I play 4k 4-6 hours a day. My left hand has worse stamina and speed than my right hand, but even though I am left-handed? I don't really understand why.

My left hand also strains more than my right when playing stamina/jacks/handstreams, leading to my whole arm to lock up and lose even more speed.

I also noticed that my right pinky lifts up when I play but my left pinky doesn't. It's so strange, could anyone give me any advice on how to improve my left hand?

( I know the answer is to "Play more." I already play long sessions and many stamina inducing maps to try and improve my left hand, but to no avail.)

I have the same kind of problem, although it's reversed for me since I'm right handed. You might want to consider taking a close look at any differences in hand/finger positioning. I play both 4k and 7k, though I prefer 7k, and I actually had to move my right hand to the top key row while keeping my left on the middle row in order to help with stamina because I noticed that my right hand had a sharper curve to it compared to my left. In this case it was because of the distance between space and the middle row causing my right hand to need to be closer to the keyboard, but the idea still applies to 4k. So if you notice any differences in how you position both hands you might want to find a way to position your left hand in a similar way to your right. It might also help to try out different key positions.

I have a suspicion that we tend to concentrate more consciously on our dominant hand rather than letting muscle memory do it's thing, so it might be worth trying to figure out if you are concentrating more on the movements of one hand over the other as well.

Bobbias wrote:

I have the same kind of problem, although it's reversed for me since I'm right handed. You might want to consider taking a close look at any differences in hand/finger positioning. I play both 4k and 7k, though I prefer 7k, and I actually had to move my right hand to the top key row while keeping my left on the middle row in order to help with stamina because I noticed that my right hand had a sharper curve to it compared to my left. In this case it was because of the distance between space and the middle row causing my right hand to need to be closer to the keyboard, but the idea still applies to 4k. So if you notice any differences in how you position both hands you might want to find a way to position your left hand in a similar way to your right. It might also help to try out different key positions.

I have a suspicion that we tend to concentrate more consciously on our dominant hand rather than letting muscle memory do it's thing, so it might be worth trying to figure out if you are concentrating more on the movements of one hand over the other as well.

Thank you for reading my question.

I didn't pay attention to whether I concentrated more on my left or my right. (probably 50% each hand I guess). Also, one question if you don't mind, what do you mean by muscle memory doing its own thing?

I don't use a keyboard, instead, using 2 hot-swappable keypads. I did notice that my right fingers are more up-right, compared to my left fingers. When I try lifting my hand up, it does improve a bit. Besides that, I still have a tad bit more strain on my left compared to my right, especially when alternating them.

People might suggest playing Standard to improve my left hand, but since I am left-handed. I need to hold the tablet pen with my left hand so it might not work out. If I were to use Auto-pilot, I still won't improve much.

So the main problem is to ensure that my hands are up-right when playing hard maps? (probably very hard idk）

Apologies for using your time, but I am really desperate to get additional advice, or else I might just lose motivation for improvement in the long-run.

my right hand is faster than my left, im left handed. I just play more, and make sure that i have good form when playing. itll come natural. my left hand is slowly getting to the same speed as my right hand.

What I meant is that once you've gotten past the basics, hitting the right key becomes kinda automatic. You're way beyond the point where things become automatic (you're higher rank than me by a fair bit), so at this point you don't need to consciously think about what fingers you need to use to hit a note or anything.

In my experience, I know that I concentrate more on the right side notes and less on the left because I'm right handed, and I think that this conscious attention to the notes on the right side is actually slightly slowing me down because I'm thinking more about what I'm doing with that hand, instead of letting the automatic action that my brain has learned do it's thing. When you concentrate too much on what your hand is doing I think it interferes with your ability to automatically react to the notes. This is personal experience, so it might be different for other people, but that's what it seems like is happening to me. It's something I only noticed after many years of playing rhythm games.

since I play both 4k and 7k, I've noticed that finger positions for 4k seem a lot more "vertical" than for 7k. In 4k, most people (including me) tend to keep their fingers in a more upright position over the keys. There's also the consideration of whether you play 'wrist up' or 'wrist down'.

Do you hover your wrists in the air when playing, or keep them resting on something? That changes various things when you're playing. I tend to play wrist down, keeping my wrists on the table, but for certain kinds of patterns, such as jacks and jumptrills, I will actually switch to wrist up in order to use my whole arm to help with the up and down motion a bit. I find wrist up to be too tiring and uncomfortable to play all the time, but I think it has more advantages, especially at the skill level you are at.

Keep in mind, this is mostly from personal experience, and paying attention to things really good players have talked about. In one of his videos on youtube Etienne (one of the best 4k players) talked about the advantages and disadvantages of wrist up vs wrist down, but I can't remember everything he said, or which video it was. The rest of this is personal experience from ~15 years of playing rhythm games. But you are already a lot better than I have ever been, so I can't say I'm exactly an expert on technique.

It might be worthwhile discussing these things with some top players and see what they have to say.