Even if you have limited practice time, you are better served spending a few minutes warming up rather than starting to play cold. Warm up exercises not only get your body ready to play, but also help your mind get into the mindset of practicing. Warm up routines can be extremely personal, but my general rule of thumb is one exercise for the right hand, one exercise for the left hand, open strings, and an exercise that combines the two. Here are some of my favorite warm up exercises to add into your violin practice.

Exercise 1: Pinky push ups

This exercises helps you build your pinky strength, which helps with overall balance and fluidity of the bow hand, and sound in the lower half. To perform pinky push ups, place your bow on your left shoulder. Push your pinky down to lift the bow off of your shoulder, and then gently set the bow back down, maintaining the tension in the pinky the entire time. If you're doing it right, you should feel the muscles in your pinky and on the side of your hand working.

Exercise 2: In and outs

This works on bow hand flexibility, which is important for developing your sound and playing off the string bow strokes. Start with your bow directly in front of you, tip facing towards the ceiling. Straighten your fingers out and allow your bow to move to the left, and then curl your fingers back in and allow your bow to move to the right. Your wrist should remain still.

Exercise 3: Lifting & dropping left hand fingers

There are two versions of this exercise: beginner and advanced. For the beginner version, place all four fingers down on one string of your choosing. Then, lift and drop the fingers by themselves (aka just 1st finger, then just 2nd finger, etc.), then one after the other (aka fingers 1 and 2, 2 and 3, etc.), then in pairs, and then in groups of three. Try to cover all different finger combinations. For the more advanced version, do the same thing, but with the fingers on different strings-1st finger on G, 2nd finger on D, 3rd finger on A, and 4th finger on E. Each time you drop the finger on the string, try to land it exactly in tune.

Exercise 4: Son file

This exercise has many names, like the five minute bow, but the premise of it is simple: see how long you can draw the bow while maintaining a decent sound. It was said that Heifetz could draw a single down bow for five minutes! The way that I personally practice this is by putting my metronome on at its slowest tempo and seeing how many clicks I can get in one bow.

Exercise 5: Schradieck No. 1

Each of the previous exercises were working on the hands separately, but this exercise combines the two. I like to start out slowly and gradually speed up, culminating by playing the exercise in its entirety around 140 BPM. Other popular exercises include those by Sevick and Kreutzer 2.

What's your favorite warm up exercise? Leave a comment and let me know!