The 4 BEST Finger Exercises For Older Adults

Hey guitar enthusiasts! In this video, I'm going to show you some tips for working on finger exercises to help with finger dexterity. Now, I work with a lot of older adults. Most of my students are over the age of 50, and a big thing that comes up is, Lauren, my hands just are not moving fast enough. Now, this is not something that only older adults experience. Even my younger students— it's just, it's a new mechanic, so we need to get these fingers Working in a specific way, but what I find is students tend to start with things that are way too difficult. They get frustrated, and then they give up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over four exercises that are shown to help my students develop faster fingers so that they can do their chord changes faster. And when you can do your chord changes faster, it means you can play your songs, your favorite songs, even faster. So let's get started. So since I specialize in working with older adults, one of the first things I tell them to do is just a quick little warmup of just moving your hands. So this is level 1, real simple. It's just opening and closing hands. I have a lot of students who have joint issues or suffer from arthritis, and sometimes just getting those fingers going, even me in my 40s, I dislocated my pinky a few years ago, and I enjoy doing this now 'cause it just loosens up that tendon.

Mm-hmm.

that's been injured. So just doing some open and closes, this gets the blood flowing into the fingers and just gets us ready and prepared for doing our finger exercises because you want to warm up before you even, even come to the guitar. Some other things that you can do as a quick little warm-up are even some wrist stretches. Okay, push— pushing your wrist up and down, especially on the fretting hand. Especially for me, as I'm getting older, I'm getting more and more tendinitis in my hand. I think it's because of my phone. Maybe I just need to put my phone down. But those are 2 great ways to just warm up. So that's level 1. It's just opening and closing the fingers, getting them to move and loosen them up. And then you can start with level 2. So I recommend you grab your favorite pick. If you don't have a pick, you can use your thumb for these exercises. You're just gonna play down with your thumb, but you will get a blister pretty quick. So if you get a pick, it'll just be much easier for, for working things over a longer period of time. Now, this is where I find students make a mistake. They start by doing too many fingers. Okay, so in guitar, in the beginning, it's very hard to move one finger, never mind 2, 3, or 4 fingers at the same time. So a lot of students, they'll get a finger exercise and it's, it's, it's just a little bit too much in the beginning. Focusing on less is more. So I'm going to show you 3 little things you can do in this exercise, and we're just gonna be working on finger pairs. So I'm gonna start around the 5th fret of my guitar. Okay, so the blocks here, these are called frets, and we have fret 1, fret 2, fret 3, fret 4, fret 5. I'm gonna start at the 5th fret, and I'm just gonna use my first 2 fingers. Okay, we're just gonna get these fingers moving. All right, don't worry about the 3rd and 4th finger yet, we'll get to those later. But for right now, we're gonna start with just a finger pair, and we're gonna be playing 5, 6 with fingers 1, 2. So the first finger plays the 5th fret, the second finger plays the 6th fret, and we're just gonna go 5, 6, finger 1, 2 on that top string, and then we're just gonna move it down one string. Okay, so we're now— we're on the 5th string. So these strings, if you don't know the names of strings, we have the E string, the A string, the D string, the G string, the B string, and the E string. And I usually refer them to as the 6th string as the top string, the 1st string as the bottom string. So I'm gonna move down to my A string now. I'm gonna play the same thing. 5, 6 with fingers 1, 2, and then down again. 5, 6, down again. 5, 6, down again. 5, 6, and down again. 5, 6. Okay, and now we're just gonna come backwards now. So on this bottom fret, we're actually gonna play 5, 6, and then 5. Alright, so this is gonna help us now move backwards up the string. So if I just do the first half of the exercise to show you, it's gonna be 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 6, and then 5, 6, 5 on the bottom string. 'Cause now we're gonna come backwards when we come back up. So now we're gonna go 6, 5 on the B string. 6, 5 on the G string. 6, 5 on the D string. 6, 5 on the A string, 6, 5 on that 6th string. So if I play through the entire exercise at a moderate speed, it would sound like this. Okay, so for you, I'm using alternate picking, which is down, up, down, up, down, up, but You can just use down, down. All downs work for this too when you play the right strings. Just either way, whichever is more comfortable for you. Eventually down the road, alternate picking where you alternate down, up just helps you play a little bit faster, but we're not going for speed right now. That's a very important thing when you're starting in the beginning and working on exercises.

We're not just—

we're not going for speed. We're going for comfort. Comfort. And just starting to move our fingers. Okay, so that's the most important thing. Okay, so same exercise. Now we're just gonna do fingers 2 and 3, and you might feel a little bit difference between fingers 1 and 2. So I'm gonna do these on frets 6 and 7. So my 3rd finger is on 7, my 2nd finger is still on 6, and we're gonna go 6, 7 on the top string. 6, 7. 6, 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 6, and then 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 6, 7, 6. Okay, so that entire part of this exercise now, the second part, is going 2, 3 all the way down the strings and then coming back up. Now you might be like, Lauren, I— that felt a little weird, that felt a little bit different. That's good. That's your 3rd finger. And I have a great exercise I'm actually going to show you. It's the last exercise we're going to go over. I have a great exercise for working on this 3rd finger. It's usually the finger that really gets in the way of you switching your chords fast enough and doing a lot of things. So we're gonna stick around, we're gonna work on that finger a lot. I have one more step in the 2nd exercise. So we've done finger pair 1-2, We've done 2-3, and now we're gonna do 1-3. So we're gonna be playing 5, 7. All right, 5th fret, 7th fret with finger 1, 3. Okay, so we're gonna do the same thing, 1-3, 1-3, all the way down the guitar. And on the bottom, we're gonna play 1st finger, 3rd finger, 1st finger for that turnaround. And then we got 3-1, 3-1, 3-1, 3-1, 3-1. Now when you start Your speed might be this slow, and that's totally fine. Okay, you do not have to go as fast as I was going in this video. Okay, but that might be where you're starting, and the goal is you do the first finger all the way down. Okay, all the way back up. Okay, then second and third all the way down. Okay, and then first and third all the way down. All the way down, back and up. Now we're not going to do anything with the pinky yet, okay? But the key when you're doing this exercise— so this, I would call this like a level 2— the key with this exercise is you want to go slow. You want to try and keep your wrists and your hands relaxed. So if you're feeling tension in your forearms, I want you to stop. I want you to shake it out, and I want you to come back. That's why I don't want you to go fast, because If you go too fast when you're not ready, it's just going to introduce tension, which is going to make your muscles sore and can also cause some of those tendonitis issues. So if you're going, you know, if you're going through the exercise and you're feeling like these muscles start to clench or tense, or you feel any pain at all, stop, shake it out. Don't forget to breathe when you're doing this exercise. A lot of people, they hold their breath and go, you know, they go all the way down, they come back up, and then they go So don't forget to breathe. Breathing introduces relaxation, right? So that's level 2, just finger pairs. Fingers 1 and 2, fingers 1 and 3, fingers 2 and 3. Okay? And they're each gonna feel a little bit different, but they're each gonna work your fingers and your tendons a little bit in a little bit of a different way. But remember, it's easier just to move finger pairs than trying to do what we're gonna do next. So once you start getting comfortable with those finger pairs, we are gonna introduce our little pinky finger. This is gonna be a spider exercise. Okay? I think this is in my crash course. If you want the PDF for this exercise, you can go on the link in the description below. You can download my free crash course, doesn't cost you anything, and it will have the PDF for the spider exercise along with some other exercises that you can print out and have fun with. So what we're gonna be doing is a spider exercise, okay? And we're gonna be moving 4 fingers now, okay? Now for this exercise, we're gonna be working over 4 frets. That might be too much of a stretch for you. I'm still gonna stay at frets five, six, seven, eight, but don't be afraid to come up to seven, eight, nine, ten if you have to, or even nine, ten, eleven, twelve. The frets here are much thinner than the frets down here. All right, so eventually when you want to start stretching out your fingers, you'll want to take your spider exercise down to the wide frets. I'm gonna stay at frets five, six, seven, eight. Okay, for this exercise. So what are we doing? I just explained each finger owns its own fret. So the first finger owns fret five, the second finger owns fret six, the third finger owns fret seven, pinky owns fret eight. And what we're gonna do is we're just gonna simply move one finger at a time across the fretboard and down a string. So it's kind of like what we were just doing in the last exercise, except we're playing. 4 notes per string. Okay, so now this is a great opportunity to start working on that alternate picking where you're gonna be doing down, up, down, up on the top string, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. Let's just practice that. Okay, so we have alternate picking and we're gonna be doing 4 picks per string. So it's gonna be down, up, down, up, and then we're gonna move down a string. Okay, so don't worry about the fretting hand, you can just put your hands over the strings so that they're muted. And we're just gonna go down, up, down, up, starting on the top string. Ready? One, two, three, four.

Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

Okay, so that's the mechanic that your fretting hand is gonna be doing. So I'm a righty, it'll be my right hand. If you're a lefty, it's gonna be your left hand. Same mechanic though, down, up, down, up. Okay, so now we're gonna sync these 2 hands together and we're gonna play down pick on the first finger, up pick on the second finger, down pick on the third finger, up pick on the pinky. So it's gonna be One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Okay, so now you're moving all four fingers. The thing to watch out in this exercise: in the beginning, your fingers might be doing this. Okay, hopefully they're not going to be doing as much of it because you already did the last exercise. So just start training your fingers to just. Start moving. Okay, so here we're gonna start working a little bit more on the control, trying to get the fingers to not completely fly away from the fretboard. Alright, the hardest one is the pinky. You can see I can even do more work on my pinky. That's not even the one I dislocated, so I have no excuses. But what you'll do is you'll just again go very slow. Your pace might be— I want you to breathe between each note. Relax the fingers down. Okay, because if you're doing this It means there's tension. So I want you to breathe. I want you to shake out the fingers, relax, then go to the next. Okay? Speed, particularly when you're changing chords or doing anything, comes from relaxation. So we really need to work on these exercises to get our fingers to move in the way we want them. Remember, this is a whole new mechanic for these fingers. Okay? So these exercises are anything you can do. You could do these, you know, 3, 4, 5 minutes, and all you're gonna do is work down the strings, up the strings, down Down the strings, up the strings. You can even introduce movement into this exercise a little bit too, kind of like a next step, which would be when you go all the way down and you come back up, you would then just move up a fret. Okay, you can do that too. Or if you get to the bottom, you can move up. You can start moving it around the fretboard. But the thing I want you to focus on is just trying to control the fingers. And if this doesn't work, this next exercise absolutely will. So this is an exercise I teach within my 7-Level Guitar System, okay? And it really helps students a lot, really helps with finger independence. And I call them— I think it's finger push-ups or finger burpees, I can't remember. I kind of use it interchangeably. But what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be placing our fingers again frets 5, 6, 7, 8, or frets 7, 8, 9, 10, whichever is most comfortable for you. And we're gonna put the fingers on the G string. Okay, we're gonna run them across the G string, and what we're gonna do is start with our first finger, and we're gonna try to reach up to the top string and then to the bottom string. Okay, and we're gonna do this, you know, I would say 20 times, and then when you're done, you're gonna put your finger back on the string. Okay, then you're gonna do the same thing with your second finger. Just move it up and down, up and down, up and down. Okay, and skip the third finger for now. We're gonna do it with the pinky. Okay, now for some people, you have small hands, you might not be able to get that 6th string with the pinky, that's okay. If you can, please do. If not, if you can only get to the 5th string, just go to the 5th string. Last one's the 3rd finger. This is the finger that tends to be the tricky finger. So people can go up, but then they try to go down and the finger gets stuck and they're like, oh, you might actually— when I started doing this, I actually had to use my other hand to get the finger to come down to the bottom string. Okay. And eventually I could let it go. You might even need to hold your other fingers in place. Okay? You cannot force your fingers into place. In order for this to work, any of these to work, your finger has to be relaxed. So again, breathing is very important. Now, I say only do it 20 times per finger because this is a very repetitive motion and we do not— all right, warning here, Surgeon General's warning. We do not want to cause repetitive injury. Issue. So that's why I say just do this 20 times per finger. And you know, when you get to the point you're like, okay, this first finger is— this first finger is flying, you don't have to do that finger anymore. Okay, just focus on the fingers that are giving you trouble. For a lot of people, it's mostly gonna be the pinky and the 3rd finger. Okay, but you can see now I can move my finger pretty readily. But in the beginning, it really— and I did, I had to hold my other fingers down, the fingers wanted to come off. And that shows you that there's still a lot of tension in your hand. And in your wrist, and it shows you that there's some independence between— because when, you know, hold your hand up like this and put your pinky down, what happens? Okay, I'll do it sideways. When I bend my pinky, my third finger wants to go with it. It's just the way your tendons are in your hand, but we can train to get a little bit more independence. Okay, that's why on the spider exercise, when you see this, it's like, oh, when third finger comes down, my pinky goes up. It's because the way the tendons are in the hands, the third finger and the pinky are really connected. But the other thing is, if you do a C chord to a G chord, what's the motion? This is the chord change everyone hates. They hate going from C to G. Okay, what's the motion? It's the— it's the 3rd finger moving up and down. It's this exercise. Okay, so if you can do this motion in this exercise, you can do this motion on chords. Okay, it's a really, really great exercise. It's probably one of my favorites that I teach my beginner students, and it really helps them dial in their hand independence. So my recommendation would be to spend, you know, 4 or 5 minutes warming up with one or two of these exercises and then getting your practice session started. And if you're not sure what to practice or you're looking for a better blueprint for learning guitar, then I highly recommend my 7-Level Guitar System. Like I said, I specialize in helping older beginners over the age of 50 learn to play and have fun with their guitar. I find a lot of students come to me because they're like, I've been over here on YouTube, and YouTube's a great resource, but they're like, watch this video, I watch that video, and I kind of feel like I'm all over the place, or I feel I can play little bits and pieces of a song but I still can't play a song from the beginning all the way to the end. And that's what my 7-Level Guitar System does. It gives you the blueprint step by step, okay, what exercises to practice together, what chords. We learn about strumming patterns, all right. I'll even suggest songs that you should come over here to YouTube and try to learn that are at your level, okay. So that's the great thing. About having a blueprint is you know you're doing everything in the right order. You're not jumping ahead, you're not getting overwhelmed with practicing too many things. So if you're looking for a better way to go about learning the guitar, click the link in the description below and check out my 7-Level Guitar System. Would love to help you with your guitar playing.