Hi #BoothHealth Tuesday friends. This is Mr. Peeve. He is my pet peeve. I asked Voice Actor and Vocal Coach, Nic Redman Voice to tell me her pet peeve in the vocal health world.

She said “It’s completely useless to say ‘use the diaphragm’ as the solution to many voice issues. It’s not a useful piece of advice because we can’t feel our diaphragm as there are no proprioceptive nerves in it, so it’s not actually possible to know if you are ‘using it’ because we literally can’t feel it. It’s much more useful to focus on release of the abs on the IN breath”.

Great advice, Nic! Now add my advice, which is to drop the shoulders and let your body feel heavy on the OUT breath.You won’t “feel your diaphragm being used”, but you’ll be using that workhorse of a muscle with these techniques!

My peeves feel less stressful already.