Playing for muscle strength/dexterity?

[jvizzlez]

I've been training on SM for a while now, and I'm able to play, at most, about 320 BPM 16th streams such as Massacre on HSMP12, Wrath of the Hedgehog, etc., but I've been starting to plateau recently.

To remedy this, I've been playing speedfiles almost every day for the past week or two, and only now have I begun to question my method... should I train my fingers like I train when I do other exercises -- that is, every other day? Or should I keep on mashing until my fingers fly out of their sockets and kill someone?

And how about sightreading? I play at C1000 for moderately difficult (6-8/10) songs, and drop that down to C900 for the crazy songs. Files like 8th Era seem utterly impossible and even at 0.8x speed, reading them is fairly difficult. How should I go about training my "eyesight", if you will?

[Dynam0]

I find it effective to play each day until you plateau, then take a ~2 day break and go back at it

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Dynam0

I find it effective to play each day until you plateau, then take a ~2 day break and go back at it

this is solid advice but I recommend a 24 hour break, possibly 16. the reason for this is because the muscles used for stepmania (very subtle forearm muscles that you probably can't identify unless you look at an anatomy chart) recover extremely quickly. for reference, other muscles don't recover as quickly -- my chest muscles can recover in about 24-36 hours, depending on how much I worked them, and my legs will take up to 2 full days for adequate recovery depending on how hard I worked them

if you really *really* want to get better at this, buy some disc weights -- about 5lb, 10lb, and 15lb. you can get them at places like Academy. do wrist curls and reverse wrist curls, alternating each arm for about 15-20 repetitions (reps); after you've done 15-20 reps that way, that's considered a set. you'll want to do about 4 sets per arm, for each type of exercise.

with that said, if you're willing to do this for stepmania, you should probably just lift weights also because the benefits from doing that will be massive and you'll get better at stepmania too

[Jousway]

funny, when I play everyday I get no improvement at all, but if I stop playing for a week or so and then play again I'm slightly better

[SKG_Scintill]

looking at your scores, you can't do 320 bpm 16th streams