| Food for Thought
 Did you know.... The diaphragm has little or no sensory feedback. In other words you can't feel it. It's also involuntary (as far as singing is concerned) which means you have about as much chance of making chips with it as you do trying to consciously use it to sing. Your abdominal muscles, however, play a very important role in supporting sound.
Some research suggests that efficient breathing responds to what is happening in the muscles in and around the larynx. Unless you have very abnormal breathing habits it is unlikely that breathing exercises will directly benefit your voice without taking into consideration how you larynx is involved in the process.
Steaming is the only way to get moisture to come directly into contact with the vocal folds. If tea, with or without honey and lemon, touched your vocal folds you would choke. The lungs have no muscular attachments to the ribs. Holding the ribs out constantly whilst singing in no way guarantees that you will have more air in reserve. Singing higher and louder both require less volume of breath. Belting requires less breath than almost any other sound. It's not how much breath you have, but rather how you manage it!
The primary function of the larynx is to constrict to protect the airway. Some sounds can encourage this constriction, though we can overcome this with muscle isolations. This led Jo Estill, celebrated voice researcher to coin the phrase, "Singing is a unnatural act!" The larynx naturally rises and falls to help accommodate pitch. Keeping the larynx in a low position is purely an aesthetic choice and in no way guarantees vocal health. The height of the larynx can be consciously controlled to help colour your sound as well. Lowering the larynx creates a darker, more rounded sound while raising it creates a brighter, edgier sound. All of these choices can be made safely and sustainably. It's worth mentioning that it's impossible and potentially dangerous to belt with a low larynx. Your speaking muslces (thyro-arytenoids) can only effectively control pitch in the lower portion of your range. As you ascend in pitch the vocal folds have to be lengthened which requires increased activity in your crying muscles (crico-thyroid). To create a consistent sound across your range using a "speech-level" setup is physically impossible. The vocal folds have no muscluar means to "dampen" or "zip up". There are numerous places you can move things around in your body to change the sound your are making. The good news is you probably know how to use most of them in your everyday life. Sometimes you just have to remind your body how to use them when singing. Pressing down like you are going to the loo won't help you sing better. It will, however, encourage your larynx constrict to help generate back pressure to help you force air or objects out of your back passage. Whilst this may be a sought-after skill in some arenas of performance, singers generally find that doing this onstage causes embarrassment.
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