Vocal Science. Practice makes perfect… but not always.

Over the years, I have possessed a lot of singers (or wannabe singers), and also speakers who originally came to me for non-surgicalvoice repair to restore their speaking and singing voices.

Now, after certain amount of hours spent with me restoring their voices and re-learning how to really speak and/or sing, they naturally became very excited and began to practice on their own, in spite of my warnings to them to keep it in moderation. 

I do understand that they are very excited to reach the new higher grounds with their speaking and singing voices, but they do not understand that the bad habits, which got them in trouble in the first place, are still there and have been there much longer then the newly – found good habits.

There is a saying: “Bad habits die hard”.  

Indeed! 

So what happens is; once my clients start practicing on their own sooner than they were advised, the bad habits kick in and knock down the newly-instilled good habits. 

So the process begins all over again.

We have made three huge steps forward, but unfortunately, one or even two steps back, which obviously had slowed down the process. 

Everybody knows that if the alcoholic, while in recovery, will try just a drop of alcohol, in no time, he will come back to drinking and even heavier than before. 

Also, the person (like myself) trying to lose weight and adopt the new lifestyle, would go to a party and eat some sweets, convincing herself that it will be only for that party time, will come back to eating the wrong foods, which made her overweight in the first place, and which will bring her weight to the same point when she had started, and possibly even higher.

The latest example is our Canadian figure skater, Kaetlyn Osmond who, unfortunately, was sidelined for 6 weeks due to a broken leg.

Prior to that, in September of 2014, she broke her ankle. She went back to the competition and ended up with a broken leg. Just a few days ago after a surgery, she came back to the Canada Skate Competition and ended up landing each and every jump down on ice. 

It was very painful to watch how this young beautiful girl was desperately trying to prove to herself and everybody else that she is OK and healed now and able to meet very high physical demands required by today’s rules and regulations set by the Figure Skating Federation.  

In my opinion, understanding how eager she was to come back to what she does best, she came back too soon not once, but twice, got more injuries and, no doubts, felt humiliated and extremely upset.

Her ankle, and respectively, her leg, simply could not bear the weight of her body. At least not yet. 

In my opinion, she should have stayed off of the ice a little longer to make sure that her leg was completely healed and the strength of the leg and the physical body overall had been fully restored.

The injured, (vocally or otherwise), people should understand that they can not run ”marathons” right after the next day leaving the rehab. Any injury requires proper healing and restoration of the strength of the effected body part and recovery of the entire body as a whole. 

So the conclusion of it is: If the unfortunate president happened, please have patience to fully heal it and also, correct the bad habits which brought you to the injury in the first place. Learn the new healthy habits and store it in memory in such a way that you would not be able to act otherwise.

That will assure and insure your health and longevity… in whatever you do.