Guitar Finger Stretching Exercises - Reach More Frets Instantly!

So if you're wondering if your hand is too small to play guitar, well, think again. I'm only 54 and I do not have giant hands. What I'm going to do in this video is show you some great exercises that you can use to start stretching out your hands. You might be stuck right now with only like this 4Fret or maybe even playing down here. You feel it's too much of a stretch. Oh, what do we do? How do we get our fingers to stretch out so that we can have a five or six fret stretch on the guitar? Again, I don't have small hands, but you can see that I can really start stretching my hand up much more. But in the beginning, it wasn't like that. I was probably like most guitar players. You know, I was lucky I could do like the four finger stretch like this. And it really started stretching my hand when I started learning how to play scales. And you know, I had to do like these five fret stretches, which I had never done before. I couldn't do them. I was like, this really stinks. I'm never going to be able to do this. And I started introducing some stretching exercises into my practice. And it's just like if you were trying to stretch yourself regular, if you started stretching today and you're trying to touch your toes. I can't touch my toes. I'm not very flexible. But if I started today, I wouldn't be able to touch my toes. But if I worked on it a little bit every day over time, eventually I would be able to bend over. I would probably be able to go past my toes. And it's the same things with your hands. If you don't work on exercises that actually work on widening the span of your fingers, you will never get a wider stretch. But there are two important things I want to talk about before we get into the exercises. The first thing is your thumb placement. Okay. The thumb placement really should be on the back side of the guitar, straight up and down. So it should look like this on the back of the guitar. Okay. If you reach, which I do sometimes when I play chords and stuff. But if you reach your thumb up over, you are cutting off the stretch of your hand. And if you're someone like me with small hands, you need every little millimeter in centimeter you can get. So you're going to get your widest stretch by having your thumb flat on the back of the guitar. Another thing that is important to notice, you'll see a, I am holding my guitar like this because this is how I like to play and this is how I like to teach. But realistically, playing your guitar in more of a classical position like this is going to help you give, maximize your reach the most. Okay? I know a lot of students who don't particularly like playing like this. I know for me, with my acoustic guitar, it, you know, because my acoustic guitar is so big, again, I'm not a giant person. I could get a smaller guitar, but I don't particularly like playing, playing like this. And I am willing to trade off, give up a little bit of my, my stretch. Okay? So just understand there's different trade offs to doing different things. But those are two important things to keep in mind when you're first doing. This is one, where is my thumb on the back of the guitar? If it's straight up and down, you're automatically going to have a much wider reach than if your thumb is off to the side or hooking over the top. Okay? We never want our thumb off to the side. It just, it's really, really bad for guitar playing. Then the other thing, a classical position, you will get a lot more reach just because your wrist is in a better position. But you could also get a lot of reach playing this way as well. So I'm going to show you one exercise that's just stretching, okay? Really just stretching. And then I'm going to a couple other exercises that will actually push you to open up this width of the hand. Now the first thing you can do is you can set up with your basic stretch. Now understand the fret stage down here are much wider than the frets up here. So I Recommend Going to 5, 6, 7 and 8 on the high E string. Okay? And what we're going to do is we're going to lift up the other two fingers, get them out of the way, and you're slowly just going to try and stretch your pinky as far as you can, okay? Now if your thumb comes off the back, that's totally fine. Try and keep it on the back of the guitar because you want to play with your thumb on the back of the guitar. But if it does come off, that's okay for this stretching exercise and what we're trying to do. So you see here, I'm on the fifth fret and you know, you might be starting at 8 and you can only get here. Okay, Maybe you can only just get to the front of the fret of the ninth, and that's totally fine. You're just going to bring it back, stretch it again, bring it back, stretch it again, bring it back, stretch it again, bring it back, stretch it again until, you know, maybe you can. I don't think I could get the 12th fret. I don't think my hand is big enough. I know some people who could reach to the 12th fret, but for me this is about the max I can do. I can do five to 11. If I was down here on these first frets, I could do a five fret stretch. So down here I have more of like. What's that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. It's a seven fret stretch on these thinner strings. But down here I only really have. I really have a five. And I could probably work on stretching that more, but I don't play those wide of stretches that often. So for me, five frets down here and being able to put my thumb on the back of the guitar and that's probably all I would need personally. So that's one way to do it. It's just like reaching down and touching your toes. We're just trying to. Oh, we're just trying to reach that pinky out as far as we can. Okay. And then relax. And if you ever have pain in your wrists, stop. You never, never want to stretch or do anything through pain, okay? So. And don't forget to breathe when you're doing this because if you're tense, everything tenses up to stretch. You want to be relaxed. So breathe in as you stretch over the guitar again. So that's just working on literally just stretching out, stretching out the hand there. Now the exercise that I like to do is to take a particular spider exercise. I'm going to show you version one and I'm going to show you version two when you start opening up your stretch. So version one is to just take your spider exercise, alright? 5, 6, 7, 8. And then work it down the top string down these frets.

Now for some of you, when you get down to this first fret, you might feel a lot of stretch because you've never stretched your fingers this much. So again, as a, as a reminder, the frets down here are much wider than the frets. So If I do 9, 10, 11, 12, and I carry this stretch down here, it's only really a three fret stretch by the time I get down to the open position strings. So stretching down here and working on your spider exercise. The spider exercise is just one finger per fret, all right? And then you just pick each one of those notes individually. Now as you're working, you know you might Get a lot of this because your stretch isn't quite comfortable, but eventually your stretch is going to get comfortable. Okay? And four frets, especially if you're doing this exercise and working on stretching down here, just working on the actual art of stretching, you then need to throw it into an exercise. Because what's the good of doing this if you can't stretch your hand while you're playing in an exercise, Right? So you can take your little simple spider exercise. Play it down at the first fret of the guitar. Okay? And again, all I'm doing is going, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

And if you feel it stretching, then that's good, keep playing. But eventually you're not going to feel that much of a stretch. So where do we go from here? The next goal would be to stretch a fret between your first and second fingers. So when we play typical spider exercise, we play 5, 6, 7, 8. Well, now you're going to play 5, 7, 8, 9.

Okay. And then again, you would do that same thing. You would start bringing it.

You start bringing it down the fretboard. You can see, for me, it's tough to do it down here. I'm losing some of that stretch on my third finger because these. These are wider. But again, if I went back and I worked on this more, I know. See, I fixed my thumb. I got my thumb in a better position.

And I was able to. I still feel that. Though I will admit that that still is a bit of a reach for me. But you can see how doing these couple of exercises really can work on widening out the stretch, because I see with a lot of students, they have trouble doing power chords or they have trouble doing a C chord because they just haven't developed that width and the stretch in their hands yet. So these are a few great exercises to. One, just work on the simple act of stretching. But then two, to apply it to something that is related to playing your guitar. It's one thing to stretch out your hands, it's another thing to actually apply it to something musical. Now, if you found this video helpful, I highly recommend you go check out this video over here. We're going to show you the number one guitar exercise for getting your fingers faster. I guarantee if you put this and that exercise together, you're going to improve your finger, your hand dexterity and flexibility in the next two weeks.