Hi it's Elissa Weinzimmer founder of Voice Body Connection
and welcome to the How To Warm-Up video series
how to warm up
I created this video series because a
lot of my clients were asking me "Elissa, how should I warm up in the morning or
before I have an audition or an important meeting etc?" Well, here's the
thing, there's no one way to warm up what there is is an intelligence about how to
tell what your body needs on any given day. If I were to create a ten minute
warm-up video and say do this every day follow it by rote, memorize it perfectly,
it would go against what I believe which is teaching you to fish instead of
fishing for you if you will. Right? So what you're gonna learn in this intro
video is the intelligence behind the exercises in this whole series so that
you can on a daily basis or whenever you need put together a warm-up that suits you.
Now let's start with asking a really important question which is, "Why is it
important to warm up?" In my opinion it's important to warm up because it
teaches your body how to behave on a certain day. If you're going out to give
a presentation or to perform and you expect your body to suddenly be there
for you maybe some days it is but on some days you may not be an optimum mode.
you need to give yourself 5, 10, 15 minutes to actually let your body feel
what it feels like to be functioning in an optimum way before you go out on
stage. So, we're going to go through 7 different steps that are the progression
of how the voice works and therefore what you can warm up when you're warming
up your voice and your body to perform. Here we go through those steps.
So here are the seven steps that we go through when our body wants to make sound. The
first step is that we have an impulse. We have a desire to speak, there's a reason,
there's some sort of inspiration for why we want to communicate. The next thing
that happens when our nervous system receives that impulse is that our body
responds in some sort of way, it moves in some way. And one of those movements of
the body is breath, it is breathing, it is the movement of the respiration in order
to get a breath in. Now as that breath comes in our lungs
expand and then as that breath travels up and out it encounters in our airway
vocal cords also known as vocal folds. Those vocal folds are where the sound
occurs which is the really simple way of saying vibration, or the fancy word
for it is phonation. When those vocal cords get set into motion by the airflow
coming through them, and indeed that is actually a physics principle that sets
them into motion, it's an aerodynamic principle. So they start vibrating very
quickly hundreds or even thousands of times per second that makes a sound in
our larynx and our voice box in our throat. Now that sound wouldn't sound
like a human voice yet unless it started to bounce around inside what's called
the vocal tract, which is the tube, your throat, from vocal cords all the way up
through into your mouth and into your nasal passages. Now as that sound bounces
around inside that vocal tract it becomes resonant, it creates
resonance. And so that resonance starts to make it sound more like my voice or
your voice because everyone's tube is a different shape. And then from there we
have articulators, we have speech things that can happen all over with our
lips, our teeth, our tongue, our jaw, etc. And as we articulate we shape that flow
of resonant sound into speech and then finally we compose all of those little
parts of speech into whatever language we've agreed upon to use. And that
language is also communication which can reach the person who is listening to us.
Now those are the seven steps that explain how our voice works and I go
more deeply into this big overview that I did very quickly in my online course
How Your Voice Works, but for now I hope you understand enough to know that if we
warm up each of these steps along the way, we'll have a warm voice.
So as you work your way through this series of videos you'll see that they're organized
into these categories. There are exercises for impulse, body, breathing,
sound, resonance, articulation, and language. What you can do is pick and
choose, see what you like the best and what feels important to you
on any given day in terms of what you need.
You can use these exercises as a pre-warm up before your existing routine
or even as a post warm-up cool down if you'd like.
Or you can just use them as your full warm-up
routine. If you have any questions feel free to let me know below the videos and
of course you can visit me at www.voicebodyconnection.com if you'd like to learn
more about the How to Warm Up series, the How Your Voice Works class, the How to
Have Presence class or any of my other offerings. I look forward to seeing you
over there and in the videos.
How to Warm Up