Your voice is a key part of your presentation delivery. And having a tired, hoarse voice can negatively impact your presentation.

I’ve conducted many training programs where I’ve had to present for five or six hours a day for five days in a row. And I’ve also sung in choirs and as a soloist. So I understand how important it is to take care of my voice so I can rely on it being ready when I need it.

Here are my five tips for keeping your voice healthy:

1. Hydrate
   Drink plenty of water, and not just during your presentation, but also before your presentation so you can stay hydrated. Room temperature or warm water works best for me. I also drink warm tea without caffeine. I find that cold water, particularly ice water, actually constricts my vocal cords, and makes me feel hoarse, making it much harder for me to project my voice. Gargling with warm water and salt also helps (and the salt is natural disinfectant). Find something that works to keep your voice well lubricated.
2. Control the room environment
   Sometimes you’re in a room that is too hot, too cold or dry and that can quickly give you a sore throat. Check out the room before you present and decide if you need to open a window, lower the heat or increase the air conditioning.
3. Rest
   Rest is crucial. You need adequate sleep the night before a presentation so your voice sounds rested (and you are alert and focused). And you should rest your voice, so no screaming at a sporting event the night before. You can’t fake rest – if your voice is tired, people will hear it. If you’re going to do several presentations over a few days or conduct multi-day training programs, you have to accept the fact that you will tire your voice and will need extra rest. It’s like working out – if you do bicep curls with weights, you expect that your muscles will be sore the next day. As you gradually build up strength, you’ll be able to lift more weights without feeling as sore. The same is true with your voice.
4. Breathe
   Breathing properly keeps your voice supported. Take full deep breaths from your diaphragm and core that will support your voice to the end of the sentence, rather than taking shallow breaths from the top of your chest that cause you to run out of air. If you do yoga or Pilates, or you swim or sing, use that same kind of breathing.
5. Warm up your voice
   In preparation for your presentation, do some vocal warm-ups, much the same way as you would do flexibility stretches with your body. Vocalize from high to low – just open your mouth wide and say “ah,” making a continuous sound with a pitch that goes from high to low. Pronounce consonants and vowels and really move your lips. Repeat the “t” sound and the “k” sound, for example.

Screw up your face and then relax it. You may feel silly doing these exercises but they will help you loosen up and open up your voice.

If you follow these five tips and take care of your voice before, during and after your presentation, you can keep your voice sounding energized, full, supported and healthy.

A deep, dark tan can add the perception of additional muscle mass to the physique. Ever see the guest posers who hop up onstage under those bright lights completely white, and look like they’re very fat, even though they might be at 8% body fat? Bright lights- whether they are from the stage, the sun, or the boardroom – tend to wash out cuts and definition on the very pale athlete. For this reason, it is important to maintain a nice healthy tan year round whenever possible to best present your bodybuilding physique.

Competition

For competition bodybuilders, nude tanning is essential. Find a nice tanning salon close to the home or gym, and visit 3-4 times a week. Since your posing trunks for shows will vary, a full-body tan will be required. If you do it correctly all year, you’ll be able to nail the contest tan with no problem at all. For the show, Pro-tan or other reputable product should be used. Depending upon your level of baseline tan, a little may go a long way.

Non-competition

For those bodybuilders who never plan to step on the bodybuilding stage, having tan lines isn’t a big deal at all. In addition to the salon, you can tan outdoors wearing a pair of mid-thigh shorts to ensure you get at least half of the quads tanned. Real sunlight can be just as powerful, or even more powerful, than tanning salons between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm each day.

Health

Getting a tan also has health benefits. Sunlight is an excellent source of vitamin D, a fat-soluble vitamin, which is essential for good heart health – something every bodybuilder should be concerned about, given the bodyweights we carry and foods we consume.

Warnings

Don’t tan too fast. Use protection such as sun block to ensure you tan slowly and don’t present yourself with any unnecessary burn risks. If you notice any spots, moles, or other abnormalities, get them checked out IMMEDIATELY. Skin cancer, if caught early, is very easy to treat. Once it has had time to grow, it can be a virtual death sentence. Always get spots looked at immediately.

Staying tan year round can be healthy and make you more attractive to the opposite sex. It can also allow you to display muscularity and conditioning more effectively onstage, and in everyday life. Take caution to get not to little, and not too much, sunlight, and you’ll look and feel your best!

“PowerPoint presentations are a new form of anesthesia and torture. They were even used at the Abu Ghraib Prison.” ~anonymous U.S. military officer.

Every month I attend a breakfast meeting of independent professional consultants. It’s a well-run nonprofit, and the ritzy country club where we gather serves bacon done just the way I like it — chewy, not brittle. Every month, we have a speaker. Nearly every month, the speaker drags us through a PowerPoint (except for one banker, who shunned slides for an unadorned speech, telling us that, in the “interests of efficiency,” he wasn’t going to explain the financial jargon he was using!).

Every month, my distaste for PowerPoint grows. The speaker interrupts eye contact repeatedly, most of us more than one table back from the screen can’t make out much of the lettering, and the give-and-take that should enliven any such presentation takes another nosedive — offering nothing but the illusion of coherence. It’s technology as a crutch, standing in poorly for the good old-fashioned display of public speaking skills that we have within us.

What I’m getting at is that we can all interact with an audience directly and express ourselves in well-prepared fashion. Well-prepared means a 15-minute presentation that you’ve laid out in logical form, as if writing an email to an intelligent friend or associate. Once you’ve got that down, rehearse it in front of a mirror or a family member or a co-worker. It’s that simple. Don’t let PowerPoint obstruct the face-to-face effective communication that serves us so well.

PowerPoint’s emphasis on process over product hit home when I worked last year with some Navy SEALs in Virginia Beach, Va. Back in the states between combat and security deployments, they were on the staff of the Naval Special Weapons Development Group, and they asked me to help cultivate a concise, to-the-point writing style to communicate efficiently with their Pentagon superiors. It quickly became apparent that they were also frustrated by briefings they gave for senior officials, including ambassadors and politicians.

To a man, they hated PowerPoint. As elite warriors, SEALs are subject to constant training — updates on weaponry, civil affairs, language, explosives, you name it. Too often, they complained, that meant absorbing one slide after another, then being pronounced “trained,” as if that’s all it took. They’d appreciate these words from Richard Danzig, Navy secretary in the Clinton Administration: “The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for… to surrender to an overwhelming mass.”

Against that background, here’s what we came up with for the SEALs’ briefings: Instead of a PowerPoint projector, make sure there’s a flip chart, blackboard or whiteboard within a few steps of your podium or lectern. Leave the lights on and lay out your presentation, pausing every few minutes to walk over and write out some key points. I told them their audience would track their moves and pay close attention to what they had to “say” with the magic marker. In other words, a few salient words or phrases on the board would link them to their listeners in an almost physical sense, with nothing technological standing in the way. (As a side benefit, strolling from podium to board and back is a good way to deal with nerves.)

“But what about all the information you want your audience to take away?” you may ask. “What about all that stuff that shows up on the slides I use now?” No problem. At the beginning, just tell them not to fret about scribbling down any details you throw at them. Tell them you’ll hand out fact sheets at the end.

After all, the overriding goal is engagement and involvement in what you have to say. A good speech or presentation — again, keep it to 15 minutes, 20 at the outside — succeeds if it leads to a vigorous Q&A session. When you speak directly to your listeners, instead of looking away and repeating endless bullet points on a slide, you’ve set the stage for trading ideas verbally instead of passively absorbing one image after the other.

I can’t say it any better than renowned Italian marketing and advertising consultant Giancarlo Livraghi: “The PowerPoint syndrome isn’t just the misuse of specific technology. It’s a cultural disease.”a