Practicing vs. Warming Up

It often comes as a shock to my college students (or let's be honest, it's a shock to many professional singers as well) when I tell them that warming up and practicing aren't exactly the same thing. They share qualities and often overlap, but they have different goals and different strategies. Let's break it down a bit.

What is warming up?

I always tell my singers that the goal of a vocal warm up is to prepare for an upcoming vocal task. So, if you're warming up before an audition, you need to prepare your voice for what you have to do in the room. This means that you will choose exercises that allow you to ease into voice use, find some balance and stretch in your voice, and get the sounds that you need for the audition ready.

I often say that warming up is like putting the train on the track so that it can effortlessly drive up and down hills, take fast turns, and do anything else that it might need to do. If you don't put the train on the track before traveling, then the train might be dragged up a hill, or thrown off the tracks on a fast turn. This is what your voice can feel like if you sing without a warmup. That's about as far as my train metaphor goes, but I think you get the idea.

You want your warmup to be the moment in the day when you're waking your voice up, assessing what feels easy and what feels challenging, and taking the time to connect with the sounds and sensations you want to have happen on stage/in the room. Your warmup can help you pick what song to sing in an audition that day. It can help you decide if you want to take those options up in tonight's show. It can even help you determine if you need to call out for your show or skip that audition.

You should feel warm in about 5-15 minutes, depending on the day and the tasks needed. Sometimes with demanding shows, some people might need to stretch their warm up out a bit longer on really tired days, but it shouldn't take you 30-45 minutes to feel warm every single day. If you do too much during your warmup, you will start to fatigue vocally (this can happen without you even knowing it!). A little fatigue might not be a big deal if you're just warming up to sing 16 bars at an audition, but could be a really big deal if you're singing a demanding role 8 times a week.

So then what is practicing?

Well, the definition states that practicing is "to perform a skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one's proficiency." So if warming up is about preparing for a vocal task, practicing is about improving or maintaining your singing.

This might mean that when practicing you do more exercises than you would during a warm up in order to work a greater variety of skills. This could also mean that you focus some exercises on tasks that are new or more challenging for you. Maybe you could also go slower and do more tweaking and experimenting with your voice as you work on developing new skills.

The metaphor I make here is a comparison to ballet (yay more metaphors!) In ballet class, you spend a great deal of time doing barrework. This is similar to the vocal work I take my clients through when we're working on improving technique. We spend a great deal of time working on exercises that focus on specific skills, just like barrework. In order to improve your singing, you need to do some vocal barrework each week. This means more focused and varied work than what you might do in a short warmup.

So, why do I make this distinction?

Because just warming your voice up will not always improve your skillset. It simply prepares you for a vocal task. If you are currently in college and have a few singing classes each week, you are probably warming up before each class, but how often are you working on your weaker singing skills by practicing? If you're in audition season and warming up daily, how often are you actually improving your skillset through practice? If

you're in a slow season of auditions and performing work, how often are you making time for practice in order to maintain and improve your skills? You get the idea.

When you practice, you will warm yourself up naturally through the process, but warming up is not always practice unless you choose a specific skill to focus on (but remember that you don't want to fatigue yourself by doing too many exercises). Your focus as a singer should be on keeping a strong balance between practice and warming up. How often you do each task weekly may change as you move through your life and career. When I meet a singer who is frustrated with their progress, I immediately ask them about their practice habits and try to hone in on if they are actually practicing when they sing or if they are just warming up and then singing repertoire. It takes time to really understand the difference between the two tasks and even takes time to understand the difference each make in your singing.

If you currently feel stuck in your technical progress, take a hard look at your weekly singing routine and see if you think you are spending more time warming up than practicing. Adding in more focused practice could be a missing element in your progress. Learning actually how to practice is an entire other conversation, so stay tuned for ways to make the most of your practice time.