The best warm-ups before playing the guitar

Would you like to gain speed, ease, and dexterity with your fingers when playing the guitar? Have you ever felt frustrated because of that solo you like so much you can't get it out? With these warm-up exercises for guitar before playing, you can gain the fluency and agility needed to play more fluently.

Warming up and stretching your muscles is essential when undertaking any physical activity. With a simple but well-done routine, we can prevent a multitude of injuries that can lead us from having to stop playing for a season to more serious problems.

One of the main objectives of the warm-up is to prevent injuries and restore mobility to the joints. According to sports doctors, warm-ups should include:

- Joint mobility exercises to prepare the joints.

- Gentle, sustained stretching to prepare muscles, associated ligaments, and connective tissues.

- Movements related to the activity itself to prepare the neuromuscular system.

Another of the most important benefits of a good warm-up is that from the beginning, we play with the maximum precision and fluency that we are capable of. If it is not properly warmed up, it can take hours until what came out the previous day comes out well.

Exercise 1: Chromaticism

To begin with, we are going to practice the simplest exercise that can be done to warm up before playing the guitar, chromaticism. This exercise is very practical and effective, especially for guitar beginners.

What we are going to do is to practice the chromaticism 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 along the neck. This exercise is very good to gain fluency and speed with the fingers.

The sequence is as follows:

- Index finger on fret 1 of the 6th string and play the string down.

- Middle finger on the 2nd fret of the 6th string and play the string upwards.

- Ring finger at the 3rd fret of the 6th string and play the string downwards.

- Little finger on the 4th fret of the 6th string and play the string upwards.

- At the end of the 6th string, you lower a string and repeat the exercise on the 5th string. And so on until you go down to the first string.

- Once you finish with the first string, you repeat it but in reverse, that is, with fingers 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 and going up until the sixth string.

Exercise 2: Learning to alternate ropes

This exercise is similar to the first one but now frets 2 and 4 play a string below the initial one. With this exercise, we seek to gain fluency when we have to alternate strings. Notice that in the first exercise we were doing 1 - 2 - 3 - 4, but always on the same string, instead now we are always going to alternate one string with another by playing each fret.

Exercise 3: Dexterity with the left hand

This is one of the best warm-up exercises for guitar because it is not the typical example of a linear warm-up in which you move around the fretboard of the guitar vertically and horizontally alternating your 4 fingers.

In this case, what we are going to do is to alternate fingers 2 and 3 on frets 3 and 4. In the beginning, it is going to be difficult to get it right because of the constant change of strings and frets, but little by little you are going to manage to gain skill in the movement of your left hand on the guitar.

Exercise 4: Finger independence

This guitar warm-up exercise is again a variation of chromaticism, but now the Movement becomes 1 - 3 - 2 - 4. With this exercise, you will gain a lot of independence with your fingers.

You will see that at the beginning it will seem an impossible task to play finger 3 after finger 1, but practice it slowly and at the end of the same day you will surely do the 4 strings from top to bottom and from bottom to top without any problem.

Exercise 5: Finger stretching with the Major Scale

The biggest guitar scale! Basically what we do is play the major scale in a group of 4 notes and as we advance we do it by introducing a new note and repeating 3 of the previous ones.

This exercise is more difficult to explain than to do, but give it a try because it is very good and not so difficult.

Specifically, in this exercise, we play the first pattern of the G major scale:

We play first G - A - B on the sixth string.

Then, we advance one note and play G - A - B – C.

We advance a little more and play A - B - C – D.

We advance a little more and play B - C - D - E.

We advance a little more and play C - D - E - F#.

And with these, we have already finished with the warm-up exercises for guitar. Remember to choose three and practice them a couple of minutes before starting to play to gain fluency, and don’t forget to join https://www.pimpmylicks.com/ for the best advanced guitar lessons!