Digging Deeper into Mechanisms: How Exercises and Stretching Impact the Voice
Thursday 21st March 2024, 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM (London Time)
Deeply embedded into voice care, interventions such as stretching and exercise have a simple premise: stretch what’s tight and strengthen what’s weak. Tight and weak muscles are often seen as culprits needing remediation, but what goes into these interventions? Though pleasantly simple narratives, the mechanisms behind such interventions are nuanced and variable. This short course will guide the learner into a deeper understanding to provide a more straightforward path to client instruction.
Paralleling problems in more general research, outcome-based studies often fail to thoroughly examine the traditional underlying explanations for why a problem exists and how change occurs via the intervention. Those mechanisms are the gap between a problem and a successful outcome. Witness the myriad of approaches claiming success with various aspects of voice. Based on a general complaint, each method tends to claim problems (tightness, weakness, poor form or technique, sub-optimal posture, incorrect breathing, etc.) and set forth to devise a study to remediate the problem. When the problem is helped, the work is seen as a success, but the logic used often falls into post hoc fallacy issues.
Fully vetted and accepted mechanisms of action for voice interventions are rare. How an intervention works is nuanced and can be viewed from various perspectives. Each model tends to be not wrong but also not entirely correct. Does this sound confusing? Join me as we explore this uncertainty and clear a path forward.
Walt Fritz
Walt Fritz, PT, has evolved traditionally taught tissue-based approaches into a unique interpretation of manual therapy. This approach advances views of causation and impact from historical tissue-specific models into a multifactorial narrative, leaning heavily on biopsychosocial influences.
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
Learn MoreSorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
Wednesday 4th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 11th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 18th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 25th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 1st April 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 8th April 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
(London Time)
Learn to Coach RP and SSBE – a Certificate in Accent Coaching
Louisa Morgan
This six-week course is an opportunity to learn about both Received Pronunciation and Standard Southern British English. Rather than a course in learning how to speak RP/SSBE (there are many brilliant available courses for this already), this course is about learning how to coach it.
Tuesday 17th March 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
The Use of Vibrato in Belt and Legit Styles of Singing in Professional Female Musical Theatre Performers
Dr. Alyssa Becker
Shaped by the popular music of its time, musical theatre blends storytelling with an ever-evolving range of vocal styles—from classical legit singing to jazz, hip-hop, and powerhouse belting. Despite its importance, much of what we understand about vibrato comes from laboratory-based studies that strip singing of its musical, stylistic, and performance context. Join Dr Alyssa Becker as she connects current research with real-world pedagogy, revealing how elite musical theatre performers strategically use vibrato to shape style and storytelling, and showing how these insights can be applied in the voice studio to train stylistic flexibility and control!
Wednesday 18th March 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
Facilitating Jaw Release Through Improved Habits of Stance and Alignment
Ruth Williams Hennessy
Are you a singer or speaker struggling with stubborn jaw tension that just won't quit? Even with elite training, the "stuck" jaw is often a symptom of a surprising culprit: your feet! Join Ruth Hennessy in this interactive workshop where she bridges the gap between podiatry and phonation, moving beyond "temporary fixes" to address the physical misalignments that bottleneck your performance.