I'm going to show you a very special finger exercise that's going to help you get faster fingers in one week and you don't even need a guitar pick a big question I get asked about students all the time is Lauren how do I get my fingers faster for playing scales or chord changes and it all comes down to the same mechanics now I've seen lots of teachers out there teaching spider exercises and I teach spider exercises as well but there is a special exercise that really focuses on the tendons in your hand now why is
this so important I want you to put your hand up in front of your face okay and I want you to bend your pinky finger okay just like this okay look what happens to your third finger alright when you bend your pinky even your second finger moves just a little bit you cannot move your pinky and you cannot use your third finger without other fingers going with it so I have a great exercise here that mimics chord changes but it's also going to help you with playing scales and other stuff as as well too but
it's going to help us get real Independence on our fingers so speed comes down to two things when playing guitar comes down to muscle memory okay can you actually make these chords changes or can you play these scales without necessarily needing to look at the guitar because as soon as you start thinking about things it starts slowing down that time Factor so if you can start doing things off muscle memory that helps a lot too but also is relaxation okay I used to be a boxer I used to do amateur boxing and I always tell
people if you get really tense and you try to force a punch out there when you have so much tension there's only so fast you can go it's going to be slow but if you relax your arm relax your body boom and you just throw a punch out there you can do it much quicker when you're relaxed so speed actually comes for relaxation and that's what this exercise is going to focus on now this is one of a few exercises that I teach in my seven Level Guitar system to develop finger dexterity and what we're
gonna do in this we're going to go through this step by step and I'm going to give you some tips so please stick through the whole thing so that you get the tips on this exercise we are going to start on the third string the G string and we're going to be at Frets five six seven and eight okay I have all of my fingers now now for some people this to keep all these fingers down might be too much of a stretch now you might have to go up to Frets seven eight nine and
ten okay because these Frets are a little bit shorter and it doesn't matter it's not really the distance the stretch right now we're working on it's more the tendon so if this is more comfortable for you that's totally fine as well I'm gonna go back to five six and seven and eight because that's where I'm used to doing it and what we're going to do is we're going to do kind of like finger push-ups one finger at a time individually and we're gonna start with the first finger and the goal is to try and keep
all of these fingers down now if you're just getting started and you have a lot of tension you may have to use your other fingers to hold your other fingers in place and what we're going to do is take this first finger go up to the top string and down to the bottom string Okay so so top string bottom string top string bottom string and try not to do this with your wrist try not to use your wrist to assist you I'm going to pull up my sleeve so you guys can see my wrist here
okay try to keep your wrist neutral and it's just the finger that is moving top string bottom string top string bottom string and for a lot of people the first finger is not going to be a problem at all you're going to be able to do this now I recommend doing up and down about 20 times and moving on to the next finger okay so now we're going to do finger number two all right and finger number two also doesn't give people a lot of issues but again do it 20 times so you can work
on the finger independence the issue is now going to come in where these next two fingers and I showed you why it's because the tendons in the hands when you move these fingers especially this third finger this look when you move this third finger you've got the pinky moving and your middle finger moving so that third finger is really connected and when you guys go to do a c chord to a G chord change look at that third finger okay so what we're going to do is we're going to mimic what we're doing in chord
changes that's what we're doing here so now I'm going to skip the third finger for now because it tends to be the worst and you'll see in a few seconds why the other problem finger is the pinky sometimes people they cannot reach the strings if you cannot reach the top string with your pinky yet don't worry if you can get to the fifth string that's fine too but try your best to get it to go up and down as fast as possible on those strings now when you're doing this exercise do do not forget to
breathe okay if you're not breathing you are not getting oxygen to your muscles you are adding in tension okay so just relax remember to breathe here's the problem finger finger number three okay almost everyone has a problem I learned this exercise after I've been playing guitar for 10 years and I still might I could barely move the third finger now when you go up to the top string it's probably easy the hard part is going to come right here lowering it down to the first string when I first started I couldn't do this so I'm
going to give you guys a little tip in the beginning you might need to use your other finger to assist you on getting this finger to go up and down okay but the important part to remember here is to relax breathe do not do not force the finger down do not don't muscle it down that's tension we want to relax breathe breathe out relax the finger okay we want to get this finger to move relax now you can see I can move this finger up and down pretty pretty easily works really well I could not
do that when I first learned this exercise now now there is a huge disclaimer a big warning I have to give you about this exercise so please do not click click away just yet because this is very very important so this is what we call a repetitive motion exercise we're doing the same motion up and down up and down up and down now if you overdo this a little bit of this exercise goes a long way if you overdo this because of this motion you're doing you could develop carpal tunnel if you overdo it so
here is my practice recommendation a little goes a long way if you were sitting down to practice 20 up and downs per finger okay so 20 or an up and down that up and down that's one two three four okay you're gonna do 20 per finger and then you're done okay that's it all right 20 ups and downs per finger work on relaxing if your third and fourth finger are really really bad what I would recommend doing is do these two fingers do the whole set at the beginning of your practice and then at the
end of your practice just focus on the third and fourth fingers do 20 more reps with just those two and I guarantee and the next one to two weeks these chord changes are going to be moving much faster because instead of just sitting here and doing spider exercises you're actually focusing on the things that are mimicking the chord changes and you're actually working on finger independence which will help you relax and that will help you go faster now if you found this video super helpful I have lots of tips like this in my seven Level
Guitar system it is a beginner guitar system designed to help students just like you go from absolute beginner to playing the songs that you know and love we work on chords we work on strumming we work on finger independence and I've helped so many students just like you finally have more fun playing their guitar check out the link in the description below I hope to see you guys in a lesson video real soon