Recently, I have been taking singing lessons. I started to love singing after I took some lessons as a teenager. Before then, I categorically could not sing. Every time I tried, my voice would hurt and the sound that was produced was not pleasant to anyone listening. However I knew that all I needed to do is to “find my voice”. I needed to find out HOW to sing; how to use my voice properly to produce that pleasant sound without my voice hurting afterwards. After a few lessons, I could sing! Not perfectly of course, but I was starting to become comfortable producing a melodic sound. So what was the difference? Simple. I learned how to engage and sing with my diaphragm and core muscles. This gave me the foundations I needed to sing and even though I knew you should sing with the core, I just didn’t know how. But wait, isn’t the core also important for stabilizing your spine? Well yes indeed it does. So how is the core actually used for singing and if the core is vital for spinal function, can singing therefore prevent back pain?
How Singing Uses The Core Muscles
The core muscles are a group of muscles that surround your lower back and abdomen. They include the rectus abdominis, external and internal obliques, transverse abdominis, diaphragm, pelvic floor muscles and many more. These muscles are vital for singing but how does it work?
Your diaphragm is dome shaped with the convex side facing upwards. As it contracts, it causes the muscle to flatten, pulling the lungs downwards and increasing their volume inside. With an increase in volume, you get a decrease of pressure which causes air to rush into your lungs through your wind pipe. This makes breathing in a more active exercise whereas breathing out is simply as a result of the diaphragm relaxing.
Singing requires air to be pushed out of your lungs at a particular pace. During the exhalation process, your diaphragm is essentially relaxing, which by itself doesn’t produce enough power needed for singing. This is where the other parts of your core muscles come in. They are required to create pressure in your abdomen to cause the lungs to expel the air with more force than would naturally be created through the relaxation of the diaphragm. This is why, if singing correctly, it can feel like you’ve done a core workout. If singing incorrectly (as I used to), you’ll feel all the tension in your throat and none in your core.
How Singing Translates To Back Pain Prevention
If singing is a core exercise, and core exercises are good for preventing back pain, then it would make sense that singing has the ability to prevent back pain. The core is vital to stabilize your spine when you move your body. As anyone who’s suffered with severe back pain can tell you, any movement of your body requires some level of spinal stabilization. If the spine isn’t stabilised with these motions two things will happen. Firstly, you wouldn’t be as strong in almost any muscle in your body due to how you need proximal stability for distal mobility and strength. The core is the proximal stability in some form for so many of the muscles in your body. Secondly, your spine will would wear out so much faster due to the amount of inappropriate motions occurring in the spinal joints due to the lack of stability leading to arthritis or worse.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, any activity that uses your core is a good thing for the core. Singing has an incredible amount of core activation and requires it for proper singing technique. Therefore singing is a great exercise to train your core and although it’s not normally the reason someone learns to sing, it happens to have the great side effect of keeping your core strong.