Hello! What's up players? This is Mike Deiure and I am shooting this short video to show you and talk about a few warm up exercises that are good to do before you play and practice. It's always a good idea to warm up to prevent injury and to get you in optimal playing condition for your fingers, your hands and your wrists.
So before I even get into this, I want to say that a lot of these exercises I learned from John Petrucci's Rock Discipline video. So check that out if you get a chance and I definitely want to throw some props to him because a lot of these techniques are ones that he showed me in his video and they are really great. So I am just going to talk about them here and show you what's going on.
So before I even play anything with my fingers, there's a couple of stretching exercises that I do with my hands and my arms. What you want to do is, basically, three exercises in both hands. The first is to put your hand out like this and take your right hand and pull your fingers back. You want to pull them so you really start feeling the strain around this area of your wrist. So we are going to pull back and hold back for about 10-15 seconds, and just make sure it just feels nice and stretched. Don't pull them too hard, but pull it till you feel strain.
So you are going to do it this way, and then what you are going to turn your head upside down like this and pull them back. Again, you are going to feel a lot of the strain right here, right around your wrist area and hold that for about 10 seconds. Then you are going to make a fist and then pull that fist down. You are going to feel this stretching more up in here, but again pull it down so you feel a good amount of strain, not too much, but make sure you feel some tension there. That's what's helping to stretch out the muscles.
So I do those three exercises in both hands. Even though your left hand or your playing hand, your fretting hand is going to be the one that does a lot of the work. It's still good to that with both hands, because your picking hand does do a lot too. So I do both of those exercises before I play anything. Then what I do are a few sets of exercises in the left hand, which are stretching and help to just get stretched out. So I start with the first fret on the big E string. What I do is play the first fret, the third fret with the middle finger, the fourth fret with my ring finger, and my pinky to the sixth fret.
Now, I don't put these all down at once, when I do it I go up and back and it looks like this. I'll do it twice on those sets of frets. Now what I do is just move up one step each and then play two, four, five and seven respectively. I also use alternate picking in my right hand. So basically what I'll do is take this same concept and move all the way up to the part where my pinky gets up to the 12th fret. When I get up to here, I'll start with my pinky and go backwards and come back down, and then all the way back down to the first fret. Then we'll do that same exercise for each string.
Even though it seems like a lot, it might only take me tops two minutes to run through it all. But by the time I am done with that, my left hand is a lot more relaxed and it's ready to go. It's definitely warmed up. I also like doing this with a metronome just to keep it consistent and steady and I also like using triplets. So it would be, triplet, triplet, triplet, triplet. That's going to help you to stay in time. It's not a speed exercise so I generally don't try to push the tempos all that high, but I do like keeping it steady. So find a comfortable pace for you to work at and then do that exercise up and down. That will definitely get your left hand warmed up.
There are some other right hand exercises that I would like to do. But for now I am just going to have you work with those because the left hand is the bigger one to work out on and that will show you and give you some ways that are easy; anybody could do it. But make sure you do it, because it's important to get your hands warmed up.
So have fun, and we'll see you soon.
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