Hi, I'm Trisha Homer. We're gonna talk a little bit about the importance of warming up vocally and physically before you present. You want to find a quiet place where you can be free to just be goofy and let it go. Warming up is critical because it helps you to get grounded and get centered so that you're able to better connect to your audience. You can do this in your car, you can do it in the bathroom, if you have an office door you can close the office door to warm up before that big meeting or that big presentation.


One of the most critical pieces of warming up physically and vocally is breathing. If you're connected to your breath, you're more connected to your own emotions, and if you're connected to yourself emotionally you'll be able to better connect with your audience. So in order to breathe deeply, just make some quiet space, quiet time. Inhale through your nose, fill your diaphragm as you inhale, hold that breath, and exhale through your mouth. Often times I tell students to breathe deeply and you see their chest rise, right? That's not a deep breath. Breathing deeply is breathing down into the depths of your stomach, really trying to actually breathe into the small of your back. Inhale, hold it, and exhale slowly.


The next step to a vocal warmup is resonance. Resonance is about where your voice, where the sound resonates in your body. So I tend to have a very kind of nasal high-pitched voice; some folks have a really low deep voice, and this is about where the sound is resonating. So what we want to do to resonate, to warm up our resonators, is to just hum, move the sound throughout your body. So start deep, low in your belly, move it up to your chest, move it up into your throat, move it up into your head, into your high voice. Now we may not use all of those areas of our resonance or of our voice, but it's important to warm it all up so that we have access to all of the different tones within our body. So this is what it would look like: 


Hmmmmm...


So after breathing, you want to warm up your resonators. The next piece is vocal projection. You've warmed up your voice, you open up your chest, and now we're gonna work on tossing the sound across the room. So in order to do this, you want to bend your knees, have one foot in front of the other, and swing your arm like you're tossing a ball. At the bottom of your swing, you're gonna say "ha" and chuck the sound across the room. It looks like this:


Ha! Ha! Ha!


And switch:


Ha! Ha! Ha!


One way to work on your projection is to pretend you're tossing a javelin across the room. It looks like this:


Ha! Ha! Ha!


So you're really getting your voice ready to fill a room. Another critical piece of a vocal warmup is getting your face physically warm. You can rub your hands together, get them nice and warm, put them on your cheeks and your jaw, relax the jaw. We often hold a lot of tension in our jaw. Feel your jaw right now, are you holding tension? And then just drop that jaw and say "ahh" really attractively:


Ahh...


Don't be afraid to look silly. Ahh... at any tone, any pitch, whatever comes out, always breathing deeply, always coming back to that breath. The other thing you can do is squeeze all the muscles in your face or open all the muscles in your face:


Ahh...


Right? Nice and big, really getting all that tension relieved and giving yourself full access to your range of emotions. You can also blow raspberries to get your lips ready for articulation. 


Now let's talk about articulation. Articulation is something many of us are familiar with: tongue twisters. My favorite tongue twisters, my two favorites are: "unique New York, unique New York" and "red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather." Say that fast five times. So what you're gonna do with your tongue twisters is you're gonna over-enunciate, exaggerate as much as possible, and you're gonna try to pick up the pace as you say each tongue twister. So let's try:


Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather.


And now we're warm and ready to articulate our best. A few tactics to get warm physically: one, isolations. So I think of the top of my body all the way down to the tip of my toes, and I just move body part by body part starting with my neck. I do circles with my neck, stop and reverse, just like an athlete or a dancer would. And then you want to do shoulder rolls, again like an athlete or a dancer. Have some fun with it, right? Stop and reverse, and just moving through your body, get down to your hips, really releasing any tension that you might have. And oftentimes, releasing physical tension can also relieve and release emotional tension. This helps to calm your nerves, just getting into your body. 


And so while you're warming up and getting ready for that presentation, you're not overthinking it. You're not thinking about your notes, you're not thinking about your PowerPoint deck, your slides. You're really getting grounded in your body. This is the importance of the physical warm-up.


Another thing that you can do physically is to tense and release all of the muscles in your body, again moving through your body. So starting at your fingertips, squeezing your fists as tight as you can, inhaling, exhaling, and releasing that tension, and then continuing to move through your body. So doing the same with trying to tense your forearms, really isolating, trying to tense your biceps, and then moving to your shoulders, taking a few seconds with each of these body parts. This is something that you can actually do while you're in the room preparing to present and no one can know that you're doing it. So you can be squeezing your toes and your shoes in a large meeting, breathing deeply, and preparing to say that really important thing or ask that question that you're afraid to ask.


This routine, this vocal and physical warm-up, actors do this before they perform for 15 to 30 minutes before performance. I recommend you try to have at least seven minutes to do this before you present. If you don't have seven minutes, here's a quick tip: Just yawn. I know, right? Yawn. Yawning is a great way to get that face, that throat open, to breathe deeply, and also to get a quick physical warm-up in. So if you can't find a quiet space right before you walk into that big meeting, let out a big yawn.