Finger Gym for Guitarists
- Nick Weiland
- Mar 5
- 3 min read
Want to challenge yourself on the guitar while improving finger independence?
This exercise is designed to strengthen your fingers and enhance their control. It consists of multiple stages and might feel unfamiliar at first—but that’s part of the process!
Before diving in, a solid practice principle is to start without a metronome. This allows your muscles to adapt to new movements before adding rhythmic precision.
It’s also about building strong neural connections between your brain and fingers, so when you tell your fingers to move, they respond effortlessly.
In this article, we’ll break down the full exercise step by step, guiding you through each stage to maximize your progress. Ready to level up your technique? Let’s get started!
Finger Gym: The First Stage
With the first stage of this we need to place all 4 fingers on the g string from frets 5 to 8. Have them all hanging on to the string like so.
We then keep any fingers we are not moving stationary.
This is important as this is where the finger independence and brain connection come into play.
Firstly we start with the first finger.
We keep the other fingers stationary and we are going to move the first finger back and forth from the d string and then play the note then the b string and play the note.
We alternate this like a warmup to get you used to moving your finger in this way.
We then after some time of feeling the burn so to speak we increase the distance by jumping to the A string on the 5th fret.
And back down to the B string.
Lastly we go to the biggest stretch in this stage.
Going from instead of the b string but the high e string down to the low e string and get used to the jump between each strings.
This is what it looks like:
Now heres where we do the same motions but with the other fingers.
It will feel more complicated if you are not used to this and that’s totally normal.
Lets try the same excersize with the second finger.
Ill quickly go over these as it’s the same excersize for all of them the hardest part will be keeping the other fingers in place.
This will really help with your finger independence.
This is what the second finger will look like
We then move onto the third finger
......and finally the fourth finger
That was stage one.
You should feel warm but the next stage is a lot more challenging.
A finger twister if you will.
Finger Gym: The Second Stage
With the second stage of this exercise we are going to keep the same range of motion between the strings but now we are going to do it with two fingers at the same time whilst keeping the other fingers stationary.
We will work with each grouping of 2 of our fingers.
First we start with the first and second finger.
We alternate between them switching between each note and string.
So again start on the G string like before with all your fingers spread from the 5th fret to the 8th on the G string.
Then we will alternate between the first finger and second finger jumping across strings. Demonstrated like so:
We then move onto the next drill which is the first and third finger.
Which looks like this:
then you guessed it the first and fourth
We continue this pattern with the second finger and third.
Like so:
It also can be done with the second finger and fourth:
And finally the 3rd and fourth:
The main thing to focus on when doing this is not the speed but the note pronunciation. Later you can move it onto the metronome and do it to a click.
This can be a good warmup that prepares you to be able to do your next phase of practice easier. i.e learning songs or improvising.
I hope this article has helped you and if it has we have a lot more videos you can check out here and here
Subscribe to use for more free guitar lessons and check out our application from grokit if you are wanting a way to understand music theory on the guitar.
Until the next article See you then!
Comments