To get the most out of your voice and to be able to deliver the most powerful message, there's one final thing that you should definitely add to breathing and posture practice, which is stretching. If you can incorporate these three together, the results will be wonderful, they will be very inspiring, and there will be immediate. The reason stretching is so important is because it's no impact, in some cases, low impact, but it's definitely also no impact exercise. So, stretching is multifaceted. It will give you many, many benefits. For example, stepping away from speaking and performance.

Stretching is wonderful for anti aging. It's wonderful for your general health and well being and it's also a very effective way for weight loss. If you're doing it intensively enough, so the purpose of incorporating stretching with breathing and posture practice here, during this course in this chapter is because you will get your best breathing and best posture if you incorporate stretching, but also the key vital element here is that stretching will release endorphins. Stretching in the right way will release testosterone for increased confidence and stretching and just raising the heart rate a little bit will also be great for a boost of serotonin and estrogen. So it's very important to add stretching to your magical mix for speaking because it's going to release all the right chemicals and hormones in just the right balance. So, for example, when I'm talking about balance, I wouldn't advise that you go and do a split That's going to be too much.

But stretching will get your heart rate just up enough to get you feeling loose and limber and confident and able to tap into your best posture and therefore your best breathing and those three go together. So just as a very quick example before we launch into the daily practice, which will cover all of these areas comprehensively and give you something to follow, breathing in and stretching up. Really stretch, make sure you feel the stretch in your arms as well as your body and especially your chest. Relax the back of the neck as you take the head back as far as you can. That bits really important, relaxing the neck, but stretching up with all your might and pulling your stomach in so the stretch begins in your lower stomach. And when you take the arms out, work in the stretch tensing your arms and coming down, which feeds straight into a posture exercise.

So do incorporate stretching just before speaking