Ever nailed a run of high notes only to find your low notes suddenly feel flimsy—or vice versa? You’re not imagining it, and you’re definitely not alone.
In this episode of Vocal Tips in 10, I’m breaking down stretch weakness—a concept from exercise science that explains why working one register can temporarily throw the other off.
You’ll learn:
🎯 Why stretch weakness happens to all singers
🎯 How to keep your vocal muscles balanced
🎯 Quick reset techniques for performances
🎯 Exercises to connect registers so the flip-flop feeling disappears
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to train your voice so you can sing top-to-bottom with power, ease, and confidence.
00:00 Understanding Vocal Registers and Stretch Weakness
03:50 Balancing Your Vocal Instrument for Optimal Performance
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Have you ever been singing along, feeling great in a particular register? So let's say you've got a lot of songs that really showcase your higher end or you've been working a lot there, really doing exercises and vocalizing to make that higher end feel as good as possible. And then you go to sing some of those yummy low notes that you feel so good about and they feel like they're not there for you. They feel weaker. It feels like it takes almost a whole song to be able to access them or flip that.
You're singing along feeling great in the low end and here comes your time to shine to really show off your killer upper register and those high notes feel weaker than normal. And you're thinking, what is wrong with me? Well, one, I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you. Two, you are absolutely not alone. This is a real thing. And three, we're going to talk about it today.
Today I want to get into why one register or one area of your voice, even an area that you feel great about, might feel weaker when you've been working a lot in that other area. What we call this in exercise science, or I guess what they call this in exercise science, I'm not an exercise queen, I wish I was, but what it's called in exercise science is a stretch weakness. And we can absolutely take concepts in exercise science and utilize them as vocalists because we are vocalists.
Singing is an athletic activity. So what a stretch weakness means is anytime you are using an opposing muscle, muscles that work in an opposite or antagonistic way. So in the body, that would be like your bicep and your tricep, or with your legs, your quads and your hamstrings. Guess what? In the voice, it's your low register, your thyroarytenoid, your your TA muscle.
that shortens and thickens the vocal folds, and your high end, your cricothyroid muscle that stretches and elongates the muscles, those muscles work in opposing ways. So if we have one, an imbalance in the musculature, so that means one muscle is much stronger than the other, or we are not working them equally, which again, kind of causes that imbalance, also gets them not used to handing off to each other, working one right after the other.
we can feel this stretch weakness, which means if I'm doing a lot of bicep and I go to work my triceps, they feel kind of really shaky and weaker than normal at first. And it takes a little bit for that muscle to realize, okay, now I'm allowed to be working because it's kind of inactive while that opposing muscle is really working hard, while we're giving it more focus. That's the same thing that happens with our voice. If you are doing a lot of low end and you're not...
paying equal attention to that upper end, or you're not really purposefully working to balance those out and to practice moving from one register to the other on the regular, you're going to feel that stretch weakness. you can feel that stretch weakness. And this happens to singers every day. I hear this lament, this worry of like,
What is going on Amber? I'm singing all these high harmonies when I'm doing BGVs and then it's my time to shine, showing my killer low end Beyonce song that I crush on And after singing those high end harmonies, I feel like my low notes come out as a whisper what is wrong with me. And as I said, there's nothing wrong with you. It's because you've been working that opposing muscle a bunch. And so how do we fix that as singers? How do we tackle this?
So the first thing I wanna talk about is really building good balance in your voice. I am such a believer in a balanced instrument for your best singing across the board. What does that mean? It means that we feel as good in our upper register and working that cricothyroid muscle, that muscle that stretches and thins the vocal folds, as we do in working our thyroarytenoid muscle, our low register,
that muscle that shortens and thickens the vocal folds.
Which just means you feel as strong in your low end as you do in your upper end. And don't get me wrong,
almost everybody has a kind of naturally happier place, right? Mine for sure is my low end. I work my upper end every single day of my life. since that is a comparatively weaker spot for me just naturally,
So almost everybody has a spot where they feel a little more naturally comfy. And that's wonderful, But I want you to spend the time working on whatever that other register is, right? That opposing muscle, we want it to be as strong as possible. Not only because it gives us the more balanced instrument.
Think about your low end, that muscle that shortens and thickens is responsible not just for low notes, it's for power throughout your voice. Your upper end, the muscle that stretches and thins is responsible not just for upper notes, it's for agility and flexibility throughout your voice. We want all of those things, right? So we want to have a balanced instrument right from the get-go. So if you are having these stretch weaknesses on the regular,
The first thing I would say to you is does your instrument feel balanced? Do you feel as good in your upper register as you do your lower register and your lower register as you do your upper register? And guess what too, this episode is not about mixing, but mix voice is a huge thing we have to do as contemporary commercial singers. It is one of my specialties. I have a course called Erase Your Break that is all about connecting your registers, creating your best mix voice.
and you are never gonna have your best mix voice. if you don't have basic musculature that is as balanced as it can be, because we need the power and the control along with the agility and the flexibility. And then we build in those different resonance strategies. So Baseline, you want a balanced instrument. And then what we wanna do is we want to practice moving
from one muscle area to the other, working those opposing muscles one after another. What does that look like in vocal practice? If I'm going to do an upper end exercise,
I'm really working stretching in that upper end. I want to then go right to a low end exercise. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, yo,
And when they're running equally together, I think about that as mix voice, right? Both of those ends are working together. And then when we want one to kind of take off over the other, they can easily hand off that baton whenever we have like the big fumble and it drops and the runner's like, God, that's when you hear a break or you feel instability or you feel this stretch weakness. So when you are practicing, when you are singing, when you are training your voice, regularly work.
Low end to upper end, upper end to low end, connect the registers, mix voice, back to upper end, back to low end, Move and utilize all those different parts of your voice, one after the other, because that's what we're expected to do in songs. And then when the time comes and you're in the middle of a show, that stretch weakness doesn't happen as much because you've worked it, you've trained those muscles to work in that manner.
And then if you find yourself in the middle of a performance and you're like, my gosh, I've been doing a lot of lower end singing and I've got a really high song coming up and I'm nervous about it. There are great ways to kind of get a little vocal reset. One of them, if you're doing a lot of low end and you know that you've got an upper end coming up, give the crowd a big woo! Right? Some kind of a siren. It just sounds like you're into it. The crowd's like, woo! Yes, they're feeling the energy.
You could be feeling the energy. You could be feeling nothing. But as you do that high-end siren, that woo to rev up the crowd, you are stretching that upper muscle. You are signaling it to let it know, hey, I'm getting ready to use you. Right? So you do a couple of those woohoo, whatever it is. If you've been doing a lot of the upper end and you've got, you know, you've got low ends coming up, give yourself some, right? Some low hums to lock that in or talk to the audience.
How's everybody doing tonight? There's my low end. There's my speech quality Kind of give your body, give those muscles a signal that their time is coming.
This happens to all singers. It is a frequent struggle, but the more you purposefully work your voice, one, to get the musculature balanced, a balanced voice, man, it's just gonna open up so much for you. Like I said, a way better mix voice, a healthier, happier voice, and then the ability to move from one register to another, from one tonal quality to another without feeling like you have this big.
dip or this weaker tonal quality for a while until your muscle gets used to being used.
then practice that, moving from one to the other on the regular. And if you need to in the middle of a performance, take those little reset opportunities, humming, a woo, a talking to the audience,
Whatever it is, you're not alone and there are things you can do to make it feel better and better. I hope this is helpful guys. Like always, I've got a bunch of freebies for you. A free 20 minute consultation with me or my fab coach, Eva Cassel two weeks free to my fantastic vocal pro membership. I'm going to put the link below. If you haven't ever checked it out, you should. It's pretty much my favorite place to be.
Then I also have a free vocal training down in the show notes. Thank you for listening guys. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
