How To Stretch Your Fretting Hand

Hey guys, Lauren here. I'm at the home office today and I had a question from someone about how to stretch your fingers more because they're having difficulty with the C chord, particularly with their third finger getting it all the way over. So when you play chords, the closer up to the front of the fret you are, the closer to the body of the guitar, the easier it is to play a chord. You don't have to press the strings as hard. So for a lot of people on the C chord, this top string gets muted a lot of times because the third finger is stuck way back here in the back of the fret instead of the front of the fret. So people are like, hey, how do I stretch this out? Or they're doing barre chords and they're like, man, this is really killing my hand. So what I recommend for people to kind of start stretching out. There's a couple different exercises you can do. And if you've done my beginner guitar course, you probably know the Simple Spider exercise. It is a four fingered exercise. I think almost every guitar teacher uses it. So most people, when they start off playing this, they kind of lift the fingers as they go and they kind of play very staccato, meaning the notes don't bleed together.

They stop very shortly. So what we want to do, something you can do that will help start with this stretching is to leave the fingers down and let the fingers stretch. Because by lifting up the. And I'm over exaggerating here so that you can see the movement. By lifting up my finger, I'm not allowing the stretch to come into play at all. If I leave my fingers down.

You can start stretching out those fingers. And if this is too much for you.

Just move a little bit more up the neck of the guitar. These frets up here.

As you can see, are much smaller than the frets down here. So if you want a bigger stretch, come down here and keep working your way down the guitar until you can do it on these big frets. That's one way to get started with stretching your fingers out a little bit. Another thing is that the third finger is a problematic finger for a lot of people. There's a lot of tendons. I mean, if you look at my hand when I move my pinky, because of the way the tendons are, my third finger has to move with it. So it's very hard to get independence in your third finger because it's just. It's so interconnected with all the other tendons and stuff in your hand. So this is a little exercise you can do to start building a little more finger independence. It also mimics kind of what you're doing when you're making chord changes. So it's something that's very helpful. So what we're going to do is we're going to take our first finger and we're going to put it on the G string at the fifth fret. So, fifth fret, G string, you're going to put your first finger and then each finger is going to get its own fret. So your second finger is going on the G string, sixth fret, your. Your third finger is going on the G string, seventh fret, Pinky is going on the G string on the eighth fret. Wow. I cannot talk, huh? So each finger has its own fret that it owns. And what we're going to do, we are going to leave these fingers here. We're going to start with our first finger and we're just going to do like little push ups for our finger. And we're going to go the top string to bottom, top to bottom, chat to bottom. And we're going to try to do this without moving our hands so much. In the beginning. You might have to move your hand a lot eventually is the goal is to be able to do this without doing a lot of this. The first finger is probably not going to be too bad. Same with the second finger, probably not going to be too bad. Top, bottom. Now if you're having trouble with these first two fingers, don't force it down. Try and relax the finger. So this is kind of mimicking the motion of you changing chords. Your fingers are moving up and down. So we're gonna skip the third finger for now. We're gonna go to the pinky. So for some people, this is a reach and you can't do it. And they're like, oh, you really gotta move your entire hand to do it. Just try and relax. If you can only reach the fifth string, that's okay. Work on stretching it out. It's part of the tension on this third finger. The other thing is when you're doing this, you don't want any of the other fingers to peel off. You want all the fingers, if they're not moving, they are staying on their string and in their fret. And the last one we're going to do is this third finger. Now you can see my finger is moving pretty quickly. Not so bad. So for some of you, going up to the top might be easy. And then coming down, you feel like you have to force that finger down. Don't force the finger. So this is the trouble finger with guitars, the third finger. So going top, bottom, top, bottom, top, bottom. I didn't learn this exercise until I have been playing guitar maybe for 10 years. So it was very humbling because I couldn't do this. I've been playing guitar for 10 years, and I couldn't do this with my third finger. So working on this, I would just do it 20 times each finger. And that'll start building a little bit more independence in your hand. And start working on loosening the hand and getting some of that tension out, because that's part of what limits your stretch, is that there's tension in the hand and you can't stretch it out. So those are a couple things you can do. So first, starting with this exercise, moving your fingers down.

Until you can get to the first string. And if you want more stretch, you can skip a string, which makes it even harder. So instead of 5, 6, 7, 8, you can go 5, 7, 8, 9.

That's another way you can add more stretch. Usually just getting down to the first fret and doing 1, 2, 3. Because there you go, there's your stretch. You need three fingers, three different frets for a C chord. And try and stretch those fingers as far out as you can.

And that will help you start building that stretch in for the C chord. Because if you can do this, you can do the C chord without too much worry. So those are a couple things you can do to start stretching out your hand. It's a common question people ask me. It's a common problem they have with the C chord. The other thing with the C chord that I do, I suggest because most people, they're used to building the C chord first finger, second finger, and then they do the third finger last. And if the third finger is your problem finger, if that's the most tension, start with the third finger and go backwards. Go three, two, one. Ideally, you're gonna wanna get all the fingers to land as close together as possible. But most people start and they do their C chord like this. They go first finger, second finger, third finger. Train yourself to do the opposite. Start with the third finger. Since this is the most difficult one to move. Get it out of the way first. Go, three, two, one. Now, for some of you, you might have to practice your C chord, and you might have to get out of the habit of going 1, 2, 3. But practice it both ways and see if that helps you a little bit with your stretch. Again, if you are looking for a little bit more finger picking exercises or strumming exercises or anything your cords aren't fast enough. You can always check out my beginner guitar course on laurenbateman.com I go over a bunch of different strumming patterns as well as some other things about chord changes and how to kind of attack difficult things like the C chord. So you can check that out laurembatement.com, but thank you so much for joining me for this lesson. I hope you guys enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video.