Saturday, November 12, 2011

Starcraft 2 Skills: Planned Structured Practice

One of the things I suggest for serious gamers is they break their practice up into different segments or parts.

Here is an example that I might give to a player I was coaching.

Day 1 Ladder play, using builds that you have practiced, and saving replays.

Day 2 Watch the replays from ladder games & take notes on what was done wrong and what was done right.

Day 3 Practice games with Training partner, or Micro practice on Training map. Focus on the things you learned from the ladder replays. Ideally watch replays of practice games, with you focusing on your partner's play, and your partner focusing on your play. Far easier to be object of someone else than of yourself.

Day 4 Watch Pro games, ideally replays, but VODs can help as well, ideally you would have one or two pros of the race you play, that you focus on. Good idea to watch game through once without much, or any rewinding, to get a feel for it. Day9 does this at x8, I tend to use x4 and x2 mostly. Then start over going slower and rewinding, while taking notes.

Day 5 Rest from SC2, do something fun or productive. Try not to sit in front of computer or TV, you want to give your body a break to recover. Eyes & hands are not up to being on computer all the time!

Now this is just an EXAMPLE, to illustrate the idea of a Planned Structured Practice routine. It is not cast in stone.

This is a Five day plan, a semi serious player might take weekend off or do whatever for fun.

While a Pro, or someone who is striving to to be a pro, might just loop back to Day 1 when day 6 comes around, or make a Seven day plan. Or even a ten day plan, you don't have to have plans that line up with the calendar.

You can also do what is called double splits, which means you break day into 2 parts, usually morning and evening.  Do one workout in the morning, then go work, play, or rest till the evening when you do your second workout.

Note that every day of gaming is followed by a day of Watching.

That is because Recovery is a critical component of improving as much as practice. Many Athletics have a hard time giving their body and mind enough recovery time, because they feel like they are being lazy then.

You actually improve during the Recovery phase of training, not during the exertion phase. When you lift weights, if you don't give your muscles adequate time to recover before the next workout, you actually limit your gains, it is called over training.


Muscles need, for most people, 2-3 days of recovery. To deal with this problem serious weight lifters work different muscles on different days. That way they can work out more often, yet still give their muscles plenty of time to recover.

To fully development and retain skills you also require Sleep. When you sleep your brain sort of filters out a lot of the little things from the day, leaving the events or actions that you spent a lot of time or a lot of focus on.

Sleep actually helps you get what you worked on during the day into long term memory.

Another important point for gamers is that lack or sleep or fatigue, basically lowers your IQ and reaction speed. It also affects your judgment. Just like being drunk impairs you, so does fatigue.

Stress causes fatigue, so anything that causes a lot of stress, say a real intense close game, can lead to fatigue, and thus impaired performance quickly. Even if you started well rested and focused. This is part of the reason why Tournaments are harder, or why driving your car in a blizzard can be completely exhausting.

If you catch yourself doing something really stupid, and you don't know why, there is a really good chance it is because your fatigued.

As a Coach and Trainer, I want to point out it is much harder to break a bad habit, than it is to learn it correct the first time.

If you practice when your fatigued you will be playing incorrectly, so you will actually be practicing poor play, or in simple terms you will be practicing how to LOSE!

Which means you will have to spend more time unlearning your bad habits you drilled in while to fatigued to play well.

So Stop playing when that happens and do something else.

Try taking a break, get up from the computer. Walk around a little bit, eat a healthy snack, & hydrate! You will be surprised how much that can help. You can use this at tournaments as well. A five or ten minute break can really improve your performance.

The more Tournaments you play in the less it will get to you.  The more familiar you with something the less it will stress you out.

Physical Conditioning also helps a lot. Cardio/Aerobic exercise is more important for this than strength training. Thought they both help.

Being fit helps in at least two ways, one because a fit body is stronger, stress causes less fatigue.  The other is that you will have more energy and endurance, so while you will get fatigued it will have a smaller effect.

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