Exercises to work out tonicity of the right forearm muscles

Tonicity of the right wrist, and to a lesser extent, of the right forearm, is key to playing in a fuild and clean fashion. The more the muscles are tonic, the less there will be tensions, and the easier the specific typical technical difficulty will seem. The impression of ease that is displayed by good musicians mostly stems from their capacity to quickly and easily play all basic gestures, a capacity that comes with time, practice and experience. This is the very reason why I have put in this section a few simple exercises to play with a metronome, on a daily basis, that use some of these basic picking patterns: alternate picking, v-v, and a few other general considerations.

These exercises are also very nice to warm up. However, bear in mind that there should never be any pain while practicing. If at some point you come across any kind of ailment, particularly when it involves a tendon, this is a message that says that a physical limit is being exceeded, either in terms of intensity, or in terms of duration. In this case, you'd better stop immediately. Tendinitis is one of the musician's worst enemies because in order to recover, you must stop practicing for several weeks. It's therefore much wiser to stop at the first signs of tendon fatigue.

Alternate picking, v-v and ^-^ on a unique string

Alternate picking is the movement that is easiest to integrate. As was said elsewhere, there are two ways it can be played: with a wrist movement or with a forearm movement. At first, since the objective is to better the wrist tonicity, it is a good idea to work downstrokes and upstrokes separately. The two following exercises consist of playing each kind of stroke as fast as possible. Starting at a moderate tempo is recommended. Play eighths in groups of 8 or 16 (or more) and as long as you feel at ease, you can speed up the tempo on the metronome. When the maximal speed is reached, as usual, slow down 5 bpm and play as many series as you can/want. In some way, it's gym. But it's a specific workout for the wrist muscles and tendons that will prove very useful later on.

Here's an anecdote. When Stochelo Rosenberg was learning guitar, he didn't even know about upstrokes at all, so he used to play downstrokes only for everything. When he realised that his picking speed reached a limit he could not overcome and he could not play some of Django's tunes this way, he was then told about upstrokes. That shows how this downstroke-only approach to playing tunes can be beneficial to feel at ease with the Gypsy technique.

Perhaps, just like me, you will notice that downstrokes can be played at a higher tempo than upstrokes, which means that alternate picking speed will be limited to that of upstrokes. The target is to play upstrokes only as fast as downstrokes only (which might not be possible eventually). Do this exercise on each string.

Downstrokes: (710 KB)
Upstrokes: (800 KB)

You can then repeat the same exercise on all strings, say on a Gm6 chord. Same observation: it's slower on the upstrokes. Tremolo speed will then be limited to the upstroke speed.

Downstrokes: (580 KB)
Upstrokes: (660 KB)

Now, you can play in alternate picking. Do it on each string.

With the wrist: (880 KB)
With the forearm: (860 KB)

Specific v-v exercises on one string

At first, you can do the following exercise: several consecutive v-v, in groups of two, as if two notes per triplet were being played.

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Now try this chromatism on one string, often played by the Rosenbergs. To be done on each string.

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Which are the muscles in use ?

Just to make sure that the right muscles are used, at the end of the workout exercises, the forearm muscles shown on this picture must feel tired. On the video, you can see the muscles involved in the right hand movement.


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