I've been doing these two exercises for a while on top of everything else I do in the gym, hypothesizing that it would target the muscles used in games like Stepmania directly. I've been right so far.
Reverse wrist curls
These will train the muscles you'd use to jackhammer in Stepmania.
A curl, in exercise terminology, is any movement that curls something toward you. The most common kind of curl is a bicep curl but forearm curls exist too. I do multiple types of forearm training on top of my regular exercises -- support grip, pinch grip, crush grip, reverse wrist curls, and regular wrist curls.
You'd think you'd want to do wrist curls, but wrist curls will just help you with very forceful downward motions. This would be fine if the objective of the game were to press a button as hard as possible, but when you're doing jackhammers what you're really doing is a constant flex of your wrist extensors. If I do reverse wrist curls, which train the wrist extensors, and then do a jackhammer motion on stepmania, you can feel the same muscle pop out of my forearm.
Reverse wrist curls will train the muscles you would use to jackhammer or drum really quickly. I've been measuring my progress with my hands on the drumometer, which is used in the World's Fastest Drummer competition. I started at 900/minute, which you'd think is no big deal since that's just 225 bpm 16ths for a minute, but you need to hit the thing with significantly more force than you'd hit a stepmania button -- if you used your index fingers the hits wouldn't even register. After a month or so of doing this, I got it up to 975/minute. I'm hoping to exceed 1000 soon. Only about 35 people have broken 1000 with sticks, and stick speed is about 1.05x faster than bare hand speed; the bare handed world record is 1140.
My favorite way to train reverse wrist curls is to grab a dumbbell with the bar between my middle and ring fingers, put one arm sideways on another arm like a T-shape (with the arm holding the dumbbell as the horizontal line crossing the T) then bring the hand up until I can feel tension against the muscle. Alternatively if you have one of those attachable dumbbell bars you can buy from Academy that lets you change the weights on each side, you can just attach weights to one and only one side and then pull the bar up toward you, sort of like the motion guys use in fishing.
Finger extensor exercises
These should train the muscles you'd use to trill.
Finger extensors are rarely, if ever trained unless the person training them has a functional reason to do so. They're an invisible muscle area. No girl is going to think "wow, look at his finger extensor muscles." She's going to look at biceps, or shoulders, or forearms or pecs or abs but this sort of detail is beyond anyone except perhaps an anatomy researcher. For 99% of guys who train anything, you want bigger arms, chest, etc. and that's way simpler. Shit, most guys don't even train calves. Why would they train fingers?
So information is limited, but here's a good article about finger extensor training.
As the article mentions, there are several pieces of equipment you can buy to train your extensors, but frankly I think that's pointless. My favorite exercise to train extensors is static jar holds, also known as the reverse farmer's walk.
All you do is fill up a jar with something like wet sand or water and stick your fingers out against the lid, using the force of your fingers against the walls to hold it up.
Here's a picture:
This sounds really stupid, but trust me -- you'll notice the same muscles burning after a while of doing this as you would from playing a really hard spread song. You'll want to hold for as long as you can (up the weight of whatever is in the jar if it's too easy), alternate hands and do about 4 or 5 holds for each hand (8-10 total).
I only recently started doing these, but I've noticed my scores going up and fingers trilling more easily from doing these even when I didn't play the game at all and only did extensor exercises.
Plateauing and other notes
Most of us are familiar with plateauing. Stepmania and games like it are games of muscle adaptation because you are adapting your central nervous system to certain specific movements. But once you get really good, you've maxed out on how much muscle fiber you can adapt and the only way to get better is to increase the size of the muscle fiber itself by making it grow, aka 'hypertrophy'. Muscle fibers grow in response to trauma to the muscle caused by resistance; in extremely simplified terms, muscle trauma + caloric surplus + protein = hypertrophy. "Trauma" sounds bad, but all it means is that the muscle was forced to do something it didn't do before. Exposure to resistance is why weightlifting is called 'resistance training'.
A lot of good players expose themselves to resistance unconsciously by playing really hard songs. Playing really hard songs is an inefficient but nonetheless effective way to add resistance; over one song, you might not have much resistance. But if you play until the point where you feel a burn in your forearms, that's a good level of resistance. Combine this with a decent diet and you'll grow the muscle fiber. You don't even really need to be 'healthy', you just need calories (not tons, just more than your maintenance) and protein. Lots of people, even athletes, unknowingly orient themselves toward foods that are good for this sort of thing, so it's not something that is that complicated.
Just remember to eat lots of protein -- ideally 0.8g per lb of bodyweight, so if you weighed 100lb you'd get 80g/day, if you weighed 200lb you'd get 160g/day, etc. Most people probably do this anyway, but you'd be surprised how many people who don't know about this stuff get way too little protein in their diet.
I recommend actually lifting weights also just because once you understand this you understand the basic principles of how to lift weights and get results, but that's up to you. If you are interested though, feel free to check out the health & fitness forum for more info.
Reverse wrist curls
These will train the muscles you'd use to jackhammer in Stepmania.
A curl, in exercise terminology, is any movement that curls something toward you. The most common kind of curl is a bicep curl but forearm curls exist too. I do multiple types of forearm training on top of my regular exercises -- support grip, pinch grip, crush grip, reverse wrist curls, and regular wrist curls.
You'd think you'd want to do wrist curls, but wrist curls will just help you with very forceful downward motions. This would be fine if the objective of the game were to press a button as hard as possible, but when you're doing jackhammers what you're really doing is a constant flex of your wrist extensors. If I do reverse wrist curls, which train the wrist extensors, and then do a jackhammer motion on stepmania, you can feel the same muscle pop out of my forearm.
Reverse wrist curls will train the muscles you would use to jackhammer or drum really quickly. I've been measuring my progress with my hands on the drumometer, which is used in the World's Fastest Drummer competition. I started at 900/minute, which you'd think is no big deal since that's just 225 bpm 16ths for a minute, but you need to hit the thing with significantly more force than you'd hit a stepmania button -- if you used your index fingers the hits wouldn't even register. After a month or so of doing this, I got it up to 975/minute. I'm hoping to exceed 1000 soon. Only about 35 people have broken 1000 with sticks, and stick speed is about 1.05x faster than bare hand speed; the bare handed world record is 1140.
My favorite way to train reverse wrist curls is to grab a dumbbell with the bar between my middle and ring fingers, put one arm sideways on another arm like a T-shape (with the arm holding the dumbbell as the horizontal line crossing the T) then bring the hand up until I can feel tension against the muscle. Alternatively if you have one of those attachable dumbbell bars you can buy from Academy that lets you change the weights on each side, you can just attach weights to one and only one side and then pull the bar up toward you, sort of like the motion guys use in fishing.
Finger extensor exercises
These should train the muscles you'd use to trill.
Finger extensors are rarely, if ever trained unless the person training them has a functional reason to do so. They're an invisible muscle area. No girl is going to think "wow, look at his finger extensor muscles." She's going to look at biceps, or shoulders, or forearms or pecs or abs but this sort of detail is beyond anyone except perhaps an anatomy researcher. For 99% of guys who train anything, you want bigger arms, chest, etc. and that's way simpler. Shit, most guys don't even train calves. Why would they train fingers?
So information is limited, but here's a good article about finger extensor training.
As the article mentions, there are several pieces of equipment you can buy to train your extensors, but frankly I think that's pointless. My favorite exercise to train extensors is static jar holds, also known as the reverse farmer's walk.
All you do is fill up a jar with something like wet sand or water and stick your fingers out against the lid, using the force of your fingers against the walls to hold it up.
Here's a picture:
This sounds really stupid, but trust me -- you'll notice the same muscles burning after a while of doing this as you would from playing a really hard spread song. You'll want to hold for as long as you can (up the weight of whatever is in the jar if it's too easy), alternate hands and do about 4 or 5 holds for each hand (8-10 total).
I only recently started doing these, but I've noticed my scores going up and fingers trilling more easily from doing these even when I didn't play the game at all and only did extensor exercises.
Plateauing and other notes
Most of us are familiar with plateauing. Stepmania and games like it are games of muscle adaptation because you are adapting your central nervous system to certain specific movements. But once you get really good, you've maxed out on how much muscle fiber you can adapt and the only way to get better is to increase the size of the muscle fiber itself by making it grow, aka 'hypertrophy'. Muscle fibers grow in response to trauma to the muscle caused by resistance; in extremely simplified terms, muscle trauma + caloric surplus + protein = hypertrophy. "Trauma" sounds bad, but all it means is that the muscle was forced to do something it didn't do before. Exposure to resistance is why weightlifting is called 'resistance training'.
A lot of good players expose themselves to resistance unconsciously by playing really hard songs. Playing really hard songs is an inefficient but nonetheless effective way to add resistance; over one song, you might not have much resistance. But if you play until the point where you feel a burn in your forearms, that's a good level of resistance. Combine this with a decent diet and you'll grow the muscle fiber. You don't even really need to be 'healthy', you just need calories (not tons, just more than your maintenance) and protein. Lots of people, even athletes, unknowingly orient themselves toward foods that are good for this sort of thing, so it's not something that is that complicated.
Just remember to eat lots of protein -- ideally 0.8g per lb of bodyweight, so if you weighed 100lb you'd get 80g/day, if you weighed 200lb you'd get 160g/day, etc. Most people probably do this anyway, but you'd be surprised how many people who don't know about this stuff get way too little protein in their diet.
I recommend actually lifting weights also just because once you understand this you understand the basic principles of how to lift weights and get results, but that's up to you. If you are interested though, feel free to check out the health & fitness forum for more info.
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