Develop your finger strength and flexibility with this fast and effective exercise.
View the full lesson at Beginner Finger Stretches | JustinGuitar
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I find it difficult to keep my fingers parallel, I can do the stretches but my fingers just go at an angle but great exercise.
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Hi Andrew, welcome to the community. Feel free to introduce yourself over here: #community-hub:introduce-yourself
Keep working on the stretching exercise and very gradually your finger will get a lot smarter and a lot more dexterous. Before you know it you’ll look down and find that your fingers aren’t nearly as slanted as they are now. Be patient with it and don’t hurry yourself. I think at one point Justin says the finger stretching is like yoga. I didn’t really get that sensation at first, but I think I do get it now. I do the finger stretching at the beginning of my practice every time, and it serves as a signal to my brain that we’re going to focus on guitar practice now. So for me, it has trained my brain as much as it has trained my fingers.
Keep it up, and enjoy the journey!
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Hi Dave,
Thank you for the warm welcome and help and guidance. I will persevere with the exercises, it was weird but my hand and fingers wouldn’t go in the right direction but I will keep on with it.
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I look at Justin’s fingers when I watch his videos. Mine sure don’t move like that. I suspect it takes 30 years to get the nice smooth parallel fingers. I have decided to work at this slowly. Starting guitar at 55 yo means dealing with a few things, like never getting to the place someone who has played professionally all their life gets to. That is ok with me, it is still fun and worthwhile.
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I see that you can buy a Guitar finger stretcher device on Amazon for about $11. How does it work?
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You know what really works? Practice! Practice using your fingers on your guitar strings! You don’t need a $12 gimmick.
Having said that, I have never tried any of those devices. It’s only $12, so go for it if you think it might help. I just think your time would be better spent training your fingers on the actual instrument that you want to learn to play instead of spending any time at all working with one of these devices.
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I should have also said welcome to the community, and I hope my remarks didn’t sound negative. All of us come here to get help from our fellow learners because of the incredibly supportive group of folks who hang out here. Go on over to #community-hub:introduce-yourself and say howdy and tell us a bit about yourself. I promise you’ll be enthusiastically welcomed.
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I can do the stretch easily even on the 1st fret from day 1 . BUT keeping the fingers parallel with the fretboard … No way . So back to the 5th fret and take it easy and slow .
I will get there in time and practice .
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Not very well. I bought similar years ago and its gathering a shed load of dust. Does not come near to practicing on the neck and they do not replicate the width of frets. Save your money, 
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Hi all. Having a great time with this so far. Amazing how Justin’s methods work.
I’m struggling with this excersize though. I’m finding I can get eventually the fingers on the frets, but when I finally manage to get them there, they are also touching other strings. For example my ring finger is on the 6string on the 7th fret, but it’s also touching the 5 and 4 strings. It’s worse for my pinky, it ends up touching all the strings.
Is this ok for the purpose of this excersize, or am I forming a bad habit here?
Thanks
Kh
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Hello @kh2272 welcome to the Community.
This is all about exercising your fingers laterally. Touching the strings below the one your are targeting is no problem whatever. You are not trying to form an arch over them and avoid contact.
Cheers 
| Richard_close2u | JustinGuitar Official Guide & Moderator
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Thanks so much for the quick response! I’ll keep at it for sure
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Thanks from me too!! I was trying to keep my fingers arched and on the tips as well as parallel with the fret wire. Just wasn’t working!! I’ll start on the 6th string with flat fingers and have them arched by the time I get to the 1st string. May still have trouble keeping them parallel with the fret wire, but I’ll work on that! 
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not having much trouble doing it all the way to the first fret but I can feel my fingers stretching a bit, so imma do it for a few days at least!
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I’ve been trying to do the stretches from the fith fret to the eigth fret but I can’t stretch my individual fingers enough distance, and I end up with 2 fingers on some of the singular frets. What do I do?
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Keep at it your fingers will stretch out with practice.
You’re asking your fingers to do something they aren’t use to doing. Stretching takes time.
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There are muscles in the hand I know I was hardly ever moving fingers with before. If you hold out your left hand flat and bend your fingers at the first two joints to try and touch the top of your palm try pulling and pushing each finger out independently. It felt like nothing I had ever done before when I tried that. We just don’t often articulate that specifically. This creates a tension that is a mix of pull push in adjoining parts of the hand. All l my life I was never able to do a Spock-like “live long and prosper” salute. I can do that now. In fact I can scissor the two pairs of fingers while keeping them straight and touching. It’s all up for grabs.
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@Weezer15 Do as @stitch suggests and keep at it. You can build up to the full exercise if you are really struggling by starting from the D string and only doing the D, G, B and E strings at first.
Hope that helps.
Cheers 
| Richard_close2u | Community Moderator, Official Guide, JustinGuitar Approved Teacher
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I have watched quite a lot of these videos/lessons on this site and some twice or thrice, like this one. Julian is one of the best teachers of anything I have ever seen in my life(long). If you are a beginner, you can’t appreciate how lucky you are, but you have hit pay dirt. Watch and watch and watch. See you on stage.
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