Warming up is just as essential to having a productive practice session and avoiding injury as stretching. In this lesson, I’ll show you some warm up exercises that you can do. A few of them are more focused on lead guitar, and a few are focused on rhythm guitar. Pick a couple that are appropriate for your skill level.
The first one, is to simply play through a scale. Don’t play it quickly. Just play it fast enough that you can cleanly go through it. Go up and down the scale multiple times.
The next exercise is the chromatic scale. This scale involves the use of every finger, and can be down by alternate picking the scale or by using hammer-ons and pull-offs. A good warm-up exercise for rhythm guitar is just cycling between open chords. Go through each chord shape you know, trying to put the shape down all at once.
Another good rhythm exercise is to make bar chord shapes all over the fretboard. Moving bar chords shapes around will really get the blood flowing in your hand.
Try using some of these warm-up exercises to start off your daily practice time and see if they make a positive impact.
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