Picking hand warm up ideas

It seems like most guitar lessons focus a lot on the fretting hand. But you can hardly play guitar without well develop picking hand.

Here is a little etude for the picking hand warm up. This exercise surves double purpose. It helps warm up the picking hand, but also works as a great review of the major scale harmonization.

Picking hand warm up exercise
Picking hand warm up exercise

The exercise comes down to playing 3 note arpeggios on the first 3 strings:

C Dm Em Dm
and
C Bdim Am G F Dm Em C

Please notice that first two notes of every arpeggio are picked up, while the third one is picked down. It looks like sweep-picking exercise, but it is not.

Make sure NOT to sweep-pick those notes!

The idea is to give the picking hand as much workout as possible, so we are not looking for the economy of motion here.

Feel free to experiment with other chords, and possibly even move the pattern to other stings. The idea is to keep it a bit more musical while you are working out your picking hand.