How To Practice Guitar Speed Without Getting Fatigued Too Quickly

FACT: Fatigue causes you to perform on guitar with less accuracy leading to more frustrating mistakes.

(Some guitarists even develop bad playing habits for years due to inefficient use of energy during their playing.)

Your guitar speed not only increases but becomes much cleaner when you learn to play with better endurance and more efficient use of energy. Most guitar players never consider this and miss out on an undiscovered realm of guitar skill that they will never know.

Here are several ways to practice guitar for speed and endurance to make fast playing easier than ever:

Make Fast Guitar Playing Feel Easy & Effortless By Eliminating Extra Tension In Your Body

Saving energy while playing not only improves your ability to play longer in general but improves your ability to play more accurately for longer. This is because fatigue causes you to make mental mistakes.

Minimizing the amount of tension in your body is something that can be trained and is very easy to improve in just a few minutes per day.

Here are 7 ways to do it:

Find & Eliminate Unnecessary Tension In Your Body While Playing Guitar

Choose any short guitar lick or item to play. Play through this lick several times and observe how much tension you feel in different areas of your body, such as your:

· Neck

· Shoulders

· Forearms

· Wrists

· Hands

· Back

When you notice yourself tensing up in one of these areas, pause for a moment and relax it. Then play the guitar lick while focusing on keeping that area as relaxed as possible. Repeat this process as much as necessary until your entire body has minimal tension while you play (this only takes a minute or two).

Note that tension often occurs when you play guitar with speed during difficult sections, so this is a great place to look.

Use Only As Much Pressure As Needed While Fretting Notes

It’s common for guitarists to fret notes with way too much pressure, especially during speedy guitar parts. This potentially leads to guitar playing injury, where time is needed away from the instrument.

Train yourself to only use as much pressure as needed while fretting by:

1. Fretting a note.

2. Striking the string to sound it.

3. Gradually using less and less pressure until you find the point where the note becomes muffled/unclear.

4. Using just a bit more pressure than this to get the note to sound clearly using only as much pressure as is required.

This video shows you how to get rid of tension in your fretting hand by keeping it independent from your picking hand:

Using this process with guitar licks you play frequently helps you play guitar with speed without getting tired quickly and helps eliminate mistakes caused by fatigue.

Always Play On The Tips Of Your Fingers

Playing on the tips of your fingers allows you to use less force to get a note to sound. It also improves your ability to create clear, high-quality notes every time you play. Focusing on this aspect of your playing for just a few minutes per practice session helps optimize your fretting hand technique with little effort.

Note: Of course, there are some exceptions to when you should not use the tips of your fingers to play notes.

For example, playing barre chords or while using rolling technique to play sweep picking arpeggios. Regardless, focus on using optimal finger pressure in these situations to minimize tension in your fretting hand.

Practicing Guitar In Smaller Sessions Rather Than Long Ones

Practicing in smaller sessions rather than long ones keeps you from getting sore, possibly leading to injury.

Don’t make the common mistake of practicing guitar for many hours a day every day.

This is not an effective or efficient way to practice and sometimes leads to injury. Instead, break down some of your practice sessions into smaller portions that can be finished throughout the day.

You can still make tons of progress to play guitar with speed and accuracy, even without a lot of time to practice.

This video gives you the strategy to do it:

Practice Guitar With Speed Bursts

Break down longer practice items into short segments of several notes each. This allows you to play them at fast speeds more easily than trying to play an entire solo every time.

This makes your practice more efficient because you are able to focus like a laser on playing just a few notes perfectly. This way, all of your energy goes to good use and you get better results faster.

Choose Songs And Practice Them Like A You Were Playing A Live Set

It’s easy to underestimate how much stamina it takes to perform a full set of songs on stage. Practicing songs to simulate this prepares you to play live without getting tired, or at very least massively improve your general guitar playing endurance.

Choose a “setlist” of 45 minutes of songs. Then once (or more) per week, perform this list of songs in its duration. Track how long it takes you to do this, how many breaks you need, how many mistakes you make and how your body feels while playing.

Check on your progress each week until you are able to perform the songs perfectly without getting tired.

Now you understand how to eliminate tension from your guitar playing to make playing with speed easier. Learn how to increase your guitar speed while practicing less by reading this free guitar shred practice guide.