hi it's Elissa Weinzimmer founder of Voice Body Connection and it is time for
another how to warm up video
how to warm up
in today's video we're going to do my
favorite exercise for breath support which I like to call the shh let it go
exercise now why is this exercise important because it reminds us of the
pattern our body needs to be in to support our voice most fully I want to
share a metaphor with you that describes how our voice moves through our body
think about a toothpaste tube when you squeeze a toothpaste tube you want to
squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom because then all of the
toothpaste will go up and out in the useful direction if you squeeze the
toothpaste tube somewhere in the middle some of the toothpaste goes down some of
the toothpaste goes up and you have the stuff that goes down gets stuck down at
the bottom and you have to do more work later to use it so this metaphor is
really similar to how we squeeze our torso if you will to allow our voice to
flow up and out of us and this is actually a really key concept that I
love to talk about which is that our voice travels up and out of us right our
breathing mechanisms are down here our vocal cords are here and the people who
are receiving it are out there
so voice travels in this direction now squeezing
the toothpaste tube in the middle is akin to squeezing at your throat or
squeezing in your rib cage somewhere lower than the abdominal muscles down at
the bottom of your torso what we want to do is squeeze the toothpaste tube from
the bottom so from the abdominal muscles and send everything up and out when we
squeeze in the middle we sort of do what I like to call a poopy breath I get that
from my mentor Leslie Cavanaugh he came up with that phrase and a poopy breath
is when we're sending our energy down in the poopy direction when in fact we want
to send it up okay so let's talk about our abdominal muscles
so we have three layers of abdominal muscles the outermost layer is called the rectus
abdominis it goes from below our ribcage right underneath our ribcage down to the
pubic bone it runs up and down with fibers like this
and you may know it as your six-pack although it is in fact an eight pack and
we all have it it just might be obscured by other things but that muscle
contracts us in this direction so it shortens our torso it protects our
abdominal contents and also it sort of brings us into a sit-up it's the muscle
we're exercising when we do sit-ups underneath the rectus abdominis we have
two layers of obliques we have the internal and external obliques internals
go this way externals go this way and as they crisscross they help us with our
coughing and our laughing is a really nice way to access them so if you laugh
or if you cough they contract inwards and also we practice them when we do our
bicycle exercise at the gym or when we're doing any sort of twisting we're
engaging our obliques underneath the obliques the deepest layer is a muscle
called the transversus abdominus or the transverse abdominus and it has fibers
that go side-to-side sort of like a weight belt so they come around from the
spine all the way around wrapping in our torso this transversus abdominus muscle
is kind of what we would think of as our core muscle and it is in fact the muscle
that we want to think about primarily when we're thinking about breath support
in order to engage this transversus abdominus layer here's a nice way to
think about it is like you're zipping up a pair of jeans that are one size too
small for you so you're trying to squeeze and get tight right where you
would need to be skinny to button up your jeans but you can maybe tell that
your ribcage actually is making more space in order for that to happen this
action which in fact does engage all three layers of the abdominal muscles is
the action that we want for breath support
so now how do we do the shh let it go
exercise like this put one hand on your low belly thumb at your navel at
your belly button and the rest of your hand below that release that area of
your body which you can tap into the release on the inhalation idea or the
belly massage that we've done in other videos to allow you to feel the ability
to release your belly here and then on a SH sound you're gonna draw that low belly in
similar to how we just imagined zipping up our jeans it goes something like this
and then of course if you want to do it again you're gonna have to let go in
between so let's do it a couple times pulsing here we go Shh let go Shh
let go Shh let go Shh let go Shh let go fabulous okay let's look at what this
looks like standing up
here's what it looks like
okay there are a couple things I want you to pay attention to while you're
doing this exercise number one you gotta let your belly go okay let it all hang
out that's really important on the inhalation number two on the exhalation
you want it to feel like one continuous stream of shh coming up and out of you if
it's a little discombobulated if you're squeezing a little bit in your throat or
in your chest you may actually hear a different sound quality with your shh it may
sound tense like shh-shh-shh-shh so make sure that you've got that energy
flowing up and out from the guts of you which will sound like
shh-shh-shh easy flowing not a lot of extra turbulence okay the other
diagnostic you can use is to pay attention to your chest so put one hand
on your chest and the other hand on your belly when you do the shh sound your chest
should go up a teeny a little bit because that lets you know that the
energy is flowing up and out it'll look a little bit like this shh-shh-shh
there's a little bounce upwards as you may be able to see if you're doing the
opposite if you're squeezing your chest down as you say the shh sound
shh-shh that means that we're doing the poopy breath energy and we don't want that
the last thing to say is that once you have mastered the Shh let it go you
can graduate to the hey let it go now hey is a useful sound because it starts
with an H which is going to allow for an easy onset at the vocal cords and also
it allows for phonation vibration of the vocal
cords themselves so you can practice with hey let go hey same action with the
belly hey hey and you can even go up and down and pitch as you do this hey hey
hey hey so have fun with this as you do it
as you integrate this into your warm-up I recommend that you do 8 "shh let it go"-s
followed by 8 "hey let it go"-s and I really highly recommend that you put
this exercise in your warmup because in case you have any other squeezing
pulling poopy breath patterns in your body this will remind your body how
you'd like it to behave supporting your breath up and out now this is of course
a breathing exercise in the how to warm up series and if you want to see more
about how to put it in context with other exercises watch the how to warm up
series intro video thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing
you in a future video
how to warm up