Reduce The Tension, Relax and Improve Your Guitar Playing.
As you become more aware of the tension in your body that arises because of playing the guitar, the more eager you will be to get rid of it. Muscular tightness is the number one enemy to fluid guitar playing.
Just take a quick look at some of the all time great guitar players, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Marvin or any other world famous guitarist. They are all extremely relaxed whilst playing.
They will have developed this laid back easy style through years of practise, but the process of relaxing whilst playing can be worked on and improved.
The first step to reducing tension is awareness.
To start this process, begin playing through a chord progression or a scale that you are comfortable with. The guitar playing will take care of itself.
Don't even think about what chord comes next or where your fingers are going. You know the progression or scale well enough. Just trust yourself.
Now as you play, scan your body for areas of tension. Start with your face, how do the muscles in your jaw feel? is there any tension or tightness? move around your face. The little muscles around your eyes. Are they tight? are you aware of any signs of stress?
If you find any areas that are tense, then consciously try and relax them. Still don't worry about what your fretting and strumming hands are doing, they are fine without you thinking about them.
If you can, try and purposely tense the muscle where you found the problem. Then once it is really tense, consciously let it relax.
Once you have covered your entire face and removed any tension, move down to your shoulders. Repeat the cycle. Locate the tension, make it even more tense if you can and then relax. This can be repeated throughout your whole body.
Locate, tense and relax is the sequence.
You can try this with other progressions and scales. Try it whilst playing a tune you aren't totally sure of and see if you can spot any extra areas of tension.
You can perform this sequence mentally too, without even holding the guitar. Try it when you have a spare 5 minutes, nobody needs to know what you are doing.
Use your imagination to visualise yourself playing a tune and going through the same locate, tense and relax procedure. It will make a difference.
Athletes and sportmen and women have been aware of the power of the imagination to improve skills for decades. Its about time we musicians started using it too.