However, there is one thing like practicing too much, and you should always stop practicing if you feel tension in your vocal cords. Taking breaks throughout the day will allow you to develop the vocal endurance needed to practice more each day. Taking regular classes is a must, try to have weekly lessons if you are serious about developing your voice and vocal balance. However, there are ways to get great results outside of classes.
Practicing every day, or practically every day, is ideal. Practicing M and F, and lessons W, is not enough to make significant progress in the IMO. You're developing fine muscle coordination similar to the finesse needed in precision athletics. A tennis player is not going to be very good at playing a couple of half hours a week, but with lots, lots and lots of technical exercises and matches.
If you want to make changes to your voice in a few months, practice as often as possible. Identifying problem areas and focusing practice sessions on these areas will improve the quality of your singing. If you have a singing teacher, they'll give you advice on songs to practice with or areas to focus on, and it's always worth talking to other singers and asking what practice songs they use. But if it's hard to find a place, then you should think about performing on local open microphones, at your school or university, or at a community center or youth club, where there will often be practice rooms that you can use for free.
Aside from perhaps avoiding dairy literally right before singing (and conventional wisdom says that consuming anything except water right before singing is a bad idea, burrito pieces in the throat are no nicer than milk). You should think about keeping a diary of your singing practice so that you can monitor how much you are doing ding and see how much you improve. This is especially true at the beginning: much of the singing has to do with the development of muscle memory for these highly specialized and coordinated tasks. On school days, I sing up to 3 hours in a row, so it has helped me a lot to develop the stamina and vocal strength to practice even a little every day.
In the same way, an athlete can stretch a muscle by exercising excessively, singing too much can strain the vocal cords. I have discovered that practicing outside of my voice classes has allowed me not to have to re-learn the technique that I have already been taught simply because I can't do it all the time. If the quality of my voice depends on drinking tea with honey or whatever, maybe I shouldn't sing. And of course, practicing singing will help you maintain your vocal health, but you have to warm up your vocal cords and not overdo it, anything more than an hour of singing at a time is probably too much for your voice.
So, under the tutelage of a good voice teacher, first find out what aspect of your singing should be deliberately focused on. It may sound obvious, but you should take a break from singing and if you have the flu, a bad cough or cold or if it hurts when you sing. In addition to being a singing teacher, Tom is one of the 10 founding members of the Institute for Vocal Advancement and serves as the organization's chief financial officer and marketing director.
