3 Reasons Why You Should Always Warm Up Before Playing Guitar

Stop! Don’t you dare play your guitar before warming up. Ever seen someone begin running without stretching first? It often ends very ugly. So why should playing guitar be any different? Always warm up before playing. You will have a lot of benefits if you do it:

1. Play better. After warming up blood flow is a lot better on your hands. This means you can move them faster without much effort.
2. Avoid injuries. What do you think is worse, spending 10 minutes warming up or 3 months without playing guitar due to an injury? Yeah, I thought so.
3. Better technique. Because of the nature of the exercises you can use to warm up (I’m posting a link to some after this list)  you can often improve your technique. By using chromatics with patterns you are not used to playing, you will warm up your hands and fingers while improving your coordination and technique.

When warming up I usually spend some minutes going through chromatic patterns that are difficult for me to play, but I play them very slowly. This way I can make sure I play them perfectly thus improving my coordination while at the same time warming up.

I found a post over at the Mad Stratter blog that covers several warming up exercises of the chromatic type. You can find the post here.

Just remember, always warm up before playing your guitar and you will have a better playing session.

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