For some kinds of practice, it may be easy to just sit down for an hour doing exercises one after the other. But for lots of metal, exercises involve speed drills, and these can be very taxing. So, I wanted to ask how people handle this. Basically, do you rest between exercises, or between iterations of an exercise? I don't mean in contrast to playing literally without stopping, I mean like, taking your hands off the instrument for a bit -- like one would do when resting between sets when lifting weights. If so, how long do you do this? Do you do anything else while resting, or no?

I ask this because I have gotten into the habit of having, e.g., a comedy video open while practicing. I will pause it while I run scales or whatever, and then watch a little while my hand recovers. But I feel like this might be counterproductive, and that I'm wasting time -- but I don't know how other people do things.

The comparison with lifting weights brings up another question. A simple "split" routine for weight-lifters would involve like upper-body exercises one day, and lower-body exercises the next. I wonder if people implement this at all for guitar. For example, if I spend one day practicing a lot of tremolo picking with my right hand, would it be good to take it easy with that hand the next day, and practice, for example, legatos instead?

For me it depends. If you are working on endurance, then yeah rests probably are counterproductive. Otherwise playing an instrument like guitar is more muscle memory than it is like weight-lifting. Breaking up a long practice with videos probably helps the conscious part of the process go easier - just like how it's good to break up studying with different subjects (or over a longer period of time instead of just cramming). Personally, I like to break up my longer practices by writing down tabs of any good ideas that come up.

I'm guessing here, but wouldn't something be wrong if playing guitar made fingers/wrist/arms feel as sore as if you were weight lifting? It sounds like you have an effective practice method for speed, but I suppose it's also worth changing things up if you're hitting a wall.

Unlike with lifting, learning guitar doesn't leave your muscles sore for days afterwards - or it shouldn't, at least . Like any learning process, especially something that develops new neural connections, you learn during rest, but unlike with heavy lifting, you can practice it just about every day without substantial diminishing returns, let alone fear of injury.

Just make sure you get enough rest. After a period of intense practising (maybe a week or two), it's probably helpful to forget all about playing for a day or two and just sleep a lot and recover.

If you feel like practising every day isn't improving your technique, maybe practise less often, but don't neglect to play the guitar every day if you can, even if it's just for 10 minutes. You'll need less warm-up every time you pick up the guitar if you play every day.

It depends totally on where your sticking points are. If your failure is muscular (ie, you're not able to pick fast enough without your finger muscles getting sore) you can implement bodybuilding style training - meaning progressive tension and overload (one day picking 16ths at 200bpm for 1 minute, the next day for 2 minutes, the day after for 3 minutes, etc).

But sometimes when I'm fucking up it's not because my muscles physically can't play a part, it's because I haven't gotten the tightness and co-ordination down. In cases like that I don't know that taking "rests" would be of much benefit.

If your fingers hurt or your mind is weary then stop. If not, go on. Always used that mindset, never had a problem.

Nah. Makes much more sense to do 3 minutes at 170bpm, then 3 minutes at 180 bpm, then 3 minutes at 190bpm, etc. Just like in bodybuilding, where you don't start benching 100kg with one rep, then do 2 reps next week, etc.

So far this is a lot of useful information for me, so thanks to those who are posting.

Here's another question. Say I am working on speed -- that I want to build up to clean tremolo picking at 200bpm. But right now, my hands can only handle about 150, due to a mix of sloppiness and simple inability to move that rapidly. If I slow down to like 120, and practice that very neatly for 3 minutes at a time, will this enable me to move past 150 in terms of top speed? I suspect it would help clearing up the sloppiness, which would enable faster playing, but would it really help with increasing sheer speed? Again, an analogy to physical fitness: this seems like expecting jogging to help make you a better sprinter. But simply doing short-ish passages at 130, 131, 132, 133... bpm until I max out is also not helping me improve my "sprinting" much.

For speed, use a metronome and slow down and practice until you can do the tremolo picking exercise with 100% accuracy and no sloppiness. Once you can do that, speed it up by like 5bpm and repeat the process over and over until you are Steve Vai. It's not like jogging to be a better sprinter, it's like be able to do 300lb squats but without getting nearly low enough, so you re-start with a lower weight and perfect form to work your way up from there.

Nail the form down at whatever speed you can and work upwards form there - unless of course you are going for a sloppy guitar style.

Thanks. Some of these things sound very obvious to me now, but since I can't spend a great amount of time practicing, I just want to do what I can to make it actually efficient.

I am just now noticing, by taking out a stopwatch, that many of the exercises I do have actually been pretty short, even though I move them up and down the neck/strings. For example, an exercise might take about 1.5 minutes at 80bpm, but by 160 bpm that's only .75 minutes. I guess it would be quite beneficial to lengthen these runs into the 1-3 minute vicinity?

The reason why you practice runs/picking slower than usual is because most people tend to sacrifice technique/form when going into uncomfortable speeds. By building up from 130bpm to 140 to 150, its a surefire way to make sure that your technique is uniform regardless of speed. It is this uniform technique that will eventually allow you to play at 150 and beyond without difficulty.