How to Warm Up Your Voice for a Conference

There’s nothing worse than having the flow of your presentation interrupted by your voice failing. The very best public speakers warm up their voice beforehand, and doing so can minimise the risk of losing your voice on stage. Whether you’re speaking at a conference for the first time and you’re worried about how your voice will hold out or you’ve struggling with your voice after a cold, it’s always a good idea to go through a good warm up routine before you go out.

Find a quiet space where you’re not disturbing anyone else and get started with a warm up for your voice. Doing some of these things might sound a bit silly for something as simple as using your vocal chords, but they can be genuinely useful.

Stretch and loosen up

The first step is to stretch out and loosen up your body. You might think that as you only speak from your mouth there’s no need to prepare the rest of your body for a talk, but air comes from the lungs so it’s worth having your whole body ready. Stretching and loosening up can have the added benefit of helping you to relax as you get those pre-talk nerves.

Hum

You need to get your voice ready for extended periods of talking to do this you can hum for a couple minutes. While you are humming you can loosen up your jaw by moving it around.

Work your voice at different pitches

Unless you’re going to be presenting in monotone, it’s important to warm your voice at different pitches. One of the best way to do this is to practice singing scales, start with: do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do. Practice changing your pitch so that your voice is used to going up and down.

Warm up your tongue

Of course your tongue is going to be doing the hard work, so give it a work out. Say your favourite tongue twisters over and over so that your tongue is ready for the rest of the talk.