Every guitarist needs an effective warm up routine. It’s akin to an athlete stretching before any strenuous activity: it helps avoid injury and gets the muscles warmed up and your hands ready for whatever insane lick you are about to demand of them! It also has the benefit of helping you play at the top of your game. The cool thing is you can use this warm up routine to hone your alternate picking or stretch your fretting hand out with some legato.
This one is an oldie, but a goodie. I’ve seen it and variations to it in just about every method book I’ve looked through. There is one GOOD reason why this routine is so popular: that’s because it WORKS! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
And here we go!
There are TWO ways you can play these exercises: Strict alternate picking as shown in the video… or entirely legato.
Here are tabs of the exercises from the video
VARIATION 1
VARIATION 2
VARIATION 3
CODA
As mentioned in the video, you need to push yourself a bit. Give enough time on each exercise to feel the burn a bit. Tempo is ultimately up to you, I avoided any kind of metronome in the video in order just to get the bare bones of the idea across. Tailor this to your skill level.
Up the irons! Or rather, WARM up the irons first!