Train your body to be ready for the stage

When a teacher tells a singer that their voice lacks "body", they are talking about timbre. They are describing a sensation. What they are pointing at without naming it is muscle that was never built to support the voice. Not a missing gift: tissue to be built.

Adeline Toniutti is an early voice in vocal technique: she advocated, before anyone else, what science now confirms.

More than ten years ago she was already teaching that strength work and cardio are not side activities for a singer, but part of the vocal work itself. In France at the time, this was treated as an eccentricity. Since then, ENT surgeons, voice surgeons and research have proved her right, and the United States has made it a public subject.

The whole CALYP position follows from this: vocal coaching has to refocus and connect itself to physical training. One does not go without the other.

We speak of "the stage" as a place. It is first of all a distance. The Olympia in Paris holds 2,824 people in concert configuration. The Stade de France goes beyond 80,000, on a pitch 105 metres long. The Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, renamed on 1 July 2026, reaches 45,000 and remains the largest indoor arena in Europe.

The figure that matters to a singer is not the capacity, it is the stage opening and the length of runway they will cover while singing. These figures exist: the scenography studios that build these tours publish them.

Crossing forty metres of runway while holding a phrase already demands cardio. Going round it while dancing demands an athlete. And even without a runway, walking the stage to work the crowd is an effort the breath pays for.

The protocol is old. Michelle Williams described the Destiny’s Child training under Mathew Knowles: singing while running on a treadmill, so the voice would hold live. That is where the famous image of Beyoncé singing while running comes from.

Taylor Swift prepared the Eras Tour for six months. Every day, treadmill, singing the whole setlist out loud: "fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs". Strength and conditioning at the Dogpound gym, three months of dance with choreographer Mandy Moore. Her own verdict: "I finally, for the very first time, physically prepared correctly."

Pink does an hour of cardio and an hour of yoga with her dancers before almost every show, and says it plainly: "sometimes I feel more like an athlete than a singer". On tour she counts around four and a half hours of physical work a day, the two hour show included, plus the rig check for the harness she sings in. Lady Gaga trains five times a week, thirty five minutes a session, with Harley Pasternak, and sings on the VersaClimber, meaning during the effort. Madonna works six days out of seven with Craig Smith: Tabata intervals, Pilates, yoga, barre, kickboxing.

Mylène Farmer built her endurance with strength coach Hervé Lewis: running, weights, massage, a diet based on slow release sugars. In tour preparation, two to three hours of physical work a day, before the choreography rehearsals even began. The rhythm described by the artists is almost always the same: one or two sessions a week to begin with, then three, then five, and a taper just before opening night.

Classical singing lived for a long time on the opposite belief: the Castafiore myth, the diva who supposedly needs no physical training to hold her coloratura. The voice as a gift that lands on a body and could do without it.

Adeline Toniutti teaches the opposite, and what she observes today is an international awakening.

According to the voice doctors who work with her, Adeline Toniutti was one of the first in the world to make this connection between strength work, cardio and vocal technique, more than ten years ago. It is the United States that is taking it up today. France is behind.

Two posts, sent by Adeline herself, say it better than any paragraph.

Jennifer Rowley (@larowley1), American dramatic soprano, founder of Aria Bootcamp.

Her words: "They are still saying opera singers should not lift weights. For decades, singers were taught that strength training would make the voice tight, interfere with breathing, or limit vocal freedom. But our voices do not exist in isolation: they are a part of the body. Training with intention has made me a stronger, more resilient performer. And it certainly did not stop me from singing dramatic repertoire. It helped me get there." She had been told she would never be a dramatic soprano. She worked her core, and she became one.

Maayan Licht (@maayanlicht), sopranist, with Maestro Fernando Cordeiro (@fernando_cordeiro_opa).

His voice is remarkable, close to a woman’s voice. And in this video you see him with his coach, training while he sings. His caption: "Being a singer is like being an athlete. It takes daily practice, focus, discipline, and ambition to keep the voice in top form."

Adeline Toniutti’s message to France is exactly this: wake up. Having voice means synchronising strength work, cardio and vocal coaching.

The lungs have no motor. Air is moved by the diaphragm, the intercostals, and for the active exhale of singing, by the abdominal sling: transversus, obliques, rectus abdominis.

In Anatomie du Chant, osteopath Jean-Marie Legé explains the role of the obliques: they form a lever arm that lets you command your diaphragm. The movements of the diaphragm bring more or less pressure into the lungs.

It is an adjustment of air, precision mechanics. Not a matter of brute force.

This is the heart of the five pivot points. And it is why teachers who instruct "sing with a relaxed belly, no core work" create a real problem: that instruction runs against medicine and against current research.

It may have worked for some singers. Over the long term, it has not worked.

Even on television talent shows, at the Star Academy for instance, the students train physically. That is not the problem. The problem is that the training is too often disconnected from vocal practice.

This is exactly what the CALYP position says: vocal coaching has to refocus and connect itself to physical training, one does not go without the other. The singer has to understand what their own muscles do for them when they sing. When you train alone, in your corner, you do not necessarily see the link.

Hence the instruction: sing while doing the workout movements, the crossfit, the running. Do the training at the same time. That is how Lady Gaga uses her VersaClimber, how Taylor Swift used her treadmill, how Destiny’s Child were trained.

This requires singing teachers trained to run those sessions. And they never are, except those who go and acquire the skill themselves, like the coaches in the videos above.

This is what CALYP teaches, and it is why people travel for it. They come from New York, from Los Angeles, from Korea and from all over the world for the support of CALYP.

The vocal gesture itself is worked with the five pivot points of Anatomie du Chant. In case of vocal fold pathology, the opinion of an ENT specialist or a phoniatrician comes before any training programme.