You probably play games like this for an hour or two a week, maybe more. Obviously, some ways of playing will make you better at the game faster than others -- someone who plays songs that are hard for them will improve much faster than someone who focused on score-attacking very easy songs. So, how would you best use your gameplay time if you wanted to get better? These posts attempt to answer that question.
If you haven't read how to make your hands faster I recommend it because this is an expansion of the concepts established there.
The key principle to know here is that any muscle, even if it's an obscure muscle you can't see, develops in response to resistance. Resistance can be created in a lot of ways -- you can do specific exercises like jar holds or wrist curls, you can play faster songs, you can hit the keys harder, and so on. As your muscles get more developed, you will need greater volume of resistance to do this. You will not get anything out of 8th note stream at 120bpm, for example, unless you did this with your entire arm weighted.
The most important part is that you have some kind of burning sensation in the muscles you're developing. If you're playing 6-key stepmania for example, you want to develop your ring/middle trilling in addition to your index/middle trilling and if you notice no burning when you do ring/middle trilling you're probably not going to develop that area.
Unfortunately, the muscular difficulty of a song is often not proportional to the grade you got on a song. To actually develop your hands you have to think about what's really stressing your hands in a muscular sense, not what the game is saying. You could get a B on a song because one part of that song was especially difficult, but if the rest is easy you're not going to have enough consistent volume to create burning.
The best kinds of songs to create volume are songs with very consistent patterns; IcyWorld's spread files are great choices if you're trying to develop your spread ability. But even on IcyWorld's files, you can 'cheat' your volume -- essentially, playing in a way that scores goods/greats instead of misses and gets you a decent grade like a B, but does not actually engage your muscles much.
There's slang for this in fitness -- it's called "ego lifting" and "half-repping." The number of times you can lift a weight (repetitions) can be used to determine your 1-rep max, within 10 reps. So if you can bench press 200lb five times, your 1-rep max should be 225lb, but if you can bench press 200lb 10 times your 1-rep max should be 267lb. Obviously, guys would rather say they bench pressed 200lb 8 times than 5 times, so they will perform the lift in sloppy ways like not bringing the bar down to their chest or bouncing it off their chest to avoid engaging their pectoral muscles.
(To clarify, all lifting has ego purposes, but ego-lifting refers specifically to cheating a rep for an ego boost.)
A lot of people play rhythm games this way, and there are two major ways to ego-play on games like SM/FFR. Others exist, but I think these two are the most pervasive.:
* Playing songs you can barely get a B on, but focusing on getting a better score instead of engaging the muscles used to play the song
* Playing songs that you can AAA specifically to get a higher timing score (say, going from 9 perfects to 5 perfects)
There is some value to playing songs for timing purposes on games like DDR/ITG, since to some extent all playing will improve cardiovascular endurance, but for games like Stepmania the cardiovascular endurance component is nonexistent. We're more concerned with muscular endurance.
If this is still slightly confusing, think about it this way. Two people could play St. Scarhand and only St. Scarhand for 10 days, starting off with B grades:
- Player 1 mashes their way through jumpstream that is hard for them
- Player 2 tries to hit the movements as true to the chart as they can, and ignores their score
At first, player 1 will outscore player 2. Eventually player 2 will outscore player 1, though, because player 1's approach does not develop the muscles used to play these songs.
We are tempted to play like Player 1 because scores are usually indicative of improvement, but they don't always have to be indicative of muscular improvement. Scores can be misleading. The best gauge of improvement should be if you are able to cleanly and accurately hit patterns you weren't able to before. You will notice this when certain parts of songs 'feel' easier.
If you want to test improvement without score as the dominant factor, try playing a jumpstream song you can normally AA but hit the keys as hard and cleanly as you can. You will be measuring the same muscle endurance, just in a different way, which the game can't measure because it doesn't take into account how hard you pressed the keys. You could notice improvement simply because you're able to hit the keys harder and more cleanly for longer periods of time, even if this isn't reflected in a score.
People reach plateaus in the first place because they don't get enough volume. In lifting, it's usually an issue of volume/eating, but I don't think we're anywhere near the limit of how skilled or fast people can be at these games, so any of the plateaus people have now are likely a direct result of their training approach.
Anyway, if you like this kind of stuff, there's a health and fitness forum on FFR that has a ton of informative posts on this kind of subject matter. I thoroughly recommend it.
If you haven't read how to make your hands faster I recommend it because this is an expansion of the concepts established there.
The key principle to know here is that any muscle, even if it's an obscure muscle you can't see, develops in response to resistance. Resistance can be created in a lot of ways -- you can do specific exercises like jar holds or wrist curls, you can play faster songs, you can hit the keys harder, and so on. As your muscles get more developed, you will need greater volume of resistance to do this. You will not get anything out of 8th note stream at 120bpm, for example, unless you did this with your entire arm weighted.
The most important part is that you have some kind of burning sensation in the muscles you're developing. If you're playing 6-key stepmania for example, you want to develop your ring/middle trilling in addition to your index/middle trilling and if you notice no burning when you do ring/middle trilling you're probably not going to develop that area.
Unfortunately, the muscular difficulty of a song is often not proportional to the grade you got on a song. To actually develop your hands you have to think about what's really stressing your hands in a muscular sense, not what the game is saying. You could get a B on a song because one part of that song was especially difficult, but if the rest is easy you're not going to have enough consistent volume to create burning.
The best kinds of songs to create volume are songs with very consistent patterns; IcyWorld's spread files are great choices if you're trying to develop your spread ability. But even on IcyWorld's files, you can 'cheat' your volume -- essentially, playing in a way that scores goods/greats instead of misses and gets you a decent grade like a B, but does not actually engage your muscles much.
There's slang for this in fitness -- it's called "ego lifting" and "half-repping." The number of times you can lift a weight (repetitions) can be used to determine your 1-rep max, within 10 reps. So if you can bench press 200lb five times, your 1-rep max should be 225lb, but if you can bench press 200lb 10 times your 1-rep max should be 267lb. Obviously, guys would rather say they bench pressed 200lb 8 times than 5 times, so they will perform the lift in sloppy ways like not bringing the bar down to their chest or bouncing it off their chest to avoid engaging their pectoral muscles.
(To clarify, all lifting has ego purposes, but ego-lifting refers specifically to cheating a rep for an ego boost.)
A lot of people play rhythm games this way, and there are two major ways to ego-play on games like SM/FFR. Others exist, but I think these two are the most pervasive.:
* Playing songs you can barely get a B on, but focusing on getting a better score instead of engaging the muscles used to play the song
* Playing songs that you can AAA specifically to get a higher timing score (say, going from 9 perfects to 5 perfects)
There is some value to playing songs for timing purposes on games like DDR/ITG, since to some extent all playing will improve cardiovascular endurance, but for games like Stepmania the cardiovascular endurance component is nonexistent. We're more concerned with muscular endurance.
If this is still slightly confusing, think about it this way. Two people could play St. Scarhand and only St. Scarhand for 10 days, starting off with B grades:
- Player 1 mashes their way through jumpstream that is hard for them
- Player 2 tries to hit the movements as true to the chart as they can, and ignores their score
At first, player 1 will outscore player 2. Eventually player 2 will outscore player 1, though, because player 1's approach does not develop the muscles used to play these songs.
We are tempted to play like Player 1 because scores are usually indicative of improvement, but they don't always have to be indicative of muscular improvement. Scores can be misleading. The best gauge of improvement should be if you are able to cleanly and accurately hit patterns you weren't able to before. You will notice this when certain parts of songs 'feel' easier.
If you want to test improvement without score as the dominant factor, try playing a jumpstream song you can normally AA but hit the keys as hard and cleanly as you can. You will be measuring the same muscle endurance, just in a different way, which the game can't measure because it doesn't take into account how hard you pressed the keys. You could notice improvement simply because you're able to hit the keys harder and more cleanly for longer periods of time, even if this isn't reflected in a score.
People reach plateaus in the first place because they don't get enough volume. In lifting, it's usually an issue of volume/eating, but I don't think we're anywhere near the limit of how skilled or fast people can be at these games, so any of the plateaus people have now are likely a direct result of their training approach.
Anyway, if you like this kind of stuff, there's a health and fitness forum on FFR that has a ton of informative posts on this kind of subject matter. I thoroughly recommend it.
Comment