Hey everyone,
im recently playing a lot more osu! then before and i wondered what the best stream/tap technique was because i really suck at fast taping and streaming and want to learn the closest to non+ultra way

I browsed youtube and found many good players having really different styles in terms of their hand/finger/wrist usage and relaxation. By that i mean some relax their pinky and ring finger while middle and index are doing all the streams and taps really tense, others pull their pinky and ring towards the hand center and also tense them when doing streams which include middle finger and tap with wrist and index ect.

So to conclude my question and maybe also open a discussion: what do you guys think is the most efficient way of streaming and tapping ?

Trompf

fully relaxed body, use only your fingers. Don't use some weird retarded hand posture that really does nothing but enforce bad habits such as tensing up to gain temporary speed. Everything comes with time and practice just keep at it.

Generally, Play un tensed and find your own relaxing way to put your hand and tap.

I would recommend starting off with some stream only maps, and start off with the lower streams like 100-110 BPM. If you can't do that just go lower then. Also Ztrot made a great video for basics and learning tips on streaming.

Don't tense, you can cause unnecessary injury to your tendons that will take weeks to heal and more weeks to get your speed back, I've been there and it sucks. Do stretching exercises, relax, then move with the fingers. You may lift your wrist or not, or lift your other fingers or not, the details are up to you. You will evolve a natural position and technique for yourself.

KukiMonster wrote:

Don't tense, you can cause unnecessary injury to your tendons that will take weeks to heal and more weeks to get your speed back

More like months

Hell, it can take a year even

I'm not sure how everyone always misses the stickied thread but here you go. I'll add an answer from my ask.fm too.

t/99612

"When learning things in osu! does it always just suddenly click? So far everything has just eventually clicked and i could magically stream, or do triples.?"

Yes pretty much everything will just happen. APART FROM STAMINA/SPEED. So many people think that because everything else just happens that speed/stamina will just "happen" from playing fast maps. IT WON'T. If you aren't physically putting effort in then you're wasting your time. Every skill in osu! apart from speed/stamina requires mental development which can be achieved by just playing, stamina on the other hand takes physical development, so many people fail to realize this. If you want to get faster you need to put in PHYSICAL effort; it SHOULD hurt a little, and I don't mean that your hand gets tired I mean that there's pain just from trying to go so fast.

This is all how I feel, a lot of people will just get RSI's from trying hard, sucks to be you.

Are you talking about just streaming speed there, or aiming speed as well?

B1rd wrote:

Are you talking about just streaming speed there, or aiming speed as well?

Streaming.

Oh ok then. Is it normal then to be physically strained attempting 6 star DT, or is my tablet area just too large?

GoldenWolf wrote:

More like months

Hell, it can take a year even

Luckily I only had tendon damage, which healed faster as I regularly stretch so it took me 3 weeks to heal but with fatal loss in speed and stamina. Took a further month of swollen extensor muscles and forearm pain to get speed back up to 190bpm. Nerve damage or ligament damage would take much longer to heal and in most causes cause permanent loss to mechanical strength.

thanks osu for giving us health issues

Gaz wrote:

I would recommend starting off with some stream only maps, and start off with the lower streams like 100-110 BPM. If you can't do that just go lower then. Also Ztrot made a great video for basics and learning tips on streaming.

Use the extension to post yt videos

[youtube]pq33jvMitRk[/youtube]

KukiMonster wrote:

Don't tense, you can cause unnecessary injury to your tendons that will take weeks to heal and more weeks to get your speed back, I've been there and it sucks. Do stretching exercises, relax, then move with the fingers. You may lift your wrist or not, or lift your other fingers or not, the details are up to you. You will evolve a natural position and technique for yourself.

What are the chances that actually happens, though?

jesus1412 wrote:

I'm not sure how everyone always misses the stickied thread but here you go. I'll add an answer from my ask.fm too.

It's been years of the same thread every day, surely it goes deeper than just "missing" it

Whatever works best for you, personally I like to tense up my thumb and curve it inwards towards my palm and rest my pinky on the side and bounce my wrist slightly for momentum on single tapping and relax everything when I stream high bpm for the extra stamina.

All personal preference

Jesse what about curling weights with your wrists and stuff, I mentioned it in another thread but it didn't get much thought there. When doing high speeds you essentially have to maintain a certain muscle tension, but I believe that you can sort of bypass lots of training done solely by osu! by curling weights with your wrist (which affects your forearms which is where your muscles are for your fingers) The technique side of osu! will still have to be trained but the ability to maintain higher speeds should in theory be easier to reach. The weights of the keys seem to limit how far you can actually train in terms of speed and supposed stamina. Because they're so light just moving your fingers faster wont affect your muscles as much once you reach a certain point. Lots of people that play this game tend to be kids that are rather petite. On the other side of the spectrum I know some people who are older that have lifted weights or use their arms a lot more than kids, so their muscles are more developed. It shows when comparing these players that the first group tends to be a lot slower and clumsy compared to the second group.

I'm really interested in this idea because small weights that I've done before have affect the way I play; currently I've been more active in the gym (unrelated to osu!) and I have seen that when playing the game it has become much easier to maintain higher speeds for longer periods. I mean, honestly it all makes sense. Your muscles will wear out and there's only so much stress they can take but if they're stronger you can last longer.

Or you could take the route of maintaining a ridiculous amount of muscle strain and single tap the shit out of super high speeds with a chance of not being able to maintain it consistently and possibly fucking up your arm (Which I've done and was out of commission for 2 months last year). I dunno, this is why I'm asking you this jesse since you managed to get to where you're at by single tapping stuff.

B1rd wrote:

Oh ok then. Is it normal then to be physically strained attempting 6 star DT, or is my tablet area just too large?

reduce your area a bit until it becomes comfortable, but not too much obviously. I was a faithful full area player and realized that the skill wall gets retarded; you can just reduce your area and then what used to be fullscreen jumps turn into common movements which are really easy to do.

I have no idea if muscle training will correlate to osu! streaming at all. To my knowledge there are 2 separate barriers to learning streams, a mental and physical one. If I were to separate it further I'd say it can be split into 3 parts: The first hurdle is mental, the hurdle at which you need to learn independence for each finger. To overcome this is the first step and also the easiest, it can take people only a few weeks to get this down and pretty much everyone manages it. After you develop the ability to alternate consistently the next phase is where people try to get faster and gain stamina. People continue to alternate their fingers at steadily increasing speeds until they reach their physical threshold, the point where using their currently developed techniques the person can not go faster. I feel like this is where a lot of people make a big mistake, at this stage they continue pushing forward by playing fast maps and long stream maps but they never realize that they're not actually doing any physical work outs, indeed I feel that people tend to use the method of comfortable alternating to "practice streaming" when in reality they need to attempt new and more straining techniques. As I explained in my ask.fm answer, it seems that people don't actually TRY to stream fast, they just do what they always do that tires out their hand and expect themselves to get faster. I've always put an immense amount of effort into my streaming, my body used to tense up so much that I wouldn't be able to aim and it would physically hurt my neck/shoulders to play fast streams. It feels to me like the other barrier is overcoming your "comfort zone" and learning the difference between muscles being exhausted and muscles being heavily strained. You want to strain your hand to develop it, not exhaust it; when you feel like you can't go faster tense up or move your fingers less or slam your fingers harder or press softer, do ANYTHING you can to get that stream down (save for things like vibrating).

To answer your question. I think working out like that could be a legit way to ignore the 2nd mental stage I spoke about and develop your muscles in alternative ways, but I'm also not sure if you'll ever get the finger motion that you need to learn unless you manage to physically plow through the struggle rather than comfortably playing.

From a biological prospective, I have no clue. All I know is that I spent 3 years rock climbing when I was younger and I've been using black switches for a long time so I've been at a slight advantage in the finger strength department since before I picked up osu!

I won't imply that I have much evidence or confirmed logic but I really think the biggest problem is passing through the 2nd mental block of streaming.

Also I'd be careful when you start straining your hand, a lot of people develop RSI's so it's something to watch out for.

buny wrote:

What are the chances that actually happens, though?

It depends on how hard a person tenses and how unnatural their technique is. From this thread alone I know it's happened to me and to Dexus above it seems.

@Dexus: the forearm extensor muscles (the muscles that lift the finger up) are usually pretty slow and weak as it is not used often. I believe this is the bottleneck of most players. If your exercise involve these muscles then it will no doubt boost your speed and stamina, as you don't need that much physique to get fast at this game (you mostly need coordination). Then when you reach 300bpm streams your finger look like this.

I swear, when I watch top players stream it looks like they're just bashing their hand against the keyboard. WWW looks like he tilts his wrist sideways instead of moving his fingers.

Drink lots of caffeine until your hand starts twitching. Hover hand over keyboard. Profit.

B1rd wrote:

I swear, when I watch top players stream it looks like they're just bashing their hand against the keyboard. WWW looks like he tilts his wrist sideways instead of moving his fingers.

WWW definitely rotates his wrist for streams.

buny wrote:

jesus1412 wrote:

I'm not sure how everyone always misses the stickied thread but here you go. I'll add an answer from my ask.fm too.

It's been years of the same thread every day, surely it goes deeper than just "missing" it

I'm sure it does.

I think people have an aversion to reading old threads. They like to read up-to-date posted-today information, even if nothing fundamentally has really changed. It's almost like people think there have been mind-blowing new discoveries which make stickied threads "old and no longer relevant". So everyone wants a present answer, in case something "new" has been discovered.

There is a lot of information though, sometimes mistaken as new because it disappears amongst the millions of threads here. To try cover everything would create the Great Wall of Text, 3000 pages long, and no one would read it. But that's what the search function is there for, if you feel like reading 3000 pages. It's not all meant to be read and remembered anyway, you're supposed to play the game and discover things as you go along, and often that involves asking questions as you go along, in the form of new threads.

Except there is a necro every day