Posture, balance and voice

When you speak, whether your posture is standing, sitting or otherwise, it's always something dynamic in constant struggle with gravity. This means that the skeletal muscles are in constant tension. This tension limits the expressive potential of the voice.

Posture or attitude?

Mylena Vocal Coach prefer to use the term postural balance, or alignment, to prevent you from instinctively thinking about what is actually defined as "attitude".

Attitude is the way you present yourself to others that reflects a certain state of mind or a particular choice. To put an attitude into practice, we need to coordinate and arrange all our limbs, but we cannot yet speak about posture. Posture is something more internal, which has to do with balance and gravity.

Whatever this balance is, it must be natural: it cannot be looked for "once in a while" to give a speech or for a performance, also because the balance itself is necessarily something dynamic, always in motion. In fact, it is enough to stretch an arm to make the rest of the body compensate for the imbalance that arises, making vain and even more rigid any kind of unnatural posture.

The posture adopted more or less unconsciously by someone also indirectly defines the way he or she presents himself or herself to others, that is, it is part of the mask he or she has built to show himself or herself to the world as a protection against his or her own fears. Unfortunately, the posture that one tends to assume is seldom optimal, to the extent that almost everyone, sooner or later, develops problems with back pain.

How to correct bad posture?

The first step for those who want to get their voice back, whether they want to be an actor , a singer , a voice over actor , a journalist , a teacher , etc., is to correct any incorrect attitude.

The good alignment of the body, accompanied by a muscular balance and a natural diaphragmatic breathing , are the basis of any training that deals with the body as a whole, from sports to just walking: so it will be obvious to all that it can not be left out of any Voice Training and left to chance.

Balance and Relaxation

Each of us will have noticed that our vocal expressiveness is "compromised" if we are under some kind of physical effort (from pushing a car to unscrewing a cap). This is the same thing that happens in a less evident way, every moment of our life when we hold the body under constant "tension". Often tension has become so much a part of us that we can no longer perceive it as such.

Tension in the body results in less perception of what surrounds us, less efficient breathing that leads to a phonation under stress and an unclear vocal articulation.

Relaxation is a fundamental concept for the development of any human capacity. If you are not relaxed you do not have full control of your mind and body. This is even truee when it comes to the voice.

The instinct to stiffen is natural, in fact you stiffen even as newborns, to protect yourself from any perceived danger. Once adults, we continue to do so unconsciously: the tension becomes part of us and no one even realizes we're tense anymore! When this happens the muscular tension is said to become systemic, in fact if you have the intention to tighten only the fist, automatically the whole arm, shoulder, back and even the legs will enter in traction: everything happens instinctively to maintain the delicate postural balance of our body.

It is easy for everyone to understand that a tense body is always under muscular effort, so it consumes precious energies that could be directed into something more useful and less harmful to ourselves, such as vocal expressiveness .