How to Warm Up the Forearms & Hands

Video Transcript

"Alright, we've gone over the parts of the snare and we've gone over how to set up your snare and how to work the snare stand. So now we're just about ready to start playing. But before we start playing, it's really important to warm up. I know you've probably heard it before a thousand times, and I have too. And a lot of times I won't do it, but it's very important. So just a really simple warm up. First of all you want to stretch out your forearm a lot. And stretch out the hands obviously because that's where, you know that's where you're working the most. So a really simple warm up is just to go palm to palm and hold it. Pull back on your fingers and that's going to stretch your forearm. And just hold that for a while. Do it on, do it on each arm. And also you can bring it up, kind of stretch around the sides because that's going to get some action too. And maybe even do something to work your shoulders, whatever. Basically your upper body, you want to stay as loose as possible. So you can stretch out the forearms, then you reverse it. So when you're pulling on your hand and now you're stretching the top of your forearm. That's also very important. So I'm doing these very quickly too, but you, I would spend a lot more time doing this. I usually when I do choose to warm up, I'll do this for about five to ten minutes and really get loose before I even start playing the drums. So yea, that's a good forearm stretch. Also what you can do is pull lightly on each finger. Don't like pop your joints or anything like that, this is just a stretch. Pull lightly on each finger, and just rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees. And go both ways; spend as much time as you want on this. So now you're just getting an individual stretch all across the hand, which is really important. And finally, and there's so many more warm ups. Just go on the Internet, you know look them up. There's so many more you can do. Finally when you get all that done, just shake your hands out for a while. Because not only does it get everything loose, it gets the blood flowing to the hands. So you can do this before you stretch. So do this, then stretch, then do it again. And just to get the, just to get the blood warm before you start playing."