Some exercises make you look like a virtuoso. This one makes you look like a spider trying to sign its name in cursive. Welcome to the weird spread-fingers drill, where your fretting hand discovers muscles it swore it didn't have and your pinky files for early retirement.
It's a guitar finger stretching exercise played on a single string: one finger per fret, spread as wide as your hand can manage, crawling along without any chord shape to hide behind. Deeply unglamorous, faintly painful, and genuinely great for reach, strength and finger independence.
How this spread-fingers stretch works
Pick one string and put all four fingers on it, one per fret — index, middle, ring, pinky. Now spread them apart so each finger covers its own fret with no bunching. The trick is that a single string gives your fingers nowhere to cheat: no easier neighbouring string to grab, no chord shape doing half the work. Start high up the neck where the frets sit close together, then walk the whole hand down toward the nut fret by fret. The lower you go, the wider the spread, the louder your hand complains.
The useful part: keep your thumb roughly centred behind the neck and your wrist relaxed — the stretch should come from spacing your fingers, not from cranking your tendons. Two calm minutes a day buys you a bigger reach and cleaner one-finger-per-fret playing far faster than one heroic session that leaves you sore. If you want more of this pain-with-benefits genre, my four-finger legato lick is the natural next stop.
Do it daily and one morning you'll reach a stretch that used to require a second guitarist. Do it never and your pinky stays a decorative tassel. For the PDF, Guitar Pro file and the rest of my questionable finger science, I'm on Patreon.