Guitar Players: Think Like Athletes

Warm-up at the start of your practice session.

Let’s think for a moment about star athletes. A world class runner does not begin the day running at full speed. The best baseball players still take batting practice and field grounders before the game. Athletes ease into full practice and performance. Why do I bring this up? Because, as much as playing the guitar is a creative, an emotional, even a spiritual endeavor, guitar playing is ultimately a physical activity.

Try to get in the habit of warming-up, like athletes do, at the start of your guitar-playing day. I recommend simple exercises that don’t require too much brain power but that get your blood flowing, get both hands working together and get you focused on good technique and tone. Generally, don’t start your warm-up with songs you are trying to learn. This is a quick path to ingraining mistakes! First, get in touch with the instrument, get focused, centered, and then begin practicing on bigger things.

Beginners, I suggest a long-view perspective with this same advice in mind. If you are just starting out on the guitar don’t worry about playing your favorite songs right away. Spend some time, a couple of weeks to a couple of months, concentrating on basic technique, chords and patterns. Establish good habits with single notes, produce good tone, clearly articulated notes, good sounding chords, steady rhythms, etc. There is a lot of musicality in playing simply, clearly and in time. Your favorite songs will come soon enough.

An example of a simple and effective warm-up exercise is shown below. It is a chromatic fragment played one-finger-per-fret. It moves simply across a string, then moves up a fret and then reverses the direction of the notes. This type of exercise has many possible variations. The second example shows how this warm-up fragment can be moved around the neck.

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