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'''''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.
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.
== Stretching ==
I like to spread the fingers of each hand and touch my palms and fingers together, then raise my elbows/lower my hands so my palms can no longer touch. When done correctly, you should feel each finger muscle get stretched - you should feel it through your palms and wrists all the way into your forearms. Then I rotate my wrists, so that my fingers point towards me. Then I turn my wrists in the opposite direction so they point away from. After giving all my fingers a good stretch as such, I pull my hands away from each other and ball them into a tight fist. Then I rotate each wrist in a circular motion to loosen them up as well as stretching my forearms on the other side.