The Voice of a Teacher

Vocal training for stamina, creativity, and control in verbal yoga teaching 

One of the most overlooked unexpected skills of teaching yoga is its vocal requirements. If you jump right into teaching a few times a week or even a day, you may notice a specific exhaustion creep up. The dry throat, the croaky flat end-of-class Om, the unusual silences at social gatherings…a tired voice strikes in subtle but significant ways. 

So what to do about it? I admit when I first came up against my vocal limitations as a yoga teacher, I chose to power through and continue. Then 5 years into teaching yoga, in the early hours at the studio, before the room spread with neutral-toned rectangles and condensation, I found myself enjoying the dawn with the same ritualistic warm-ups I would do before stepping out on stage. Yoga…and acting… The two disciplines I had been exploring throughout the year came into glaring synchronicity, connected in the moment by their shared interest in training the voice. Humming at the wall and shifting my voice and weight back and forth, I knew that that crossover would become an intentional interest as I continued to grow as a teacher and actor. 

Along my journey (though far from being even halfway done), I’ve found a few things helpful that I’d like to share. Before diving in, there’s more to say on exactly WHY this training can be helpful: 

• Prevent vocal fatigue—Learning how to use your voice gives you tools for teaching longer, clearer, and with a new creativity and control. 

• Improve clarity and accessibility—the clearer you are, the more accessible your classes can be for people of different hearing and language capacities. 

• Connect to yourself—the voice is deeply personal, like an invisible fingerprint. Giving your voice some attention, care, and room to play is a facet for release and self-exploration.

• Upskill your teaching—broaden the knowledge that informs your teaching style and may be specifically interesting to certain yogis. 

These are only a few of the interconnected benefits that can come from vocal training. Whether it's only half an hour each week, or a few minutes before each class you teach, or just a simmering focus infused into every class, any dosage of vocal training is a good amount. 

And now for the main event: some tips and exercises for vocal training for yoga teachers: 

Training Intonation and Projection

As yoga teachers, we want volume without sounding too rigid, at the least amount of effort. Practice projection to strengthen that ability to be heard without strain. Standing with your hands on your diaphragm, feel how your body expands and deflates with every breath. Imagine flinging a strong “Ha!” to bounce off the wall and back. Go on and give it a try. Feel how your diaphragm engages to push that sound out from a space not very far from where we think of uddiyana banda. During your teaching, drop that vocal awareness to the diaphragm, the sound verbatim through your bones (as opposed to vibrating through the muscles of the mouth or throat). Using the diaphragm conserves energy to make a big sound with less effort. 

On the note of clarity, there is a very human tendency to let our sentences, especially when encouraging a relaxed or meditative space, trail off or lilt downwards at the end. Read a poem or any text with specific attention to the end of the sentence. Using that diaphragm, push those last few words of each sentence into a new intonation, never mind if it sounds weird or wacky. This introduced the body to an awareness that can kick in with more practice to make each of those cues heard until the end. 

Warm up before teaching.

We tend to accept the voice as an invisible phenomenon that happens automatically. If you really take seconds to think about where the voice comes from, it is a very advanced physical apparatus that, just like your joints and muscles, can only benefit from the extra care to warm up.

Three S’s for a warm voice

Stretch—make your mouth as wide as possible, open your eyes as well, similar to lion breath, and stick your tongue out. Slowly bring your facial expression to exactly the opposite, willing your nose and mouth like you are biting down on a big juicy lemon. 

Siren—with a relaxed diaphragm and having knees lightly bent and shoulders and arms relaxed, behind to hum the lowest note you can. In the same breath, slowly draw your note up to the highest you can, then back down again. Keep the sound like a steady pull of elastic as it grows higher and lower. Repeat the same with the mouth open with different bowel sounds. 

Sigh—seated in heros pose or extended child's pose, breathe in deeply and sigh out of the mouth as if you've had the most exhausting day ever. Then do the same as if you were drinking tea. Repeat with different qualities.

The voice and workout struggle. 

Sometimes it's two hours, sometimes it's only ten minutes—it takes a while to warm up to practicing while speaking. When you do end up exhausted beyond words, reduce cueing to minimal and take a moment to either pause your practice or take a walk off your mat and continue cueing.

Then there’s everyone’s favorite word: cardio. For me that would be running, a relatively new activity that obviously made its mark on my vocal stamina. Now running is definitely not everyone's thing, but that is just to say that the occasional cardio practice goes a long way. Activities like running, cycling, and dancing train breathing practices that build the natural instincts to manage breathing economically to sustain vocal control during effort. 

Talk Less! 

It’s amazing how much we say without realizing it. This is definitely a matter of personal taste, and for me—less is more. I’m a big fan of minimalist cueing, especially helpful if you also happen to exhaust your voice easily. Listen to yourself cueing and observe how you could retrain some of those “and then we,” “Ok, now,” and other filler habits that might oversaturate the main ideas of your class. At the same time, your voice shows off your personality, and don’t let minimalism snuff out those occasional jokes, metaphors, or other idiosyncrasies of your cueing. Keep it simple, but not at the cost of your style or uniqueness.

Nutrition

Everyone's voice reacts differently to different foods and drinks. In general, a hydrated body and voice is a happy one. Some foods can irritate your throat and vocal folds, such as caffeine, sugar, and spicy and greasy foods. While you will not cause permanent damage, the irritation and inflammation can be uncomfortable for long days of teaching. Especially during a busy time or before leading an intensive such as teacher training or a retreat, I always keep extra hydrated and skip the morning coffee. 

Is that enough to get you started? Let the vocal journey begin!