Most new guitar players mistakenly think you can just pick up the guitar and start playing as you wish.

They don’t think about warming up their fingers before playing sessions, even though warming up your fingers and arm muscles can prevent injuries and even improve your technique.

Before you get started with your guitar lessons, try to do these simple finger and guitar exercises first.

Why it is Essential?

Before we look at some of the best warm up exercises, it is important to understand why you need to do them before playing. One of the important things is your guitar playing technique can improve if you warm up before playing. One of the reasons this happens is you remove unnecessary tension from your fingers and from your whole body. Your fingers will be more relaxed and therefore, it’s easier to play correctly.

Even more importantly, proper exercises before guitar lessons can prevent injuries from occurring.  For example, numerous guitarists suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome and some even require surgery to cope with it. Luckily, there are ways to prevent it and keep the symptoms at bay and this is best achieved by warming up beforehand.

Start with Stretching

Before you pick your guitar, you should start by doing a few stretches with your fingers and your arms. In fact, it isn’t just your guitar playing arm that you need to worry about. If you play guitar sitting down for long periods, you might end up with back pains. Therefore, you want to do a few easy stretches throughout your upper body to ensure you are relaxed and ready to go.

The Guitar and Bass website has some great stretch ideas. On top of these ideas on the website, you could also do the following:

• Lower back stretch: sit on a chair and slowly fold your upper body between your knees. Try to touch the floor with your knuckles and keep your back straight during the exercise. Hold the position for 20 seconds and slowly get back up. Repeat a few times.
• Finger push-ups: put your fingertips against each other (a bit like an evil scientist!) and gently push them against each other for a few seconds. Repeat for a few times.

Slowly Start Playing

Once you’ve relaxed your body with a few stretches, you should do a few simple guitar exercises before you continue with the actual guitar lessons. It is a good idea to play some slower songs or do some freestyling first. This ensures your fingers are properly warmed-up before you pick up the speed and play the more difficult licks.

You could use basic chord progression to warm up or even pick some simple songs to play. If you are into blues music, the Traditional Music website has plenty of chords and tabs available for guitarists.

It doesn’t matter what you play during your warm up session, which should last about 15 minutes. The key is to ensure you don’t play too fast and that you slowly increase the difficulty to your fingers. Once you’ve done your warm up, you can continue to your guitar lessons!