TOP Wrist Stretches for Guitar Players & Musicians

I work with a lot of guitar students, and oftentimes they ask me, Lauren, what are the best exercises and stretches I can use to warm up with and cool down when I'm playing or practicing my guitar. So I'm going to show you some of the most beneficial wrist stretches and hand exercises for guitar. And you can do these just for a couple minutes when you warm up and a couple minutes after you play. And it'll make you feel a lot better and make you feel like you have healthier wrists. Foreign.

The most simple one, and this is a great one for students with arthritis. Many of my students, I work with a lot of students online. A lot of them are over the age of 50, and they suffer from arthritis in their hands, which can be a real pain in the butt when you're trying to learn guitar. So the best thing is to do is to just start by moving and wiggling your fingers around. I know this isn't much of a stretch, but the biggest thing with your hands is to get blood flow into the fingers and get your tendons loosened. So just by pumping your hands like this, I mean, this feels like a workout to me already. Just moving your hands, pumping the fingers, you'll start getting blood flow and you'll start warming up your hands. I have a few students who said that they use a hand warmer. These are some of my older students who have arthritis. They're like, it really helped them to use a hand warmer first and then do some of these stretching exercise after their hand had been warmed up a little bit. Exercise number two is another nice and easy one. And all we're going to do is we're just going to kind of pull on our fingers. You don't. Don't yank them. We don't want to yank the fingers. And, you know, you might get some cracking, you might get some popping, but you're just kind of, oh, so that one popped. You're just getting a little bit of, you know, blood, again, warmth into the fingers, and you're just trying to warm them up. It's almost like a little bit of massage. And I'm just gently pulling on the fingers. Again, I'm not yanking on my fingers, but after doing a bit of this, you can then warm up with your fingers. And again, each one of these is maybe 20 or 30 seconds. You don't even have to do this very long, and then you can move on to your next stretch. So these next stretches might be familiar to you if you are an athlete like myself, and one of the very common Ones is to just to extend your hand out in front of you. Okay. And then pull your hand up. Sorry. Face your palm up and just kind of gently pull back. I'll turn to the side. You're just going to gently pull back on the wrist. Again, don't yank your wrist. Keep your arm straight and just gently pull. You can hold it for a few seconds, and then you can switch to your other hand. Do the other side. And then the opposite is you can just flip it with your palm facing in towards you and you can pull up. And you kind of stretch this part of the wrist. So there's two ways. The, there's the this way. Okay. And then there's this way down. Now, again, if you are feeling any pain when you're doing any of these stretches, stop. And on this one in particular, if you feel your fingers starting to go numb, particularly your thumb, index finger, or your middle finger, that could be a sign of carpal tunnel. You'll want to pay attention to that. I had carpal tunnel in my strumming here many years ago, and it's something you just want to pay attention to. So again, these are just gentle stretches. Up, down. You can do it on each hand. All right, Just a little pull. But you should feel a nice gentle stretch on the top side of your wrist. And this underside of your wrist, this one's a little bit more advanced, but if you come from a martial arts background, it probably won't be too tricky. So what you want to do is you just want to put your hand up in front of you with your thumb facing in towards you. Okay. And then you're just going to twist your wrists. So this is my right hand. So my thumb, thumb is kind of pointing out to the side. And then what you're going to do is you're going to grab this pad of the thumb. So you're grabbing this pad of the thumb. So we came up, thumb is facing us. We're going to twist the thumb out, and then we're going to grab with our other hand and just give it a good twist. Okay. And again, we don't have to yank. It's just a little bit of a pull. Same on the other hand. Up, twist out, thumb goes out. Grab with your other hand and just twist. All right, I feel that here. I feel that even down my forearm. You know, I play racquetball too. So this is a great stretch for kind of stretching out that forearm too, in this as well. This next one is pretty simple. And again, just another lovely stretch. For warming up before you play guitar. So just put your hand up in front of you, palm facing out. What you're going to do is you're going to hold your hand on the back side of your fingers here, and you're just going to bend in. You're just going to bend the wrist in. I find this one to be a little bit gentler than the one where you have the full extension. So if you're feeling too much, pull here on your forearm. This is a great alternative. Just put your hand up, the other hand behind your fingers and just bend the wrist in. I find this is a little bit gentler on the wrist. Same thing with the other hand. You can put it up, hand behind, and just bend it in. Nice little stretch on the top part of the wrist. Now I'm going to show you a great exercise for strengthening your hands. You could do this with a rubber ball or you could get something like the d' Addario Vera grip. One of my students told me about this great product, and it's really great for just squeezing and strengthening the fingers, the wrist, and the forearms. Remember, we're going to. At guitar players, we use these muscles a lot. So the more we can do to strengthen our muscles, the more we're going to be able to do to protect our body from the wear and tear of practice. Remember, it's kind of like going to the gym when you practice and you will get tired, but the stronger you get, the longer you'll be able to play, the longer you'll be able to practice, and the easier you will be able to recover from sessions. So you can see, this is my fretting hand. My fretting hand is obviously much stronger than my strumming ham, but you can do both sides and it's. It's a really, really great tool. The other thing I like about this, too, if you pull this padding off, there's a little strip on the back. So if you go on vacation, you can keep your calluses while you're away on vacation. So very, very cool tool. I'll put a link in the description below if you guys want to go and grab one of these. Now, if you are suffering from wrist pain and are looking for ways to diagnose the problem that I highly recommend, you can watch this video over here where I'm going to give you the top three issues people have with wrist pain and how to fix it. I'll see you in that video right over there.