Why Does Every Guitar Player Warm Up The WRONG WAY?
Is there a best way to warm up when you practice guitar?
To most people it looks like anything can work for warm up. And most people end up doing chromatic spider-walk exercises or something similar...
...and I’m here to tell you that that's wrong.
Yeah, I know, in the modern touchy-feely world I should instead say that "it's not optimal" or "there are better alternatives", maybe I need to validate people who do the spider exercise...
... but that would make the message less clear. And what I will say in a minute can be the difference if you progress in your guitar playing or stay stuck at your current level (seriously!)
So let me be clear here.
If you are using the "spider exercise" or any other kind of chromatic nonsense to warm up, you are wasting these 5 minutes a day in your practice (and you are also sc#%wing up the rest of your practice...) and boy, these 5 minutes add up fast.
(If you are the kind of person that goes "but I don't have time to practice"... you should be paying attention right now)
Just like the day of the champion starts with the breakfast of the champion, the practice of the great guitar players starts with a great warm up.
Failure to do so will make all your practice less effective.
Instead, starting your practice with a great warm up - and also ending your practice with the right exercise - will multiply the amount of time you have.
... or to be more precise. You are wasting the majority of your practice time because you are practicing stuff out of order.
(You don't even have to change what you are practicing. You just need to practice it in the right order)
Am I going to back up all these claims? Yup!
In fact, I am going to explain in detail:
what is the best warm up,
when you should do all the other exercises, and
why doing that will literally double the amount of effective practice time you have.
It's all right here. Watch this video now:
Want something new to learn and practice so you can try this concept out right away? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course which will massively explode your knowledge of chords and harmony on the guitar!
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet! So nice to see you. What is the best way to warm up on guitar when you want to practice? Well, if you go around the Internet, you're gonna find that a lot of people tell you, well, play the spider exercise.
Horrible. Don't do that. The spider is the wrong thing. Usually the spider only, if you are planning to play some music where these... it's actually something that you would play in your music. Yeah, I know.
Controversial opinion. But if you think about that a moment, if you actually think what you are doing when you are warming up, if you think how to be more efficient in your guitar practice, you'll see that the spider is the exact wrong thing to do.
So what is the right thing to do? Let me explain how I think. Now, my idea here is that you are busy people, right? You're busy. You don't have much time, right? You would like to use the time you have to play your guitar and to practice your guitar so that you accomplish the most, you practice the most, you accomplish the most, you get the most progress, and you have as much fun as possible.
Now, if you're one of those people that think playing the spider is fun, okay, well, fine with that. But let's see exactly what's happening when you warm up your hand. Let's see exactly what you're doing.
I mean, why would you even warm up? I mean, you should warm up. I'm not saying no. Don't go out. Don't close the video now and say, Tommaso, that does not warm up. No, no, you have to warm up. But why do you have to warm up?
There is a specific reason, and you can leverage that. So, let's see, when you practice guitar, you have to consider that you have two resources that you're using, which are how limber are your hands and how quick is your mind, or in other words, the performance of your hands and the performance of your mind.
Okay, what do I mean with that? Okay, well, your hands will start with a very low performance. Okay, then as they warm up, the performance increases and stay fairly stable. Okay, so at the beginning of your practice, your hands are cold, right?
That's why you warm up to take your hand at this level. Now, actually, this curve is not exactly like that. This curve should be done in a slightly different way, so let me do it properly. Okay, so hands and minds.
Your hands start with a low, go up, and then get here. Low performance of your hands. Your mind on the other hand, which is important, because everybody seems to forget that. Your mind starts with a high performance, you're fresh at the beginning, okay?
You want, you grab the guitar, you're fresh, you're ready to tackle a lot of things. In your mind, so your mind starts with a high performance, and then eventually that performance starts declining, and toward the end of your practice, you're fried, okay?
So, you are in your practice, you're fried. Meaning, your brain is not paying attention anymore. And that happens, because when you practice, you have to pay attention to what you're doing, okay? You're gonna wonder why we're even doing all this.
I mean, I'm warming up to do that, that's inevitable. Why we're even talking about all that? Well, because I can divide the practice into three phases, early practice, mid practice, and late practice, okay?
So, at the beginning, right? Beginning, mid practice, and end practice. And I can start thinking, what are the best exercises here? What are the best exercises here? And what are the best exercises here?
Just by looking at that, this is gonna sound so obvious when I say it, but nobody does that. At the beginning, your hands are cold, and your mind is really sharp. An exercise like the spider exercise is essentially mindless.
There is no, your brain is not doing anything. And so you are wasting all the ability of your mind right now and your hands are not warmed up yet, because you're doing this to warm up, and so you're very inefficient at doing that.
Basically, you are wasting all the first third of your practice, all the time you warm up, you are wasting it by playing the spider exercise. Completely wasted. Because all these nice mind power you have here gets completely wasted because you're not using it.
Now what, let's leave this aside for a moment, what would a normal person, what YouTube tells you to, how YouTube tells you to structure your practice, I mean if you go around and look at lots of videos, they tell you do something technical at the beginning, do whatever you want in the middle.
At the end, practice a song or improvise. But look again at these graphs. It should be the exact opposite. At the beginning... Let me tell you the story of the perfect practice here, okay? Let's say the perfect practice is this.
At the beginning, your hands are cold. They cannot move fast. But your mind is fresh. So, the beginning is the best moment to play all those things that require you to do some mental activity, like learning, okay?
But don't require your hand to move fast. The beginning is the best moment to learn a new solo. Because when you are learning a new solo, for instance, or learning a new song, you can't play it fast yet.
And again, you can't because you don't know the song. So, this doesn't require any much ability in your hands. But you're doing a lot of mental work because you're learning what comes after that, what lick comes after that, what chord comes after that, what section comes after that, and all these kind of things.
Or the beginning would be the perfect moment to learn some music theory. If you're learning the notes on your fretboard, using the exercise I give you of playing all the notes across the fretboard. Or if you're learning your intervals or your chord shapes, the beginning is the best moment to learn all that, to learn your scales, your chord shapes.
Because you can't play them fast already because you don't know them. And indeed, your hands right now are not in a high efficiency area. Your hands are still cold. But again, since you can't play it fast anyway, might as well learn them on the beginning of your practice when your mind is fresh.
In the mid practice, your hands are warm and your mind power starts high and then starts to get lower at a certain point. In the mid part, you play whatever you want. That's the moment to challenge yourself.
Okay, difficult exercise. where you have to pay attention, speed exercises, coordination exercises, all those kind of things where you need your hands to be warm up and quick, and you still need your mind to pay attention to what you're doing.
That's the best for mid practice. Once you feel your mind power gets lower and lower, you get to where your end practice. In the end practice, what you get? You have your hands are still warmed up. Your hands are efficient.
They can do a lot. They can still do a lot. It will take quite a while to tire your hand completely. But at this point, your powers of attention starts waning, okay? It's harder to pay attention to the exact synchronization of your hand or other things.
So at the end, you do all those kind of exercises that are quite mindless, but give your hand a workout. So at the end, you can start doing bends. So, like, physically you're enforcing the hand to do bends, or you start doing legato stuff.
Of course, I should warm up before doing that, because this should be the end practice, okay? At the end, you can run your arpeggios, or run your scales, again, if you know them, already. So, at the end, you run all the stuff that you already know how to play, but that require more physical endurance, or more physical speed, or more...
you're just reinforcing your hand at the end, okay? So, everything that you know, at the end, you show off, essentially, okay, if you want. You push the envelope in speed, or other things, but again, all stuff you know already, okay?
This is not the right moment to learn a new song, because your powers of attention, your mental powers, are quite low right now. You see, that's exactly the opposite of what most people do. Exactly the opposite.
Most people start with technical stuff at the beginning, something in the center, and songs and improvisations at the end. And I'm telling you, songs and improvisation and theory. At the beginning, okay, of course, you're not going to improvise great, because your hands are not super-warmed up, but that's okay.
There are exercises of improvising that don't require any technique, or very little speed. So, but thinking stuff, so learning new things or theory at the beginning, while your hands warm up doing those things, technically challenging stuff in the mid practice, stuff that is hard on your hand, but not on your brain at the end, like legato, bends, endurance, okay?
All these kind of things. Routines, essentially, which most people do at the beginning. beginning. If you follow this, what's going to happen? Why would you even do that? Because if you follow the natural curve of your hands and mind or brain, okay, you get more stuff done.
Because you can learn more theory here than you can learn here. And then you can do more legato and bend and endurance here than you can do here. So for the same amount of practice, for the same time, for the same time, and for the same effort, you'd get more stuff done because you are following the natural curve of ability of your hands and brain.
Or in other words, I'm not saying it's a factor or two, but it's it is probably a factor of two, okay, you can probably get twice more done in a practice session if you follow this schedule. if you do those things in this order and if you don't believe me try take a week or better a month in which you practice every day and you run your guitar practice following this blueprint.
Theory at the beginning or learning new things challenging stuff that require attention of your brain and dexterity of hand in the mid practice and endurance stuff or routine stuff at the end of your practice try that and tell me at the end of the month if you haven't improved more than usual.
You will you would have just try okay this is something that you are not gonna find anywhere okay this is stuff that me and a few other musician passes discussed together you're not gonna find this stuff anywhere else people explain this people even know this but if you have limited time in the day.
Like i have like most of you have this is the best way to practice and you're done you're not changing anything of what you practice you're not gonna play different exercises you're not gonna revolutionize anything you're not gonna play stuff you don't like you play the exact same thing you just reorder them so that your brain and hands are more efficient in doing them.
In that moment you do that you will see the difference okay now if you don't have anything to practice if you want exercises i recommend you guys check my courses right now i'm gonna promote this course here Complete Chord Mastery. Great for learning harmony on guitar great for reading guitar players great if you want to compose songs this thing this course runs you through a lot of things that people don't know and how to play them on guitar and it explains to you how music actually works. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com follow those ideas for practicing give it a try and i'll see you guys next time and until next time, enjoy!