by Mark JW Graham – Vocal Coach in Nottingham, UK | Book Now
I was chatting with a client this week about taking a rest day for your voice, i.e., days we don’t work on our voices or do singing of any kind.
To be honest, I work on my voice near enough every day. I’m a practice-a-holic. But there is still HUGE power in taking days off on a consistent basis. I actually schedule them in each week, such that I have to opt out of them rather than opt in.
As such, I want to talk about three reasons it’s worth taking vocal rest days.
Preface
Working on your voice for vocal development is like going to the gym. Turning up consistently is worth more than doing several long sets sporadically. However, gym-work and lifting weights is about causing microscopic damage to your muscles, such that your body repairs those holes and build muscle. With voice training we are not seeking this. We are aiming to smoothly co-ordinate our voices better, with as little excess tension as possible, or wear-and-tear due to imprecise/inefficient behaviour.
If you are working on your voice in a consistent, sustainable and healthy way, you SHOULD be able to practice every day with little to no ill-effects. Nevertheless, rest days are important for the following reasons.
Reason 1: Recovery
“But Mark, I thought you said if you’re practicing in a consistent, sustainable and healthy way, you SHOULD be able to practice and use your voice every day?!”
And this is absolutely possible. The very nature of my job means sometimes I have to do so. But we as humans are not perfectly consistent in everything we do. Moreover, none of us is omniscient about HOW perfectly we are practicing. Especially at the beginning of voice training, people convince themselves they are 100% on the money when they are barely doing 50% right.
As a result, even with the best and most precise singers in the world, they cannot guarantee there is not a little bit of excess wear-and-tear going on in their voice when they practice.
If we then practice every day for weeks on end, that wear-and-tear builds up. Add in issues like not sleeping well, even mild colds, stomach bugs, etc, that aggregate of wear-and-tear soon makes itself noticed. Then, you’re trying to fight your way back from ill-healthy.
Worse still, by practicing every day, you become accustomed to however your voice has felt for the last few days/weeks. Which means if you’re building up wear-and-tear in your voice by practicing without any rest days, you become internally oriented towards that worn-and-torn version of your voice, rather than the healthier one.
Reason 2: Developmental bursts
I talked before in this article about how sleep benefits the body. One of the key things is that when we sleep, our brain repeats neural patterns it has been subjected to throughout the day. This is why it always seems easier to perform a particular action the day after you’ve been practicing it – the brain is able to absorb that information as the body lies fallow.
I notice this especially when I’ve been practicing tricky piano pieces. To some extent, I accept pretty major mistakes on the first day I start practicing it, because I know that the next day a lot of those issues will have improved without me trying. How? Because the brain repeats those patterns again at night, refines them, and integrates them into my body. I can then lather/rinse/repeat this process every day, being very light and carefree about my mistakes, trusting in the physiological side of the learning process to sift out the good from the bad.
The same is true for vocal practice.
When we work hard for a week on our voice, giving it a day off helps our brain integrate what we have learned. This couples with the recovery aspect of our first reason, and means when we DO go back to working on our voice, we are doing it on a fresh(er) voice than before, and our body can deploy what it has learned as successfully as it can.
Reason 3: Reset the muscles
This is a very niche point I want to make. We’ve mentioned many times before, that to sing low notes the vocal folds must contract and thicken, and to sing high notes the vocal folds must stretch and thin.
We need elasticity and suppleness in the muscular tissue to do this. It’s fairly obvious that reason 1 (recovery) will obviously aid with this.
But here’s the thing: most people’s choice of songs will bias them towards being overly contracted OR overly stretched out, relative to how their voice would otherwise be.
Consider rock music. Most rock music is more intense/aggressive, and in turn requires a fair bit of contraction to make the desired sound. If someone is having to contract a little harder than their voice would otherwise choose to be, then performing this material everyday will start to tilt the balance of their voice towards being overly contracted. This can sometimes be a huge problem, as it is essentially forcing the voice into an otherwise unnatural state. Damage or vocal problems can arise.
Similarly, many singers singing pop/RnB or other lighter material in a higher range can often end up overly stretched out than where their voice would otherwise sit. In reality, every single one of us will have material that takes us away from our natural ‘speech level’ and can leave us in that unnatural state.
Good news though!
Even a single rest day can permit the body to reset the vocal apparatus. By resting the voice, we allow vocal folds that are overly contracted or overly stretched out (relative to their natural state) to relax and return to a more appropriate condition for them. For those relying on practicing every day to keep them on the straight and narrow, this can be a hard pill to swallow, but it is worth it in the long run.
To wrap up
The simple advice is, once a week or so, take a day off from using your voice like you do the other days. There are benefits from general health, seeing development jump ahead, and also helping you recalibrate your voice by doing so.
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Mark JW Graham - Mark is a high-end vocal coach and singing teacher based in Nottingham, UK.
Certified in Speech Level Singing, and with over 20 years of musical experience, he is known as the "go-to vocal coach" for singers wanting dramatic improvements in their singing voice in a short space of time.
Trusted by singers worldwide, Mark’s expertise as a coach, singer and musician helps clients transform their voices and raise their musicianship to new levels.