5 Mistakes to AVOID When Playing The Spider Walk Exercise on Guitar

One of the most popular exercises you can find here on YouTube for guitar players is the spider walk or the spider exercise. But did you know that most people practice this exercise incorrectly? Now the reason this exercise is so popular because it works on two very important fundamentals. One, it works on finger dexterity. Just getting this fretting hand moving. Especially for older adults. If you suffer for arthritis, it's a really great warm up just to get the blood flowing and get the fluid flowing in your joints. But it's also a great way to develop finger dicks dexterity so that you can actually play and change your chords much faster. The other great benefit is it's a great exercise for getting both of your hands working together, so coordinating the left hand and the right hand. So you can see from that alone why this would be so important to incorporate into your practice and warm up routine. But the issue is most students are going about practicing this wrong. Therefore they cannot receive the full benefits of the exercise. So what I do in this video is show you some of the most common mistakes and how to fix them so that you can get the most out of this exercise and get faster fingers and hands within the next 30 days.

If you need a full lesson on the spider exercise, I'll put a link up here. I'm just going to review what the spider exercise is quickly. So if you already know what it is, feel free to fast forward and get to the next section. So what a spider walk exercise is, it's when we use our fingers across the fretboard and we usually go down the strings and up the strings in a very specific order. There's a number of different spider exercises. The one I'm going to use today is very, very common. It's going to be four fingers and each finger owns its own fret. Five is the first finger, six is the second finger, seven is the third finger, and then the pinky is the eighth fret. All right, so each finger has its own fret. As I eat my hair there. 5, 6, 7, 8. Okay. And what you would do is you would take this on the top string and then you would move it to this next string, down the next string, down the next string, down all the way down to the bottom. And then you would work your way back up.

Okay. And you can see you can go very fast with this, you can go very slow with it. But that is the essentials of the exercises. It's just each finger has its own fret and you basically walk up the string down the fretboard using this exercise, and it's very good for building dexterity. And like I said, it's a great warm up in getting the blood flowing and the fluid flowing in your fingers. So that is the quick review of what the spider exercise in. Let's get into mistake number one. So the question some of you might be asking is, Lauren, where do I start this exercise? So I started on frets 5, 6, 7, 8. And for most people, that's going to work out great. But for some people, you, it's too much of a stretch. So if you notice on the guitar, the frets here, the first fret, this big block, is much wider than the frets down here. So again, if you're someone who's older, who suffers from arthritis, you might not have as flexible fingers as someone maybe in their 20s and 30s. So starting at 5, 6, 7, 8 might be too much of a stretch for you. So you might want to start at 7, 8, 9, 10. Okay. These frets will be a little bit smaller, it'll be a little bit less of a stretch, and it'll be a little bit easier to play those notes. A lot of people start down here at the first fret. And this is a big stretch, especially for a beginner. Even if you have young hands, this is a big stretch for beginners. I don't recommend starting at the first fret. I recommend eventually getting there to stretch out your hand. But starting either on the 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th fret would really be helpful. You could even do the ninth fret. The tricky thing with here, you can see I have a cutout. Some people don't have a cutout on their guitar. And when you get up to these higher frets, it can sometimes be tricky for you to play. But 9, 10, 11, 9, 10, 11, 12 is also really good, especially if you have very, very, very tight hands. The other great thing about starting higher up on the fretboard is that the string tension in the middle of the guitar is a little bit lighter. It means you'll need less pressure at the ninth fret than you do at the first fret. Same goes for the 5, 6, 7, 8. The strings are just a little bit more flexible in the middle of the guitar. So it's going to make pressing those strings and making the notes sound good a little bit easier too. Mistake number two is a huge mistake. Lots of students do it. It's just playing too fast and everyone wants to play fast on the guitar. It's cool. I mean, Eddie Van Halen was super cool. He could play A lot of notes, really, really fast, and eventually we can get there. But the goal of the spider exercise, especially in the beginning, is not to go fast. It's to work on finger dexterity and to help you relax. So to start, you're gonna need to go slow. If we go too fast, what it does is it puts a lot of pressure and stress on the hand. Okay? Because we really are trying to force ourselves to go faster. And then that stress travels down our hand, into our wrists, into our forearms, into our biceps, into our shoulders. As soon as you know, your whole arm is locked up and you're feeling a lot of pain. So we want to work on going slow and breathing through the exercise. I have so many students who do the exercise, and they're trying to go fast, and they go, you know, they get down to the bottom, and then they go. They breathe out. They haven't took a single breath all the way through. So what we want to do is start working on relaxing the hand, because speed actually comes from relaxation. So what I want you to do, I'll start here on the seventh fret, so we're have a little less of a stretch. And I just want you to play a note. Relax. Play your next note. Relax. Play your next note. Relax. Okay. There's no rush, because, one, I'm trying to get these notes to sound good. But also, in the beginning, your fingers are going to be doing this. They're going to be flying away from the fretboard. But if we relax, we can actually control the muscle movements a little bit better, and you can start breathing. Okay. And you can start thinking. And by giving yourself time to practice, process the information, you can actually tell your fingers to relax. Okay? What I would recommend to students, especially if you're very, very tense, play a note, and don't play the next note until your hand relaxes. So if you feel tension, I wouldn't play that next note. You might have to shake your fingers out a little bit to get them to relax. Play that next note. Okay? Relax the fingers again. Play that next note. And that's how you should start this exercise. Going very slow. Really focusing on getting the notes to sound cleanly but also getting these fingers to relax. Okay? And you'll do that by going slow and not forgetting to breathe. And something I tell my students to do. You know, take the picking hand completely out of the equation. Work solely on your fretting hand. All right? I know I said this is a great exercise to coordinate the hands, but if you're really having trouble with that fretting hand, just focus on the fretting hand. This way, all your brain power goes to forcing this hand to relax and getting these fingers to move. Okay. Because the faster your fingers can move, the easier it's going to be to make chord changes. The better the strumming patterns you'll be able to play, and the more your songs are going to start sounding like songs. Now, another mistake students make is only practicing the spider exercise one way. What do I mean by that? So right now you've seen me lifting my fingers as I go, and this is really great for helping to relax the fingers. Okay. If you're working on relaxation, I would lift the fingers as I go. Okay. But as you get more and more relaxed, it's good to practice the spider exercise another way where we leave the fingers down. You can see I'm leaving the fingers down as I go. And Now I'm on 5, 6, 7, 8. And what this does by leaving the fingers down, we're now focusing on stretching out the hand. All right. So you'll have less tension, less stretch by lifting the fingers. But if you keep them down, you're going to start feeling the fingers stretch more. Okay. And you can notice my hand. Another mistake people commonly make is they think that every finger has to be played perpendicular into the string. I don't know if you'll see it on my close up, but my first finger and my pinky are angled out at about a 45 degree angle. So my first finger is not going straight into the guitar. It's actually hitting on the side of the finger. And the same with my pinky, it's hitting on the side of the finger. So we're not trying to do everything straight in. So when you're holding them down, each finger, you're kind of going to have a curve to your knuckles. Okay. So that's two ways of practicing. One for relaxation. Okay. And I would warm up this way first. Okay. And once you get the blood flowing, then you can start keeping the fingers down and working on stretching out the hand. Because eventually you will want to be able to play this down at the first fret because this is. This is where we're playing a lot of our chords. And this is why the C chord is so hard, such a hard chord, because it's a three fret stretch, and a lot of us haven't worked on stretching out our hand. So eventually, you're going to want to get your spider exercise down here and start stretching out your hands so that playing those open Chords, especially that side C chord, becomes a lot easier because usually what happens is people don't have enough stretch on the third finger, and it ends up on the front side of the fret here, okay. Close to the headstock. And you get this. You get that muted sound. But if you could stretch your fingers so that this finger ends up in the front of the fret, you need a lot less pressure, and it makes playing the chord a lot easier. Another mistake students make is focusing on the fretting hand. Okay, so, yes, the fretting hand is doing a lot of work in this exercise, but you have another hand that. That we can focus, focus on. And students get so focused at looking at the fretboard, especially during chord changes, they forget to look at their fretting hand. So just like I said before, you can do this exercise with just your fretting hand, or you could work on just the picking hand. And there's two ways you can pick this exercise. The first way I would recommend doing it, just to start working on coordinating the hands, is just doing all down picks on each string. So that would be four down picks per string. So it would be 1, 2, 3, 4 on that low E string down to the A string, 1, 2, 3, 4, D string, G string, B string, and then E string. And then I'd come back up to the B, to the G, to the D, to the A, and then to the E. And then you can add the other hand in.

And start coordinating them together. But it's okay to practice your picking hand by yourself, and that's how I would start the exercise. But eventually, you're going to want to evolve to something called alternate picking. And a lot of students, they don't make this move. They stick with the downs. And you can actually pick a lot faster by going down, up versus all downs. So what I would do is start with your picking hand just by itself. Don't worry about the fretting hand just yet. And just go down, up, down, up. Move to the next string, then the next string.

Then the next string. B string, E string, B, G, D, A, E. And now, you see, I'm not looking at the strings because I have really good string awareness because I've been playing the guitar so long. But for you, you might need to watch your hand as you're doing this to see where the strings are. But eventually, the more and more you do this, you're not going to have to watch and see your string placement. And then what you can do is, is now put the hands back Together.

Okay. And that's how you can get much faster with this spider exercise is using this alternate down, up, picking. And another note on picking, make sure you are picking through the string, not away from the string. I'm going to over exaggerate on my close up here. So when I'm picking down, I don't want to pick off and away from the string. I see a lot of students who kind of do this and I'm over exaggerating it a little bit, but they pick away from the string. Pick through the string.

You want to pick through the string as opposed to coming away from the string like this. And again, I'm over exaggerating. The motion's not usually that bad. But just think of going through the string instead of kind of coming away. You know, people think they have to pick off the guitar. Just pick right through the string. Now the next mistake I'm going to talk about is probably the worst mistake students make, and that is not practicing this exercise long enough to actually get real benefit from it. Now, you don't need to practice this for hours. It is a warm up. But to see benefit you should be practicing for anywhere. At least five minutes would be my recommendation. And what happens is a lot of students, they go through and they do this and they go down the exercise, okay. And they go down and up a couple times and they're like, okay, great, I practiced that. Now I'm going to move on. What I would recommend going up and down this twice is not enough. What I recommend is getting a timer and setting it for five minutes. Okay? Five minutes is a lot longer than you think. One minute is a lot longer than you think. So if you actually really sat down with this exercise for five minutes straight and worked on it, you would make so much progress in a single week. If you did this for five minutes every day for a single week, I guarantee you your fingers will have a lot more control, a lot more dexterity, and your chord changes are going to be a lot faster. The other thing is, students usually only do this for like one to two weeks and then they stop doing it. No, don't do that. You need to keep practicing this exercise for at least 60 to 90 days to really get the benefit. You're not going to get the benefits out of this. Out of just one or two or even three weeks of practice, hopefully it's going to start getting faster after maybe like three or four weeks. But you really want to start incorporating now. You're going to put in the alternate picking. Now we're going to start stretching. There's so much you can get out of this exercise, and there's so many different ways to do it. Do not put this down. After only one or two weeks, you are not going to get the full benefit from the exercise. Remember, this is a new motion for your hands, so you are only really going to see very, very brief foundational benefits of doing this for one or two weeks. I highly recommend you work on this for three or four weeks at a very slow speed, working on getting finger dexterity, the hand coordination down, and trying to get your hand to relax. After those first four weeks, then you can switch over to alternate picking, trying to work on speed and trying to stretch the hand more. And even in those following four weeks, you can really work on busting your speed and getting the hand all the way down to the first fret. And if you're working on speed, I highly recommend that you use a metronome to race against. Metronomes are great tools to use in your practice arsenal. It's a great way to keep track of your progress over time and and see are you really getting faster? Now, if you're not familiar with how to use a metronome in your practice, I highly recommend you go watch my video right over there where I show you how I use metronomes in practice to get your fingers to move faster and get your chord changes even faster. Go check out that video right over there.