Playing the guitar is fun and painful at the same time. No matter how much you love the instrument, you may feel a little pain in your fingers and hand if you play it continuously or incorrectly. This mostly is due to the same posture of your hands for a long time or it could be that you are following the wrong technique or just not practicing enough.
However, you don’t need to worry since this will not stop you from achieving the tunes you want to play. Instead of taking a break, all you can do is add a few hand exercises to your daily guitar routine. Not only will the finger and hand exercises help you with the guitar practice, but they will also help you to strengthen your fingers and hand muscles.
Guitar Practice Tips: Hand and Finger Exercises
So, without further delay, let’s go through some of the hand exercises that will help you improve strength and play for longer duration but also build better coordination between the fingers on the left hand and the right strumming or picking hand.
Staircase Guitar Exercise
This exercise is all about stretching your finger, which will help you improve your Guitar practice experience. To start this exercise, you must begin from the higher point of the fretboard and gradually move down the neck (like an arpeggio). This will help you stretch your finger more than usual as the frets get apart further.
The name of this exercise is derived from the fact that you make a staircase shape using your hand and fingers when they move down the fret one at a time. This exercise ensures that you get the maximum stretch of your fingers while also helping you make your finger work independently.
Spider Exercise for Guitar
This exercise offers an amazing way to blow the cobwebs out of your hands and provide them with an amazing workout. This exercise ensures you can play two patterns simultaneously.
In this exercise, you run your fingers vertically down and up across the fretboard hitting single notes with each of your fingers. This helps your fingers have a good warmup, reach all the points on the fretboard, become more independent with the strings, and improves your playing experience. This exercise is apt for people who want to play notes for real.
Camper Exercise
The fingering pattern in this exercise becomes 1,4, 3, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, using your hand on the fretboard, which is played entirely on one string. This will help boost your guitar practice sessions.
Although this exercise may sound simple and easy but let us warn you, this exercise is complex when you start following it. But once you cross the limits of difficulties, you will get rare benefits that will lead you to an expert-like experience when playing the guitar.
With the constant shifting between 3, 4, and 2, 4 patterns, you might experience some challenges here. But this exercise will reward you with improving speed, finger independence, and better synchronization between both hands.
Besides these three leading exercises, you must ensure to follow the basics rules of learning the guitar and that is:
– Giving enough time when you practice which mainly translates to practicing with patience.
– Maintaining consistency.
– Try challenging notes and tunes.
– Practice, and keep practicing!
While these tips will help you get going with your guitar practice routine, we also suggest you take a online guitar classes that entails an instructor who will guide you to a higher level in playing the guitar. He will not only give you exercises to practice but will help you grasp the essentials needed to begin playing acoustic or electric guitar. Additionally, you’ll have a structured approach to playing quickly, performance techniques, and music theory.
As a final note, it can be said that playing the guitar is not difficult; you will just need the right platform and tricks to learn them the easier way and make your guitar practice session productive.
