Understanding Guitar

One Beginners’ Efforts

I’ve been traveling for work as we are migrating projects to different offices. I don’t travel often, so it was interesting to me.

I was on the road on Friday, and then again Monday to Tuesday. All that time I’ve been away from the guitar. In a way, I felt that I needed a bit of a break from guitar. I had pushed myself and followed through on the exercises but some days I probably did more then I should have.

Over the weekend, during the time that I did have here at home I went to the Gym to get a little stress relieving weight-lifting in. I was flipping through a weight-training magazine between weight sets and either an article or advertisement reminded me that you should put a day between the days that you weight lift.  I’ve been doing weights training since high school, so this is not new information to me.

Perhaps we should look at this information in regards to learning guitar. The work that you do with you fretting hand is, in a way, similar to cardiovascular exercises. However, there are exceptions to this. Certain chords you learn, in particular barred chords, can be more like an intense weight lifting regimen. Keep in mind, that I’ve been “drilling” the Bm and F chords after reading the article in Acoustic Guitar magazine.

I felt that being on the road for those three days have given my hand the break that it needed in order to build up some muscle. I’m really not sure if this has any validity to it (in regards to learning guitar), but the theory seems sound.

I do need to give my hand a day or two to re-develop some of the dexterity that I had built up but hopefully barred chords will continue to get easier; they have been getting easier for the past couple of weeks.