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'''''{{loud|ALWAYS WARM UP!!!!!!!!''''' }} Warming up helps improve your playing and avoid injury. '''Be sure to warm-up both your fretting and picking hands.''' Your fretting hand needs to be stretched so that some uncomfortable chord shapes or finger-stretches don't push you into injury or cramping. This includes your wrist, which needs to angle in difficult positions as well as your fingers. Your fretting hand wrist and elbow need to be loosened up as well. All the muscles and ligaments involved in playing guitar (there are a ''lot'' in your hands) need to be given a gradual introduction to the workload you are about to put on them, to make sure they have good blood flow and nothing is out of place. When you start playing a gig or even recording, trying to hit that difficult lick can be a jarring shock to the biomechanics involved if they weren't warmed up.
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{{Gig Prep Crumbs|5}}
The main thing to remember for warm-ups is to go slow. Ease your hands into the workload required for playing guitar. Your warm-up exercises should hit all the muscle groups you use during playing. You want to introduce all of them to a very mild difficulty, not a severe strain out the gate. If anything produces a sharp pain, back off and try to ease through it slowly. If it doesn't get better and in fact gets worse, you may already have an injury you need to get treated. Trying to push through the pain can often result in a catastrophic injury that prevents you from ever playing guitar again...or even worse.