Water water everywhere! Hydration tips for seasonal fatigue 💛 (plus: a tasty recipe!)

This week's video is about keeping you voice healthy and hydrated. I hope it helps! If it does, please let me know in the comments :)
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Edited Transcript:
Hello! I find myself early to Teesdale school again because one of my students hasn't found their way to the practice room, so that gives me 20 minutes to do a video for you.
So lovely Pauline asked me a question in our Facebook group (join free at www.happyinharmonymusic.co.uk) the other day and asked me to do a video on hydration, and I didn't think I could because I didn't think I could talk for 5 minutes about hydration- but it turns out I can! So here we are.
Your vocal cords are made of water, so drink your water. You need to drink it sooner than you think, you need to drink it. So I have a bottle of water by my bed and I try and drink most of it before I go to sleep- not all of it anymore because I'm approaching the big 40 and if I drank all of it then I wouldn't get to sleep at all! Unfortunately, but I did up until about 5 years ago, I did used to drink a pint of water before I went to bed.
So if you can do that, great! If not, I feel you. Okay so the the good news about that is the other half the bottle is there in the morning um so that gets drunk um pretty much as soon as I wake up and then and then that's sort of done, but I I need more! I find the more the more I sort of progress through my singing career and through life, I feel like I need more sources of hydration, water on its own doesn't cut the mustard.
So I like a herbal tea with ginger or turmeric in it. Lidls do quite a good one, in a little yellow box and it's got echinacea in it which is my new favourite thing for winter.
Soup is another good one. The soup that healed me in time for rehearsal on Monday was my spicy chicken broth. So this is the lazy version of chicken soup because if you really need chicken soup then you can't be bothered to make chicken soup!
So this is chicken soup even if you've got very little energy. So cooked chicken. Then I can't be bothered to pick the whole thing either because that takes about 20 minutes and a bit of faff. So I just prize the breasts off the carcass, then I get some quick wins so I just sort of take what I can quickly off the main carcass and then start boiling the bones straightaway.
Take the legs off and do the same and just sort of squeeze the meat off the bone and get the pan boiling with the bones and then just chuck in any bits of bones and skin as fast as you can be bothered to get it off. And if you can boil that for sort of an hour- great. I did it for 20 minutes this time because I really needed the soup rapidly! Then so just get that going.
Then I got all pre-prepared veg grated carrot, pre-prepared onion, some pre-prepared celery, and just bung that in a pan with a little bit of oil, salt and pepper on a nice low heat and just sweat it out. Squeezy garlic, squeezy chili if you've got it, I had chili flakes, turmeric, I've got some frozen ginger that's been in the freezer for goodness knows how long that needs using, so soup is the destination for that! Any of those warming spices just chuck those in because they're going to do you some good and and help to heal you.
When you're finished with the chicken broth boiling just strain it and add that to all the vegetables with some chunks of chicken and any sort of fresh herbs you've got. I had some dill left over - I love a bit of dill at Christmas!
Normally I would peel a potato and put a potato in- couldn't be bothered! I was really ill. So I had some leftover Christmas pasta shapes in the fridge so just sort of broke those up and chucked those in and that was it, so plenty of salt and pepper and just a bit of lemon- bit of extra vitamin C.
So that is your rescue chicken soup recipe and it really did work for me so I can recommend it! So just basically try and hydrate a long a long time before you need to, and try and keep your hydration good all the time and get in some good habits particularly at this time of year.
But if you've got a concert coming up in the evening or your choir practice, generally start up in your hydration around about lunchtime, then throughout the day. Really you want to get a good litre down you sort of before sort of two, three pm in the afternoon and then it's got a good 4 hours to get to your vocal cords.
Okay, happy singing! Any questions, let me know so anything you want me to do a video on just give me a shout because apparently I can do one about most things!

[@daveheron9234]

Some great tips there Rosie! I wonder if Tom Waits hydrated himself with alternative liquids? 😊