The easiest way to think about developing strength and endurance in your fingers for playing the guitar is to think of each of your hands as an Olympic athlete. Huh? Yep. If each of your hands were an Olympic runner and had an event to compete in, there are a few things your hands would have to do:
- Train every day
- Progressively work to improve skills
- Celebrate each victory and then take on a new challenge every time a goal is achieved.
If we set up a strength and conditioning program for your hands, and you actually do the practice every day just like an athlete who wants to win, you will find your playing gets better really fast.
In order to play guitar, the first thing that must learn some endurance is your fingertips on your left hand. Your fingertips need to develop callouses so that your fingers can press the strings against the fingerboard and make the note ring in a crisp and clean sound. This means you must practice in a slow and steady way each day to allow the skin on your fingertips to grow and thicken into callouses. No matter how strong your hand is, if your fingertips hurt, you won’t want to practice!
The most effective way to work with your fingertips and avoid the discomfort of developing callouses is use the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th strings of the guitar. Even though these are thicker and heavier strings, and it seems like they are harder to press, they actually are more comfortable on your beginner fingertips. The wrapping on the string makes pressing them less intense than the 1st and 2nd strings.
Practice for thirty minutes each day in five-minute segments. Time yourself. Once you’ve played for five minutes, stop and rest your hand for a minute. This makes your practice much easier. It also allows your fingertips and your whole hand to build the strength and endurance you need without being so hard that you want to give up.
Make a fist in each hand and hold it as hard as you can. Notice while you hold that the harder you squeeze, the harder it is to do. Now let them go. Make fists again, but half as hard. Notice that because there is less strain on your fingers, hands and arms, you can hold these half-effort fists much longer with less discomfort. This is exactly what you need for great playing on your guitar!
The secret to building strength and endurance is steady effort without over-doing it. If your hand “gives out” in the middle of your playing, it needs a rest. Rest it. If you try too hard to push yourself through the pain or the weakness, this will create cramps and a tired hand. That won’t help you grow your endurance. By pushing yourself to the point that you have to stop, you make it so hard that your hand spends less time on the guitar! By practicing in short intervals, like the five-minute segments, you build up much more endurance.
Let’s look at the two different jobs in each hand. The right hand needs to be free to move up and down, and stay near the center of the guitar body. The left hand needs to be steady and strong on the neck, while free to move left and right across the neck. If you make those two motions happen at the same time, you can feel that your hands are doing totally separate things! This means you also must be relaxed enough for each hand and arm to be coordinated.
Try this for a moment: work your left hand really fast back and forth while slowly strumming the right hand up and down. Notice the challenge there? If you increase the speed in one hand, the other will automatically do the same. Why does this matter? If you overwork and use more effort than you need in either hand, you automatically begin to stress the other hand. This works against developing your hands. If you squeeze your left hand fingers too hard against the fingerboard, your right hand will tense up on the pick. If you hold the pick too hard while strumming or clench your right hand while picking individual strings, your left hand will tense on the neck. Both of these things will slow you down and will keep you from developing the strength and endurance you want.
Just like the Olympic athlete, you want your practice every day to be a challenge, but not impossibly hard. If you practice every day on something that is slightly harder than you can play easily, but something that you can feel yourself making steady improvement on, you will stick with it. Mentally and physically, this is the best way to develop your strength and endurance.
thanks to Richard J. Lin for the photo
