Warm-Up Exercises
ALWAYS WARM UP!!!!
I am not a doctor. See Disclaimers. Any medical advice below should be reinforced by your own research and advice from a professional.
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. 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.
Failure to warm-up can cause early onset of Carpal Tunnel or tendinitis.
Contents
Cardio
It helps to do several minutes of cardiovascular activity before playing. Running in place or jumping jacks or simply pacing around the room quickly will get the heart working and force blood flow to all the muscles in the body. Restricted blood flow to muscles results not only in weakness and difficulty to control but the build-up of acids and other toxic byproducts.
Stretching
Stretching is crucial to reducing Repetitive Stress Disorder (RST) and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS). It improves flexibility of muscles and tendons, reducing their pressure on nerves and blood vessels. It improves blood flow, serving to remove toxins and metabolic byproducts from muscles. It also produces fluid that serves to lubricate joints.
While stretching is a good part of a warm up, it will have a more powerful impact after a playing session. The small, repetitive movements required by intense guitar playing will aggravate and tighten the muscles and tendons of the hands and wrist, putting pressure on the nerves in the wrist, causing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I recommend a light stretching before a session, perhaps even integrated into your cardio routine, and thorough stretching afterwards, particularly focused on the forearm and finger muscles.
All stretches should be done carefully - forcing a stretch too quickly or overextending the muscle can itself result in injury. Any pain associated with stretching should be mild and spread throughout the muscle, not sharp and confined to a joint or nerve. Slowly increase tension until the muscle feels slight (but not sharp or intolerable) pain and hold for 20-30 seconds, then release.
Fingers
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 between your fingers as well as 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.
Forearms
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. Then I hold my forearms straight up and try to point my fists at each other - this should stretch the forearm muscles thoroughly. Then rotate your fists to point away from your body, then towards your body.
This next one is crucial. Place one arm straight out ahead of you, fingers straight but touching together, palm facing downward. Use your other hand to lift your fingers and pull them back towards your body, so your palm is now facing away from your body. Repeat this exercise, but this time start with the palm facing up, and pull the fingers downward so the palm is again facing away from you.
Shoulders
Next, be sure to stretch your shoulders. Grab above your elbow with the opposite hand and try to pull your elbow towards your rib cage below your armpit. This will stretch the shoulder and shoulder-blade muscles. You can also grab your opposing forearm behind your back and try to pull. Once complete, be sure to make large circular movements with your shoulders.
Neck
Finally, stretch your neck. Try to hold your shoulders back and push your head back, like you are trying to retract your chin into your neck. Now turn your neck as far left and right as possible, back and forth. As you turn back and forth, slowly start tilting your head backwards, so you are looking upwards. Next, try to push your shoulders lower, while tilting your neck left and right. Don't tilt the neck too hard - try to lower the shoulders more until you can your lats get a good stretch.
Injury
see Injury
Petrucci Chords
Again, be sure to go slow and back off if you feel any sharp pain. see Advanced Technique Exercises#Petrucci Chords
Chromatic Scale
Scales
Practicing various ascending and descending scales (be sure to play through the transitions from ascending to descending and descending to ascending) is always a good idea, especially the scales and positions you are likely to perform. You can find a giant reference of all the common scales at Ref: Common Scales, and full scale maps across the entire fretboard for the major and minor scales at Ref: Scale Fret Maps for all Major/Natural Minor Keys w/ CAGED breakdown.
For lots of exercises, see Common Scale Exercises.
Note: these exercises are better for warming up the right hand than the left. I'd rather perform the Petrucci Chords or Chromatic Scale exercises for the left-hand, as those have a more consistent emphasis on all the left-hand fingers.
Arpeggios
Just like scales, arpeggios are good exercise - focus on the ones you'll tend to use. Or at least the ones that give you fingers a good work out. There is reference for all the CAGED major and minor triads. It should be somewhat simple to alter these to fit other chord types, which are referenced at Ref: Mega List of Chord Fingerings/Voicings. For example, adding the minor 7th of dominant major/minor chords.
Rhythm
The best way to warm-up for rhythm is to play to a metronome or a good drummer. The first thing to get down is consistency, so all your notes fall on the beats and have equal duration. Metallica used to warm up by simply chugging palm mutes on the open low E string for a good 5-10 minutes. It seems simple until you try it.
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n x100
pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
Practice on at least 4 different speeds, with an extreme slow and a fast speed that is close to your maximum. Practice with all downstrokes, all upstrokes, and strict alternate picking. Obviously, the straight down or upstroke exercises will require a slower speed than the alternate picking. Also try different strings.
This same exercise works for strummed chords, although you'll likely need to reduce the relative speeds. Start by keeping the left hand constant, holding the same chord throughout.
Playing the same note or chord over and over is easy to get a consistent rhythm. Trying to keep that rhythm with runs or riffs or chord changes is another story. Once you establish a good right hand using the above exercise, you have to lock it in. Don't ever let your right hand wait to catch up with the left. If the left hand is slow to fret the notes, play them uncleanly. Throwing off your rhythm might sound ok playing in the bedroom but becomes painfully obvious in a band or recording context. Even playing solo, hearing it played back that inconsistent rhythm sounds pretty terrible. Unclean playing is also noticeably bad, but sounds less amateur. And its easy to get in the habit of sacrificing rhythm to attain synchronicity, which then becomes difficult to break. The other way around is going to be more noticeable to you and annoying and forces you to make the left hand sync to the right hand.
The kind of playing to get a good warm-up for rhythm will depend on the individual and the type of playing you perform. If you are a rhythm player, it may make sense to alternate between two strings or power chords or full chord changes. If you are a lead player, playing various scales ascending and descending, as well as arpeggios or advanced techniques like tapping and sweeps makes more sense.
The key thing is when you're jamming or playing along to your favorite song or trying to record a part, you may notice some riffs or chord changes or rhythms that seem impossible to nail. Make a mental or written log of these things, identify the specific parts of the licks or riffs or changes are giving you trouble, and try to break down why it's difficult. This will let you develop your own exercises that consist nearly entirely of such. It's helpful to alternate between sections of these parts and just chugging on single notes or a static chords like above.
Another thing to practice is throwing in accents. Start by putting accents on the beats:
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
> > > > > > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
1 tr lt 2 tr lt 3 tr lt 4 tr lt
> > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--:|
tr lt = trip let; so 1 trip let 2 trip let ... etc.
1 u n u 2 u n u 3 u n u 4 u n u
> > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
1 t l n t l 2 t l n t l 3 t l n t l 4 t l n t l
> > > >
E-|:0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-:|
t l = trip let; so 1 trip let and trip let ... etc.
It may be easier to just say 1 n uh and n uh 2 n uh and n uh ... etc.
The faster the tempo, the harder it is to work those accents in. But they really help you keep a consistent rhythm - you know every 2, 3, 4, or 6 notes you should be making an accented downstroke on the beat. It's easy to hear when and in which direction your rhythm is falling off and make the correction. A consistent rhythm demands control and accents demand more control than static dynamics. That makes this a great warm-up.
Then you try trickier accent patterns, where accents alternate between downstrokes and upstrokes.
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
> > > > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
> > > > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
> > > > > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n 1 n 2 n 3 n 4 n
> > > > > > > > > >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|
Finger-Stretching
see Advanced Technique Exercises#Finger-Stretching