile run an integral part of her warm-up routine before every performance. The Barihunks Blog celebrates the buffest of our deep-voiced men. And, of course, directors now want performers to look as convincing as possible in their roles.
While improving your overall fitness can yield fantastic results for your vocal technique, movement skills, and appearance, if this improvement in fitness is accompanied by a significant weight loss, there can be a detrimental impact on the way your instrument functions. For a singer, major weight loss must therefore be undertaken with great care, ideally with professional supervision. In addition to your diet and fitness regimen, you will need to adopt strategies to ensure that skill and strength replace the role that your weight has been playing in your technique.
There is a good reason to expect bigger voices to come in bigger bodies: increased weight provides considerable assistance with breath management. As you sing, gravity causes the extra weight in your viscera to exert a significant downward pull on your rib cage as the diaphragm strives to return to a relaxed state. The diaphragm ascends more gradually, slowing the release of air from your lungs, resulting in greater subglottal breath pressure. This means that your breath is more concentrated—or, as some voice teachers describe it, more “compressed.” The more concentrated your air flow, the greater its impact on your vocal folds, enabling you to do things like sing with heavier registration, access fuller resonance, and sustain longer phrases. This is one reason why heavier singers are often able to produce a more dramatic sound.
This does not mean that heavier singers must sacrifice vocal quality should they choose to slim down. It is possible to supplant all the benefits their weight confers with technical skill, and it is likely that doing so will lead them to enjoy even greater volume, resonance, and sustaining power. Technique is something you can control moment to moment, but your body mass is constant. While a heavy abdomen may increase subglottal breath pressure, it doesn’t provide any help with regulating that breath pressure—it’s exerting the same downward pull at all times. Excessive weight increases the effort required to maintain good alignment and perform stage movement and may make it challenging to maintain the optimal health and energy level that your singing career demands.
What this means is that if you wish to reduce your body mass by 20 percent or more, you must develop an alternate means of optimizing your subglottal breath pressure to ensure your transformation will enhance your voice rather than cause harm.
You have two available strategies for increasing your subglottal breath pressure. Unfortunately, the most expedient and intuitive way to do it is far less effective and potentially harmful.
Hook & Push
The swiftest way to increase your subglottal breath pressure is to tighten up your throat and then override that tightness by driving the breath against it. You can create the tightness by over-adducting your vocal folds, pushing the base of your tongue back and down, and/or tightening up your constrictor muscles. You can then drive the breath by pushing with your abdominal muscles, compressing your sternum down, and/or pulling in your rib cage.
As uncomfortable as this sounds, it is a very effective and easy way to increase subglottal breath pressure, and that’s why so many singers do it. Some are even able to achieve a very impressive sound with this strategy. However, it comes with a high price tag.
If your approach to breath management uses your laryngeal musculature to increase subglottal breath pressure, then the musculature is no longer entirely available to do what you need it to do. Your vocal folds are not able to freely vibrate while creating pitches and dynamics, because they’re also responsible for creating resistance for the breath to push against. Your larynx is not free to remain in a settled, low position because when you drive breath pressure at it, it will consequently ascend—which means that if you want a low larynx, you have to hold it down, taxing the musculature even further.
I doubt that many singers intentionally tighten up their throats and then drive a lot of air between their folds in the name of vocal technique. I assume most of you understand the importance of a relaxed throat and a low larynx and know you’re not supposed to “push.” But there simply aren’t two ways about it. If your breathing strategies include mobilizing your abdominal and/or costal muscles to support your breath, you have, to some extent, built a technique around creating resistance in your throat and overriding it with breath pressure. There can be no distinction between this kind of “support” and pushing. It’s just a question of scale.
When singers’ voices deteriorate after significant weight loss, it is most likely because they have compensated for the way their weight once contributed to their breath management by hooking and pushing. They lose resonance because the higher and louder they sing, the more their larynx ascends. They sacrifice the ability to spin out long phrases because the increased laryngeal resistance requires greater breath expenditure. They fatigue swiftly because the vocal folds give out from the effort.
‘La lotta vocale’
“La lotta vocale,” or “vocal struggle,” is the foundation of what the Bel Canto specialists call appoggio breathing technique. Methods vary for teaching this technique, but what they all have in common is an emphasis on keeping the muscles of inspiration dynamically engaged while singing. The “struggle” implied by lotta vocale occurs when air that would normally just flow out on exhalation is restricted by the continued activity of these muscles of inspiration.
My approach to breath management emphasizes maintaining a high, stable sternum and continuing to engage the muscles of costal inspiration while singing. Maintaining the sternum like this contributes to good alignment. Many of the muscles that act on the larynx are anchored in the sternum, so when your sternum stays in one place, it creates a stable platform for those muscles.
While the intercostals are the main muscles of costal inspiration, there is a complex network of muscles around the ribs that contribute to their elevation and assist with inspiration. These include the pectoralis major, pectoralis minor, serratus anterior, levatores costarum, and serratus posterior superior.
These inspiratory muscles can potentially all work together to stabilize the rib cage in an expanded position, contributing to good alignment while doing nothing to create resistance anywhere near your larynx and vocal folds.
Releasing your breath while using your muscles of inspiration to hold back the flow concentrates and compresses the air, thus increasing subglottal breath pressure without the need to create resistance with your glottis. When you do this, you provide your vocal folds with a higher concentration of breath without pushing any breath out.
It takes time and focused, consistent effort to develop the requisite strength and coordination for proper breath management. If your technique has been enhanced by some extra abdominal weight, you may not have spent much time on breath management because it just didn’t seem necessary. But as you lose that weight, you must replace it with skill. Here are some exercises to help you get started.
Building Awareness
• With good upper-body alignment, take a full, deep breath.
• Allow your sternum to rise and your ribs to expand in all directions.
• When your lungs are at full capacity, try to continue to inhale.
• Continue pretending to inhale for 10 to 15 seconds after reaching full capacity.
• Release your breath fully.
• You should now be able to sense where the effort was being exerted as you were sustaining the movement of inhalation.
• Where do you feel it?
• Repeat this process.
• Do you feel the effort in the same places the second time?
• Different places?
• Additional ones?
While you were using all of your muscles of inspiration to inhale, the ones where you are likely to feel the exertion are probably related to costal inspiration, as the diaphragm contains no sensory nerves. Everyone senses this movement differently, and you will likely be more aware of some of your inspiratory muscles than others. For most singers, it takes repeated exploration to figure out how to voluntarily engage these muscles independent of the breathing process. Be patient and, with practice, you will get an increasingly clear sense of how they all move.
Building Strength
Applying a reasonable amount of resistance to your rib cage further increases awareness of the muscles of costal inspiration and helps to strengthen them. You can use either a Thera-Band or a rib belt.
Wrap the Thera-Band or rib belt around your rib cage so it provides enough resistance that it requires a little extra effort to inhale, but not so much that you can no longer expand your rib cage fully.
Practice exhaling while continuing to expand your rib cage. Once you have developed the coordination to do this fairly easily, try performing some sustained vocal exercises or long phrases from your repertoire while continuing to expand against the resistance provided by the device.
At first, you will probably find that you are unable to keep your ribs expanded while singing. That’s fine. As long as you are able to slow the rate at which your ribs contract, you will build strength in these muscles. To whatever extent you’re able to increase strength and coordination in your muscles of costal inspiration, there will be payoff for your skill in breath management. Perform this exercise regularly, and your strength will increase. Take it easy the first few times you try this—as with any new strength training exercise, you may experience some muscle soreness the following day and will need to recover before attempting another rib workout.
If you’re pursuing a weight loss program through diet and exercise, you can gradually build strength in breath management as your weight gradually decreases—and you may notice no change to your singing other than an increased sense of freedom and control.
If, however, your doctor has recommended an intervention like gastric bypass surgery that will result in much swifter weight loss while requiring some recovery time, understand that retraining your technique will take just as long as it would have if you had lost the weight gradually. While these treatments may expedite your weight loss, there is no way to expedite the development of strength and coordination. Take a break from your performance schedule, set your heavier repertoire aside for a few months, work with someone who is skilled in teaching breath management—and vigilantly avoid the temptation to hook and push!
Weight loss complemented by exercise can greatly improve your breathing for singing. “Once you learn to use your breath support in a more engaged way because you are not as heavy, you don’t get as tired as often, and your heart rate lowers and your breath expanse is a lot better,” Oropesa shared in an interview for Runner’s World magazine. “My breath control has gone through the roof because my heart rate is low.”
Mezzo-soprano Olivia Ward, the Season 11 winner of ABC’s reality show The Biggest Loser, comments that “When I was extremely overweight—I didn’t realize it at the time but can see it now as the result of this experience—you have this natural pressurization of the breath . . . a natural resistance. I’m so thankful that during my weight loss, exercise and daily activity was such a big portion of how I lost the weight.” Olivia’s exercise regimen helped increase her awareness of the muscles required for skillful breath management and facilitated the gradual retraining of her vocal technique.
How you choose to manage your weight is very personal. Singers with powerful, dramatic voices will always be in demand, regardless of the shape and size of their bodies. It is possible to become a radiantly healthy, virtuosic singer without cultivating a svelte physique. However, if you wish to radically transform yourself while continuing to pursue vocal excellence, you must carefully attend to the way the changes in your body affect the functioning of your technique.
If your doctor recommends surgical intervention or your trusted professional team believes weight loss will benefit your career, take their advice to heart—but make sure your treatment plan or strategies include a long-term, sustainable regimen for developing skill in breath management and get to work on it at the same time you implement your weight loss program.
