Violin Bow Hold Exercises Without the Violin

Have a weak fourth finger in your bow hold? Does it keep slipping? In this post, discover excellent bow hold strengthening exercises you can do without the violin.

The following violin bow hold exercises are for muscle development within the bow hold.

Bow hold exercise 1: Pinky Pushups

Pinky pushups help strengthen the pinkie in the bow hold. It’s very important that the fourth finger in the bow hold is strong. Why? Because when we play at the frog, there is a lot of weight put on the fourth finger from the bow.

Don’t like playing at the frog? Most likely you have a weak fourth finger.

1. With your left hand, hold the tip of the bow. This helps alleviate the weight. With the right hand hold the bow with your most beautiful bow hold. Check that your thumb is bent, pinky is curved, index finger nice and relaxed.

2. Take your left hand away from the tip and just hold the bow with the right hand.

3. Take your index finger off of the bow and be able to hold the bow horizontally without any problems. You want to be able to do this comfortably before moving to the next step.

4. In this step we actually do the pinky pushup. Your thumb is the fulcrum, the triangle underneath the teeter totter and your stick is the teeter-totter. The bow is going to angle down and up on your thumb. Push down with your pinky while your index finger is not on the bow. As the pinkie pushes down, the bow goes up. You lightly let the bow come down and you do this quite a few times. Don’t do it more than your pinky is able to. If you start getting tired you’ll feel your pinkie shake until the muscles develop but it’s normal and then after a while maybe a week, maybe a couple of weeks you’re going to be able to do this easily.

Bow hold exercise 2: The Spider

The other exercise that we have for muscle development on the right hand is what I call the spider. Now, this is fairly tricky too.

1. Hold your bow verically (straight up and down) with a beautiful bow hold. Thumb is bent and your pinkie is curved.

2. Crawl up the stick with your fingers keeping your thumb nice and bent. You’re probably going to be able to do this fairly easily since gravity is working with you. Do make sure that you don’t touch the horsehair and you keep your bow nice and straight.

3. Now this is where the challenge comes in. You get to do that spider but you’re going to be doing this going back to the frog. You don’t have gravity helping you this time. You have to do it all on your own. While keeping the thumb nice and bent crawl your bow hold back to the Frog. This helps finger independence and also coordination of the fingers working together as a team.

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Bow hold exercise 3: Collé Prep

So we did the pinky push-ups and then the spider. The final exercise I have before you is to help the fingers move together in a direction that’s good for the collé stroke on the violin. This exercise helps with the fingers moving together and moving the bow in a specific direction mimicking the collee stroke on the violin.

Hold the bow vertical as before in the spider exercise.
Move the fingers in your bow hold up and down. Now you do this with the bow still straight up and down and as you can see the bow moves up about an inch. You want to make sure your bow is moving only straight up and down. Not in and out, only straight up and down. It’s important to get this motion first before adding it to the violin.

So good luck with your muscle development exercises for the bow hold and happy practicing.

Let me know in the comments below, which exercise you will be implementing.