Guitar playing can be painful to your fingers, especially when you are starting out. Here are some effective finger stretching & strengthening exercises to help you cope with Guitar playing.
Learning the guitar may be “cool” but not without its share of pain. All those learning the guitar will know that playing the chords and strings could be quite painful for the fingers, sometimes even causing blisters on them.
Effects of Guitar on Fingers
Learning to play the guitar is fun and exciting but we have come across many who have started out with much gusto but fizzled out after playing the strings and learning the chords.
The reason being that, initially, the learning process could hurt your fingers a bit, causing blisters. Learning how to play the guitar requires quite a lot of practice and dedication. But when you play for a long period of time, your fingertips become soar.
Also some of you tend to press the strings too hard that causes blisters on your fingers. The tips of our fingers are generally very soft and when we press the strings when playing the guitar, it is normal to feel pain.
However, if you still continue practicing, you will notice that the blisters dry up eventually and cause calluses. The calluses protect the fingertips for a while but after a while it starts hurting again. But eventually the calluses keep building up making your fingertips thick and you won’t feel the pain anymore after that.
Best Warm Up Finger Exercise for Guitar
Here’s an excellent warm up finger exercise for playing the guitar. Before you begin your practice session, its a good idea to warm-up your fingers before moving on to the complicated things.
This is perhaps the most important exercise to learn and practice for guitar and an excellent warm up for guitarists of any level.
Before attempting this, spend some time to learn the frets so you know where the notes are located.
Initially it may take more time, say about 10-15 minutes, but with practice you should be able to go through it several times in much lesser time and use it as warm up exercises before you move on to the other practice stuff.
Here are some more things to keep in mind when you’re doing this exercise, to derive the maximum benefit out of it:
- Try to only touch the string you are playing, and not the string below
- Try to play legato, which means you lift the fingers just before you pluck the next fret. As you lift the fingers, try to lift them towards the direction of the next string/fret you’re going to play.
With more practice, you should easily be able to move your fingers across, up and down the frets.
Tips to Protect your Fingers
How to Strengthen Your Fingers
Summary
Anyone who plays the guitar will tell you that the initial phase of learning how to play causes a lot of pain to your fingers. Every beginner has a problem of soar finger tips and blisters but this is not something you have to deal with all the time. The pain eases out eventually. Long hours of practice or too much pressure on the strings or frets can cause these blisters which hurt initially; however, the skin thickens after a while. There are many finger strengthening exercises to strengthen your fingers and wrists for playing guitar better. But the best way to strengthen your fingers is to keep playing without being deterred and without giving up on your guitar.
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