Singers - are you supporting too much?

When I was learning how to sing for real, in my late teens, the method in vogue was the Klein method.  The story goes like this - one day when a young Joseph Klein was heading into an office tower for the day, he saw a dog barking.  When he came out that evening, the dog was still barking, but he didn't seem to have lost his voice.  The dog had barked all day, without any apparent issues with stamina!  Joseph himself had issues with vocal fatigue and stamina, so he wondered whether he might learn something from this amazing dog.  So he took a closer look.

He noticed that every time the dog barked, the dog's abdomen would push inwards.  Could this be the secret of the dog's amazing vocal stamina?  I'm unclear about what happened between this formative experience and the popularity of the dog-immitation method, but from these humble beginnings came the Klein Method, which (at least as taught to me) involves a log of muscular pressure in the abdomen in order to supposedly free the vocal mechanism.

Fast-forward fifteen years to 1999.  By then I've taught hundreds of people the practices of the Klein method, but I'm suffering from vocal stamina issues that I can't get over.  I'm beginning to wonder if I have missed something.

At this point I was fortunate enough to get some vocal instruction from a few terrific instructurs, including Adele Clark and Corlynn Hanney.  Their big question for me, "why are you pushing so hard?"  Maybe it's just my over-achievement personality type and I took the abdominal "support" too far, but it took me a few years to unwind all that conditioning and habit, in order to finally achieve a relaxed and free voice.  Spring of 2005 I made a big leap forward by "barely singing" for a while.  Still plenty of sound outside my head, but I was addicted to the pressure so it was a big change for me.

So here's my philosophy in a nutshell.  Vocal support is an important teaching technique and is necessary to some extent when vocalizing, especially at the upper extreme of your range, but it's also very easy to overdo it, so be cautious!

I am interested in learning more about other techniques, such as speech level singing, that seem to be more well adapted to "pop" styles of singing rather than opera.  After all, unless I'm terribly mistaken, opera singers have more trouble with vocal fatigue than any other sort of singer, rock stars included.  That's what you get for trying to cut through a 120 piece orchestra!