How to practice guitar

Make a certain time each day as your guitar practice time. Playing guitar is a physical activity that has a lot in common with sports. Whether or not we play material that needs a great deal of precision, regular practice will keep our hands, legs, arms and backs in practice for guitar playing, so that most of our time can be given to learning new songs or plotting how to impress our friends with our staggering new techniques.
If you can’t practice your guitar every day or at a particular time of day, at least plan for it to be at a time when you are reasonably fresh. If you have a heavy work load or a lot of study to do, throwing in some guitar playing for fifteen minutes or half an hour will help you with your work and study too. The key to fitting in regular practice with a busy life is having your guitar sitting somewhere close by so you don’t need to dig it out of a closet or from under the bed. Keep your pitchpipe handy or a shortcut to your guitar tuner program on your desktop, and any books or tabs you need can be sitting on the floor under the guitar.
If you feel like you don’t know what to practice you probably need some new material. Even beginner guitar players need a little more new stuff than they can reasonably handle, just to keep the juices flowing.
Also you could look at your guitar playing as a collection of techniques you need to practice individually every day. Our left hands should be able to do chord changes smoothly. That means whether or not we feel we need to practice chords, a good habit to get into is to run through the chords to a song or two. If you’re using first position chords to play the song, use barre chords just for the hell of it. Or vice versa. Now play some chords as arpeggios.
If you have never formally studied scales you can still practice them by looking at what notes you play in the melody to a particular song. Find the notes in a couple of positions higher up the guitar neck.
Keep your practice fresh. Playing the same stuff in the same way every day will lead to makes us stale. Throwing in variations to any kind of routine is always good.
Whenever I think of practice routine I’m reminded of the classical guitarist who had to do a stint in the army. He made a list of some pieces that gave him the opportunity to practice all the basic techniques he needed. He was able to run through these pieces every day in the barracks so that he wouldn’t lose his technique.

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