Your 30 Minutes of Guitar Practice Can Be More Effective Than You Think

Setting up the proper mindset for guitar practice transforms how effectively you use your available time. We explore strategies to optimize practice sessions regardless of whether you have 20 minutes or 2 hours to play.

• Begin with a proper warm-up routine for both physical and mental preparation
• Develop core daily exercises combined with rotating weekly practice concepts
• Practice mentally when your guitar isn't available by studying theory or visualizing the fretboard
• Avoid the "all or nothing" attitude - even 15-20 minutes of focused practice makes progress
• Work on the right things that align with your specific goals rather than random exercises
• Combine a clear game plan, consistent playing, and regular assessment of your progress

If you're struggling to develop an effective practice routine, we can help you create a personalized plan inside the GuitarZoom Academy, where we work with you personally on a daily basis to ensure you're making progress.

Links:

Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/

• Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
• GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Up Proper Practice Mindset
• 2:11 Creating Daily and Weekly Routines
• 4:52 Practicing Without Your Guitar
• 8:03 Quality Over Quantity in Practice
• 9:27 Staying Motivated and Getting Support

Transcript

Steve: 0:35

Hey, steve Stine here from Guitar Zoom. Thank you so much for joining me again. Today. We're gonna be talking about setting up the proper mindset for your practice. Okay, understanding what it is that you're gonna be doing, how you're gonna do it, making a game plan for yourself so you're not just running through the same motions all the time, okay. So number one what I would do is I would set yourself up with some sort of a warm-up routine, depending on how much time you have, depending on the age you're doing you know you're practicing depending on the amount of strenuous practice that you're gonna be doing.

Steve: 1:08

I always tell people just you wanna get warmed up both physically and mentally. Okay, so, physically, doing some hand stretches. Again, if you're listening to this, you're not gonna be able to see any hand stretches, stretches. So I'm not going to talk about specific hand stretches, but you know doing things, doing hand stretches that are beneficial for you to get your hands warmed up. You know you can run them underwater. You can pinch the tips of your fingers. You know stretch out your wrists uh, you know massage your forearms, anything like that, to kind of get you warmed up.

Steve: 1:37

The second thing is is doing some sort of an actual warm up routine, something that you don't have to think about for the day. It's just when you grab the guitar, you know you do the 20 second exercise, or you do the two minute picking drills, you do the spider walk, you know. You, whatever it might be, you work on your down picking, you work on your alternate picking, you know. For me it's always three parts. Number one is your fretting hand has legato work to do strength, speed and stamina. Your picking hand has down picking and alternate picking drills to do, and those could be anything from you know absolute beginner picking through you know learning some songs, things like that, to some real basic skills to develop, uh to, like I said, the spider walk, some of those chromatic kinds of things that you can do and advance from there. You could also do some scale work in that right. So maybe part of your practice routine is just rolling through the five positions of pentatonic, or two positions, if that's all you know, or three positions of diatonic again. Whatever it is that you do, but that's your core thing that you know every day you can default to to get yourself warmed up, get yourself in the right place, start working up your energy. You know, getting yourself synchronized, that sort of thing, and then from there you move into other opportunities of practice, depending on how much time you have.

Steve: 2:56

So here at the Academy, at the Guitar Zoom Academy, what we try and do is develop you a daily and a weekly concept of how to practice. So your daily is your core. Okay, these are the things that, in order for you to be able to reach your goals, these are the things that you need to focus on on a daily basis. You know, with time allowed, obviously, I mean, if you're busy that day, it's going to be less practice that day. If you've got more time that day, you're going to practice more that day.

Steve: 3:21

But that daily routine that you do and then what we do is we interject weekly concepts. So maybe one day Mondays, wednesdays and Fridays you're focusing on songs, learning songs, or maybe you're focusing on fretboard study, or maybe you're focusing on, you know, improvisation, and maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays you're focusing on theory. And then Saturdays, you know, you're going to put this all together and maybe make a video of yourself playing something. You know there's a lot of different ways to approach that, but having a game plan of multiple opportunities, a core thing that you do every day, and then these other elements that you're going to get to on a weekly basis and I don't mean once a week, I mean, you know, a couple, three times a week. You're going to shift these things in and out. We help you set that up. So for me, that's the proper mindset is knowing what it is you're supposed to do, why it is that you're working on it. But getting yourself warmed up, okay. Get your mind warmed up, okay. Getting ready for what it is that you're going to be trying to work on, that's really, really important. And then you go through the routine. Now, once you get done, you might need to do some sort of a cool down where you do some stretching again, that sort of thing.

Steve: 4:27

The other thing I always like to remind people, too, is that, depending on what your life looks like, if you do a lot of traveling for work or you know whatever it might be, whether it's in a plane, whether it's just driving to work every day, and you're at work five days a week and you know you're not sitting around with three hours or four hours of practice every day, it's okay. Another thing that you can learn how to do is work on the mental and conceptual stuff when your guitar is not around you or not available to be played. This is honestly I mean I don't have a percentage but half of my practice is done driving in a car, listening to music, figuring out how things go, or on a plane, studying things, studying fretboard roadmaps or studying theory. Or you know things that might not even pertain to guitar, other things that I want to learn how to do as well. You know things that might not even pertain to guitar, other things that I want to learn how to do as well. But having that study time as far as guitar goes, you know, maybe you're learning a theory thing, maybe you're working on your fretboard.

Steve: 5:29

When I was in high school, during my study hall, when I got my homework done, I would always pull out a piece of paper and I would draw out, or I'd have one that's drawn and it's in my folder you know my fretboard and then I would draw concepts on my fretboard, be it a pentatonic concept or an arpeggio thing, or you know a cage thing, which back at that time I really wasn't familiar with cage but you get the idea. You can. You can draw these out and then, when you've got time, you just do study like you sit and memorize and visualize that fretboard. So by the time you get home, you've already thought about this, you've thought about what it looks like, you've thought about how navigation would go, and then you could take that piece of paper and stick it on a music stand and then start practicing what you thought about before, but now with the guitar physically in your hands. Start practicing what you thought about before, but now with the guitar physically in your hands. It's a great way to optimize your time.

Steve: 6:22

So you're not just waiting, you know, to get home to your guitar. And then there's this ritual that you've got to go downstairs and you've got to do all this stuff and then you've got the guitar in your hands and you're studying theory, right. Or you've got your guitar in your hands and you're trying to study the fretboard. You're kind of wasting time at that point, like what you could have done at some other point in the day or the week or whatever is done some studying, some mental work, right, conceptual ideas in your head, and then when you get to your guitar, you now start applying those ideas. So you're you're saving yourself time and of course in the academy we can teach you how to do that, set you up with the right things that you need.

Steve: 6:57

But it's something to think about in trying to optimize the way that you practice, because people are always like, well, I only have 30 minutes a day to practice, or only have 20 minutes a day to practice, or OK, that's fine. Listen, you've made this choice whether it's elected or whether it's mandatory, of how much time you have a day, ok, something is better than nothing. Whether it's elected or whether it's mandatory, of how much time you have a day, okay, something is better than nothing. Don't adopt the all or nothing attitude where you have to practice for three hours or you're not going to practice at all. It's a terrible way of thinking of things. Practice on the days that you eat.

Steve: 7:30

Even if it's 10, 15, 20 minutes a day, you can still make progress as long as you're working on the right things. That's what makes all the difference in the world is working on the right things. If you're just practicing, you might be getting better at X or Y or D or L, but the problem is, if they're not cohesive and they're not getting you to point A to point F on your ladder of what it is that you really want to accomplish. The problem is, you're wasting a lot of time by working on things that are not necessarily relevant to what your goals are. So it's very important to have a game plan, know what it is that you need to be doing, why it is you're doing it and how to approach it. When you've got days where you don't have a lot of practice time, you've got days when you do have a lot of practice time.

Steve: 8:20

Setting all of that up, and if you have a problem with that, if you struggle with that, that's one of the primary things that we work on inside the Guitar Zoom Academy Among actually working personally with you, literally on a daily basis, to make sure everything's going the way it needs to go. So again, stay positive, keep practicing. Get yourself an effective practice routine that will get you where you want to go in a much shorter amount of time, not because of magic, not because of some magic pill, but because A you've got a game plan, you know what it is that you need to do to get to where you want to go, and you know what you want to get to. B you're willing to put in the work, whether it's 20 minutes a day, whether it's two hours a day, you're willing to grab that guitar on a daily basis. Make that guitar your friend again.

Steve: 9:06

Dust off that you know that guitar. Make it a motivational thing so you want to pick it up every day. And then the third thing is being able to have help, get clarity, get assessments of your playing on a regular basis so you know that things are moving the way that they need to be moving. It's really important, all right. So take care, stay positive, be blessed and thank you for your time. Thank you always for your time and I'll talk to you soon, all right.