Little introduction here.
When I was 14 years old I was playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 and some day a mate introduced me to o2jam. I kinda liked it even though it was very hard.
I played it for like a month or two, was only able to play lvl 8-13 songs and then quit rhythm gaming for a very long time.
What happened in the time between is basically I played a lot of different genres and one day stumbled into WoW arena where I got a little bit more serious about gaming. Fast forwarding again, I stumbled into Bloodline Champions which was an awesome indie game that had action arena pvp (which is a lot more about mechanical skill than the other slow & boring MOBA type of games out there today).

Anyway, nearly all my mates and most serious players stopped playing BLC for lots of reasons I'm not going to mention here, and that's when I got back into o2jam (bout 8 months ago). Well, o2mania this time since o2jam was dead. Played it seriously for like 4 hours a day every day but I only played songs that were way above my skill level since I believed that this was the way to improve. It made my hands hurt, a lot. After some time of this intense playing I woke up every day nearly unable to make rotations with my wrist and my fingers were immobile. It took me about an hour of careful exercising to make them feel normal again to be able to play o2jam. I did this because I just loved the f* out of that game. But it got too bad and I had to take a 2 months break from rhythm gaming.

Now my RSI is a lot better (I have found a way for myself to play osu! streaming maps without too much pain, I do sometimes wake up with rusty hands if I played a lot of streaming maps the night before but it gets better in like a couple exercises (5mins)). But osu!mania just puts a lot more stress on my fingers and wrists and I can't handle it anymore. I don't know what to do, maybe I just have to learn to play with the pain and play maps that are more around my skill level instead of way beyond it? That's what my doctor told me, build slowly and move at a slow pace. Ofcourse my doctor doesn't play rhythm games so I was wondering if any of you ever had this problem and what you did about this?

I mean when I search the internet for solutions it's all about 'do finger/hand exercises' and 'stop rhythm gaming for a month'. I do exercises daily and I took a two months break so I don't know what it is. Should I take and even longer break? Should I go and take scans of my wrists and fingers? And yeah I have a mechanical keyboard with red switches so it's not that either.

Seems to me you still have serious problem of tensing up a lot. It's true playing songs above your skill level will help, but it depends on the how big the gap is by what you mean above. Playing songs 10-20% harder of your comfort zone would be the best to train with, and always maintain Relaxed hand if possible. If ever your hand tensed up while playing is fine, but not to a point wherein it keeps on building up and your whole wrist locks up.

Is it even possible to maintain relaxed hand on faster songs though? Your guess is right my hand tensed up the entire time. I initially resisted this but later on I was just being a tryhard and ignored it =/

I'm not sure what you mean with 10-20% above your comfort zone because I don't know where you define comfort zone. I played songs where my life bar in o2jam would nearly always deplete, but not instantly. I would say about 50% cool, 25% good, 10% bad, 15% miss.

It is possible once your hand reaches that speed, But to build speed it's necessary to start slow. Tension is caused by lack of speed or lack hand coordination.
Prioritize hand coordination first because that is the most basic step. Forget about the speed for now, cause that is the final step. The mortal enemy of every rhythm gamer

As for the comfort zone, I would say comfort zone is the level wherein you could play a song with no misses or just play without breaking a sweat.
What your doing is good, play songs that you could clear. Just make sure they're not the songs you have the chances of dying (chances of dying because of spam, present in identity songs is an exception). Its always nice to train songs you can read and has a little challenge. Your hands would learn how to press each pattern correctly and fluently.

BTW I suggest using random mod when training

I have played maybe 10 songs without random mod in o2jam so yeah :p Thanks for the advice mate. Looks like the doctor was right ^^

Posture is everything. I used to get pains, maybe not as bad as yours seems to be, but simply adjusting my posture to match the standard keyboard etiquette did wounders. Not only that, it also increased my accuracy and speed tenfold all while playing more relaxed than usual.

http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/ahtutoria ... sture.html

Make sure that your keyboard isn't set too high. Notice how your arms shouldn't be making an angle smaller than 90 degrees when playing. Stretching, warming up or exercising your hands before long sessions for the same reasons your old gym teacher made you do so before gym class. Also training muscles in your hands other the ones abused while playing will give your hands enough strength to cope with this. Things like stress balls or grip strengheners.

Just make sure you don't play through the pain without doing anything. You will cause irreversible damage to your hands, which is obviously something no mania players want. I wish you luck~

Drace wrote:

Posture is everything. I used to get pains, maybe not as bad as yours seems to be, but simply adjusting my posture to match the standard keyboard etiquette did wounders. Not only that, it also increased my accuracy and speed tenfold all while playing more relaxed than usual.

http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/ahtutoria ... sture.html

Agree to a certain extent, but the pics show a person with a very bad posture. You don't really need a negative incline, you have to type with your hands floating, just like the standard for playing piano. Negative incline would give weird angle button presses, but yeah it's still a thousand times better than the pictures shown but not optimal. I'm not sure whether the floating position is better than the negative incline as far as rhythm games are concerned though.

Drace wrote:

Stretching, warming up or exercising your hands before long sessions for the same reasons your old gym teacher made you do so before gym class. Also training muscles in your hands other the ones abused while playing will give your hands enough strength to cope with this. Things like stress balls or grip strengheners.

Warming up part is true. Training muscles is not. I used to do powerlifting and my biggest strength was grip. I could close the CoC n3 which is comparable to squeezing 127kg between one hand. But my fingers are rather slow. There's the same complaint from most guitar players and piano players with a lot of grip strength. Training strength is counterproductive for your execution speed.

I hope I didn't make you angry (I know some ppl do if some1 below their skill disagrees) but I just wanted to clear up some common misunderstandings. It's not that I don't appriciate your intent of helping either, because I do. But well, I did some research around all this. I guess I just have to learn to play less tense which is something I overlooked because I thought it was impossible to not play tense on harder songs.

Heey it's all good, just sharing the stuff that helped me ^^

Though I gotta say the relation between "grip" strength and finger speed aren't a direct relation. I've been playing guitar for well over a decade and rhythm games for about half that time. Been working out my grip and fingers regularly the whole time. And never have I felt it slowed me down. The truth is muscles adapt for the tasks you train them to do. If all you do is workout, you will slow down your muscle's contraption speed since it's a slow motion. But if you do something similar to speed training right after every time, like for me it would be drilling my licks and arpeggios, you're tailoring the muscles you've made for speed.

It's also worth noting the muscles involved in grip strength aren't the only muscles involved in mania.

And I agree that image doesn't convey the proper posture too well, threw the first link I found for a basic idea haha. But what I wanted to convey from that image was the keyboard height, not the incline. When your keyboard is too high it forces your into a T-Rex kindof posture which is the most common source of pain amongst typers. The back of you hand needs to be flush with your forearm~

Well, muscles do adapt to what you train them to do! But my point is that strength training is counterproductive to speed (and stamina too, actually) in general. Specific workouts might be good, but powerlifting type of training (which is the only true pure strength training imo) is what you want to avoid. (who presses buttons with 127kg of force anyway?). I will suppose you are training with normal grippers and not the ones with crazy spring force and you are doing more than 6 reps, which means you are not training pure strength. You are also right about grip playing a minor role in osu!mania, but I was just giving a general example since you were referring to grippers.

In my case I can't get proper posture. My desk is too high and I'm using a laptop.

I've been playing music games for about a decade now. As far as finger speed goes I find that the biggest tendency seems for people to treat pressing the keys either as a strong down-press and minimal upward motion (a strength based approach), which is very slow and makes you very tense, or like a "snapping" motion where the finger snaps out to press the key and return to the position above the key forcefully, which also causes you to tense up more the necessary (but is a bit faster than the strength approach). When you play relaxed, you will tend not to pull your finger very high and kind of 'float' over the keys.

I can't always achieve this, but when I do, I find there's a considerable jump in skill, but every time I manage it, I feel like I've made a significant breakthrough. I'm still nowhere near the top skill level, but I can pass some level 30-40 o2jam charts (in o2jam. In o!m I can pass some level 60+ conversions with HP5 OD5.)

Nice Bobbias! But if you played rhythm games for a decade, you should have really thought about buying a new desk by now! haha

Bobbias wrote:

In my case I can't get proper posture. My desk is too high and I'm using a laptop.

I've been playing music games for about a decade now. As far as finger speed goes I find that the biggest tendency seems for people to treat pressing the keys either as a strong down-press and minimal upward motion (a strength based approach), which is very slow and makes you very tense, or like a "snapping" motion where the finger snaps out to press the key and return to the position above the key forcefully, which also causes you to tense up more the necessary (but is a bit faster than the strength approach). When you play relaxed, you will tend not to pull your finger very high and kind of 'float' over the keys.

This.
Problem is that if you're like me, you've grown accustomed to the way you hit keys. It's really hard to break habits like that. I've been trying to change the way I press my keys, but it's frustrating as it makes me do worse.

If you haven't already done so, I advise you to find a key setup that doesn't put your wrists in a bad position. I've been suffering from bad wrist position for quite some time and only recently started trying to fix it. When playing things like Lv.01 from ZUN (Arr.sun3) - STAR OF ANDROMEDA, I get severe wrist pains.

Xcrypt wrote:

Nice Bobbias! But if you played rhythm games for a decade, you should have really thought about buying a new desk by now! haha

Yeah... unfortunately, I don't have any money, and a new desk is VERY low priority right now.