My #1 Guitar Finger Independence Exercise - Skyrocket Your Speed!

Have you been playing the guitar and you're struggling to get your fingers, particularly on your fretting hand, to move faster? Well, I'm going to show you my number one finger exercise that I teach my students in my seven level guitar system right out of the bat, because it really helps with developing dexterity, getting your fingers to move not only across the fretboard, but change your chords faster and get your fingers to move independently. Okay. Because in the beginning, it's very, very hard to move these fingers. So whether you've been playing for a while or you're just getting started, this is a phenomenal exercise. Let's get started.

First, let's start with the problem. Okay. Why are our hands moving so slowly? So one of it is. Is a dexterity issue, but another part is just the way your hands are made. So our hands have tendons inside of them. Okay. And I just want you to hold your hand up like this. You can hold it so you can see mine. I just want you to bend your pinky. All right. When you bend your pinky, do you see your third finger moving with it? Okay. These fingers are. Now bend your third finger. Okay. And you're going to see your second finger kind of goes with it. Okay. So you can see that when you move your fingers, they are very interconnected. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I'm sure that that's great for us to hold on to things, but when we're playing the guitar, not so much. So what we want to do is we want to work on our finger dexterity to get these fingers to move independently. And usually the toughest finger to move is the third finger. If you were someone that hates that C to G chord change, this is why. Look at my third finger. I have to move my third finger from the fifth string all the way to the bottom string. And for a lot of students, the. That's very hard. Or if you're doing a finger exercise, you know, if you're playing a scale and your third finger is real tense, like, your pinky is going to start flying away. So even if you're someone who's trying to get faster, developing finger dexterity is very important. So this exercise will work great whether you're an electric guitar player or an acoustic guitar player. So like I said, this is one of the first exercises that I teach in my seven level guitar system. This is the first version. I do have a version that comes after this, but for most people, this is challenging enough. So what we're going to do is we're going to take our fingers first, second, third, and fourth. Fourth is the pinky. First is your index. We're going to find our G string, which is the third string up from the bottom. And we're going to start at the fifth fret. Okay? 5, 6, 7, 8. Each finger is going to get its own fret. Now, if you're saying, lauren, this is crazy, my fingers do not stretch that far. That's okay. Not a problem at all. Move up to 7, 8, 9, and 10. Okay. Or if you have to, 9, 10, 11, 12. It doesn't really matter where on the fret board you are. I want you to find a place that's comfortable, stretch wise for you for now. And then you can slowly move yourself down. All right, so I'm going to show you the exercise, but please stick around to the end because there is a warning on how to practice this and how many times to do this a day. Okay. So we're going to start with our first finger. And what we're going to do is we're going to reach up to the top string, the thickest string, and. And we're going to reach down to the low string. Okay. The thin string. So it's going to be thick string, low string, thick string, low string, thick string, low string. Okay. And this finger is probably going to be pretty easy for you. We are trying to keep all of our fingers on the string and we're trying not to do this with our wrist. Okay. We don't want the wrist to assist in the beginning. If you don't have a lot of stretch in your wrist yet, you might be using the wrist to assist, but essentially your wrist should be staying fairly neutral. Your thumb is on the back side of the guitar. Flat. Okay. Not off to the side, flat. All right. To give you more stretch. And it's also kind of located. If I reach up, it's kind of in between my second and third fingers. More leaning towards my second finger. All right. So top to bottom. Okay. Give that a try just a few times. Put that finger back. All right, now we're going to go to the second finger. R. Is that the index ring finger? Middle finger? There you go. And we're just going to go up and down a few times. Okay. And you can just see me. I'm just moving quite smoothly up and down. We're going to skip the third finger for now. Usually the one that gives us a problem is the pinky as well. Now, some people with the pinky, you're not going to be able to Reach the top string. You might only be able to get to the fifth string without, you know, needing to distort your, your wrist. So that's fine if you just start fifth string to first string. That's perfectly fine. Ideally, we want to go from top string to bottom string. Okay. Without doing this again to our wrist. The final one is the middle finger. This is the tricky finger. So what's going to happen, a lot of you are going to go up and you're going to get stuck. You're going to try to bring this third finger down and you're going to be like, I can't. Or maybe you can only bring it here, but you can't get it down to the, the high E string. You're like, okay, Lauren, what do I do? Or maybe your other fingers. Because like I showed you earlier, when we do this, when we move this third finger, it is so connected to the pinky. And the second finger, it wants to pull those other fingers with it. So what we have to do, it's very, very hard. We have to breathe and we have to relax. Okay? So you might need to bring in this other hand to assist you to hold these fingers down. Okay. So you might need this to come in and press gently. I'm not forcing them down. I'm just kind of holding them in place and allowing the third finger come up and come down. Now again, if your finger can't go all the way to the bottom, you might have to with your opposite hand, relax the finger down. You cannot force the finger down. Do not, do not try and muscle this down. You must relax it down. This is going to be the hardest finger to train. It is the one that's also messing up most of your speed issues. This is what's slowing you down. It is this third finger, okay? Because what are we doing? Remember I showed you earlier, C to G. Look at what we're doing. C to G. That is this motion, okay? It is essentially this motion. Now you can see how quickly I can move my finger down. When I first learned this exercise, I couldn't get my finger below here. All right? And I have been playing the guitar kind of off and on for 10 years. So if you don't know me, I'm mainly a self taught guitarist myself. I just love guitar and I try to help people learn how to have fun here on YouTube, learning to play guitar. But when I learned this, I've been playing for about 10 years and this was a stretch for me, okay. And I have been, I could do my chord Changes, fine. I was working on scales and trying to get faster. And this was an exercise that really helped me speed up. And you can see I can do this. Now, eventually down the road, we're going to move multiple fingers at the same time. It's a little bit of an advanced, a little bit of an advanced lesson. I show that one in my seven level guitar system, the more advanced version. But for now, for a lot of people, the beginner is just going up and down. All right, now I said I was going to warn you, okay? Because Lauren, how do I go about practicing this? How many times do I do it? You know, how many minutes straight should I practice this? Here is my recommendation. So warning, okay? This is a repetitive motion exercise, okay? Because you're just basically doing this, okay? You're doing this with one finger up and down. If you do this too much, you can cause carpal tunnel, okay? Especially if your hand is really tight. So this exercise is best done in moderation. What do I mean? Here is my recommendation on how to incorporate this into your practice routine. I would do 10 push ups, that is up and down, okay? That's 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay? So up and down is the kind of one. I would do 10 push ups per finger at the start of your practice, all right? And then I would go through your practice and. And if you want to do it a second time at the end of your practice, you can go ahead and do it again a second time. You do not. Do not. Okay? Big warning. Do not spend 5, 10 minutes doing this exercise. It is not necessary. It is not needed, I guarantee you. And you can put in the comments below, come back here in a week or two weeks and tell me if your fingers are getting faster and getting more independence. You'll know you're getting more independence because when you do this exercise, these other fingers are going to stop wanting to peel away from the guitar. A lot of you, when you're doing your spider exercises, this is what happens to your fingers. You know, they're kind of flying off instead of kind of like staying above the strings, they're flying away from the strings. That's just tension. That's the fingers not being able to move independently. That's this third finger taking over and taking control. So do this exercise once at the beginning. 10 push ups per finger. That's okay. And once they start moving, like my first finger is super flexible. Once you can start doing this, you don't even have to practice with that finger anymore. So focus on the fingers that are lagging Behind. Okay. This way you don't put extra stress and strain on the fingers that are already good. And if that is your third and fourth fingers, it's the third and fourth fingers. Okay. And then you just do this up and down and that's it. All right. When you practice, I'd recommend not even doing it every day. Okay. If you want to do it five days a week, great. Give your hand a rest a couple times and make sure to stretch. Okay. I also have some great stretches in my seven level guitar system. If you're someone that is just getting started with the guitar and you're looking for more of a step by step approach, I really do recommend that you check out my seven level guitar system. I'll put a link in the description below. Learning over here on YouTube is great, but having a step by step system, a blueprint that having some of these golden nuggets and tips in the palm of your hand can really help you make progress on the guitar a lot faster. I have students, they're like, I've been practicing these chord changes for years and I give them this exercise and they're like, oh my goodness, now all of a sudden I can play my chords faster. So sometimes it's just getting that one piece of valuable information. Something like this, a little simple exercise to help your hands go faster and. And learning things in the right order can totally be a game changer in improving your progress and having more fun on the guitar. So if you're interested in learning more about my seven level guitar system, there's a link in the description below. I have a lot more exercises just like this to develop your hands, help your fingers move faster, and help you have a lot more fun on your guitar. I hope to see you in another lesson video real soon. Have a good one.