Keeping our fingers limber and flexible is important – We’ve put together our top five finger stretches for guitar to help you stay sharp!
You may have read about guitarists who come back from horrible injury to reclaim their successful careers – Pat Martino, Larry Carlton, Ani DiFranco, etc. – but, for obvious reasons, you hear significantly less about people who got hurt and had to give up the guitar.
Today we’ll get into some easy ways that you can retain and improve flexibility, endurance, and dexterity so that you can enjoy playing the guitar and avoid unnecessary pain and injury.
Guitar Finger Exercises To Improve Your Left Hand Technique
Fold some of these techniques into your finger stretches for guitar and you’ll have a routine that keeps your hands and arms feeling good!
To keep your wrists healthy, gently massage the area where your hand meets your wrist, but be sure not to use too much force.
Tendinitis is an inflammatory condition that locks up your forearm, feeling a bit like a permanent muscle cramp. without some care, it can make it very painful and difficult to play the guitar.
Fret Hand Stretches Exercises
We are not in the business of advertising products, but if you do have a case of professionally diagnosed tendonitis, you may want to consult with your provider about getting one of these little life savers: the Armaid.
We are not, however, medical professionals. If any part of the finger stretches for guitar or the self-massage techniques we’re describing feels in any way painful or wrong, please get off the internet and go see a live person who has a degree or two in how your body works!
There are plenty more finger stretches for guitar that can prepare you for a pain-free and exhilarating practice session, jam, or gig.
Left Hand Accuracy And Positioning
Hand and forearm massage prepare your body by improving the circulation in those muscles and loosening everything up before you pick up the guitar.If you have ever had challenges getting your left hand to stay in position or get your fourth finger to remain close to the fingerboard, this exercise will likely be helpful. It is simple in concept but very effective at developing good habits in your left hand technique.
As a teacher this exercise has proven very useful to demonstrate a student’s left hand position. My hope is that by sharing this lesson it will be of use to those who are learning without a teacher also.
If you have trouble getting your 3rd and 4th fingers in the left hand to behave, accurately placing your fingertips at the fret, or maintaining the left hand position… you are not alone.
Guitar Finger Exercises You Need To Know By Heart
I am going to provide you with some useful exercises to improve your left hand technique, but first let’s talk about the key issues.
Accurate finger placement helps produce a clear sound, it uses less energy, relieves tension, aids agility, and it will encourage consistency with other movements in your left hand. These compelling reasons make it well worth your time to focus on left hand finger placement as a priority in your practice session.
Over the years I have come across many beginner and intermediate students that say they “can’t” make the stretch, or their fingers simply “won’t” reach that far. This is simply not true.
How To Play Guitar
While we all have different shapes and sizes, and even peculiarities from person to person I have never come across anyone who cannot develop reach, flexibility and accuracy with dedicated and focused practice. Developing a habit takes time, and so does developing flexibility within your hands. Remember that we are dealing with ligaments and tendons in our hand, not just muscles, and they take a considerably longer time to adapt.
Perhaps an experience that we have all shared is figuring out how to play the first position G Major chord. This basic chord involves a stretch from the sixth string to the first and for all of those who encounter it for the first time it seems difficult if not impossible. Did you manage to make the distance with some perseverance?
The number one culprit that might be holding you back is a lack of consistency in your finger placement and this is down to your attention to detail. If you are unaware that your fingers are placed too far back in the fret, then you won’t be able to make a change for the better.
Finger Stretching Exercise
Have a look at the following examples, record a quick excerpt of your left hand playing and evaluate whether or not there is room for improvement.
To be clear, there are many instances where the fingertips cannot always be neatly placed up against the fret wire. A good example of this is the common A Major chord that squashes three fingers onto one fret. There is no need for each fingertip to be exactly snug against the fret in this case. There are plenty of other examples of this being the case too, but in general we should be striving for a consistent closeness to the fret.
The first step, as was mentioned earlier, is to be aware if you are placing your left hand fingers accurately or not. So, record your left hand playing a variety of material and have a look. Record for long enough that you fall back into your regular playing style, not one that is hyper aware of being analyzed.
Right Hand Picking Exercise
After having a look you might notice that your finger placement becomes inconsistent with specific movements. For example, it might be that when you shift your left hand position, the finger lands without consistency. Or, it might be that when more than one finger is used at the same time results get messy.
If your overall finger placement is sloppy it will be important to take a very simple exercise to start building accuracy and consistency.
For this I recommend playing a very simple sequence of fingerings in the seventh position. This involves the left hand playing finger 1, 2, 3, 4, sequentially on one string then moving the the adjacent string. It looks like a chromatic scale, but it isn’t as we are playing in the seventh position.
Guitar Technique For Beginners 1: Hands, Fingers And Strengthening Exercises
As you work through this basic but effective exercise focus on each finger being placed snug up against the fret each time, using the same small pad of your fingertip each time and keeping the fingers down as you play 1 – 2 -3 -4.
After you have spent fifteen minutes on this, you can give yourself a rest (yes try and spend a full focused fifteen minutes!). When you return to the exercise, perhaps that day perhaps the next, you can move it down to the sixth position. Over the span of a couple of weeks move it down to first position and your left hand will have enjoyed and progressive habit building exercise that encourages accuracy and flexibility.
Following on from this exercise, you can move to a full chromatic scale in the first position that then shifts up on the first string towards the twelfth fret.
Finger Independence For Better Dexterity
Accuracy with the left hand is an essential part of classical guitar technique. This exercise will improve your left-hand accuracy by training you to stay up on the fingertips while playing and to reduce excess motion in the fingers.
Focusing on accuracy of finger placement is a perfect example of how we can use scales as tools to develop our technique.
Regular scales that have one single note after another provide the challenge of every single note having accurate and consistent finger placement. We can also start to think about the consistency of weight/finger pressure we use.
Try These Fun Guitar Exercises To Build Coordination Between Your Fretting And Picking Hands
A scale in one position is great for the variety of finger combinations it uses and a scale that shifts around the fingerboard will give us a chance to work on shifting, extensions and contractions.
The key of the scale does not matter too much in this process but choosing a variety of locations on the fingerboard and a variety of scales (which therein have a variety of fingerings) will be a comprehensive way to approach your accuracy.
A two octave scale with accompanying arpeggio will give you a variety of challenges with which to monitor and improve your accuracy.
From Guitar Beginner To Professional In 5 Amazing Finger Exercises:
These scales require you to play two notes at a time, so our challenge of accuracy and consistency is greatly increased. I would recommend staying on single note scales until you can see that you are very accurate and consistent in your left hand recordings.
The goals will be the same in terms of finger placement and shifting but your finger independence will now get a substantial workout.
These two scales provide a compact area to work on your accuracy, albeit in in the first position where the stretches are the greatest.
Best Stretching Exercises For Guitar Players
Over a two octave scale we get the opportunity to shift, and traverse the fingerboard which includes a variety of distances between frets. A great exercise!
Take all of these exercises at a slow tempo, perhaps quarter note equals 50 or slower. Why? Because if you you set a fast tempo you will not be able to notice or correct your finger position. Use a metronome to keep you on track, and remember that speed is not a goal here just accuracy
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