How to be GOATED at Speedrunning

"I could never" is a saying that is holding us all back. With many people daydreaming of achieving excellence, these three words tell the whole story. Putting in the hours isn’t gonna matter, because I don’t have what it takes anyway. This is a very dangerous mindset to have. A poison that before long begins to spread to your confidence. By saying "I could never," you’ve already given up, and I don’t blame you, because that used to be me. As a kid, I was dead average at every sport I played, and I started to wonder if I’d ever get good at anything. When I found speedrunning at the age of 14, it was much the same, I was nothing special. But this time, something was different. It was the realization that speedrunning is endless. No matter how much you play, your time can always go lower, and before I knew it, I had become obsessed with improving. As of making this video, I will officially be 15 years deep in this relatively niche hobby, and I’ve carved out a respectable body of work within this amazing community. A place where I’ve felt so welcome, it’s given me a reason to never leave. But I gotta keep it a buck. Improving at speedrunning was never taught to me. There were no guides, no tutorials, no older sibling or teacher who was there to show me the ropes. I, like many others at the time, had to learn through trial and error. Today, there are tons of videos that can help you set up LiveSplit, get a capture card, and learn whatever game, but there are very few videos tackling the extremely layered process of how to actually get good at any speedrun. This is going to be that video. So whether you’re a seasoned speedrunner, completely new, or just a viewer, this will serve as a guide on how to get better. I have consulted five of the best speedrunners I know, who all have years in the game, alongside myself. We’ll bring you through the steps to becoming GOATED at speedrunning. Before we get started, I want to let you guys know about this video’s sponsor, Surfshark VPN. I personally first used Surfshark back during the COVID years, and it's super handy. I lived in the UK at the time and listened to a lot of underground rap, and YouTube was outright blocking most of the videos for the whole genre. Since these songs weren’t on streaming services either, my only choice was to use Surfshark to change my location to somewhere else in the world to access it, and it was super easy to do. On mobile, it’s literally one click of a button, and now I’m in another country. When my plan ran out at the time, I just had to suck it up that I didn’t have Surfshark anymore. But I got a message from my mom that roughly translates to "The shark ran out, can you buy me the shark?" To which I remembered that I had hooked her up with Surfshark, and she was using it for privacy protection and to access a larger library of Netflix shows because Denmark genuinely had next to nothing. So if my mom can’t live without Surfshark, that’s a sign that you gotta get it. And there’s a good deal going on right now. To get four extra months of Surfshark VPN, go to surfshark.com/tharixer or use code THARIXER at checkout. That’s four extra months if you go to surfshark.com/tharixer or use code THARIXER at checkout. Thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring. Now, back to how to become GOATED at speedrunning. Before we even begin to play the game, we must take care of something important. Our bodies. Specifically, our hands and wrists. Stretches are not something you do when your hands start hurting; you do them to prevent injury for the future, so I’d recommend starting now. Stretching before runs or practice can also help circulate blood in your fingers, and depending on how intense the game you’re running is, not stretching could heavily limit your abilities to perform. Just don’t run with stiff or cold hands, terrible idea. Here’s what I do. I bend my hand backwards and hold it for around 25 seconds to get that nice stretch along the forearm. This is gonna feel weird when you first do this, but trust me, it gets better with time. After 25 seconds, I turn my hand around and stretch the other way, again for 25 seconds. I do this with my other hand too now, and after that, I roll them in circles, making sure I really get that stretch going. If your game involves the shoulder, you can use a stretching band. I used to do this before doing runs of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, but unless your game requires some kind of excessive mashing or stick rotation, this is probably not necessary. If you are struggling with wrist pain right now, I’d recommend checking out these two videos from Silent Wolf and Simply That that cover a book called The Mindbody Prescription. They both had horrible hand pains and were able to recover with the help of this book, so check it out. Wrist pain is no joke. The very apex of any leaderboard is gonna feature players that have mastered their game’s fundamentals. This is understanding your character’s movement to its core, or being able to fully internalize certain lengths of cooldowns or animations. Getting good at any game requires a lot of playtime, and the more you play, the more you internalize its controls. To expand on what I’m saying, I’ve brought in Muty, a masterclass speedrunner in games like Quake, Half-Life, and Devil May Cry. Muty: “There are many facets in which you have to excel at to be a top-level speedrunner. Part of that whole package is getting the raw fundamentals down. There’s probably a reason you picked the game you speedrun, and there’s a good chance that reason is you enjoy the game mechanics and the speedtech. Whether it’s bunny hopping in Half-Life, controlling your mid-air momentum in SMB1, recognizing enemy attack patterns in Souls games, inventory management and menuing in Resident Evil. Every game has a cornerstone mechanic, and it is quintessential that you develop your mechanical skills to the point where you develop a sixth sense for the game. Being good at the fundamentals means you do things generally faster than most, you get to learn harder strats, you learn new strats faster. You can correct mistakes on the fly, you can get more creative and come up with your own new strats, and so on. I have noticed in many games over the years how having good mechanical skills would mean the difference between those contending for world records and those who are not quite there yet and, sadly, may never make it. As to how to get fundamentals down, my personal recommendation would be to play around with the aforementioned mechanics. If there are mods or tools that allow you to practice the basics, go for them. Like, for example, in Half-Life, we have multiplayer servers with a custom game mode called “kz” where we play on community-made maps that solely involve bunny hopping and movement, with the goal of finishing the map as fast as possible. As movement is the undisputed boss of Half-Life speedrunning, every newcomer that comes along gets recommended to play on these custom servers, to the point where it has reached meme status at this point. Even if you have been speedrunning a game for a long time, it is never a bad idea to go back to basics and do nothing but mess around with mechanics. Acquiring any game’s practice tools is definitely something I can strongly recommend. For example, in Ratchet & Clank practice, I use Racman, a practice tool that can connect to your PS3 via IP. Every time I derust this game, I use the tool to warp to planet Umbris, give myself all the items and weapons I need, and begin using the map as a playground to strengthen my fundamentals. Obviously, not every game has these kinds of advanced tools, but if they do, learn how to use them. For movement-heavy games, make sure you watch tutorials and movement guides that can teach you about the fundamentals. Even if you were able to figure out some basic concepts by yourself, you likely missed some small nuances that could be learned through something like a video. Going back to

before long begins to spread to your confidence. By saying “I could never” you’ve already given up, and I don’t blame you, because that used to be me. As a kid, I was dead average at every sport I played, and I started to wonder if I’d ever get good at anything. When I found speedrunning at the

age of 14, it was much the same, I was nothing special. But this time, something was different, it was the realization that speedrunning is endless. No matter how much you play, your time can always go lower, and before I knew it I had become obsessed with improving. As of making

this video I will officially be 15 years deep in this relatively niche hobby and I’ve carved out a respectable body of work within this amazing community. A place where I’ve felt so welcome, it’s given me a reason to never leave. But I gotta keep it a buck. Improving at

speedrunning was never taught to me, there were no guides, no tutorials, no older sibling or teacher who was there to show me the ropes. I, like many others at the time, had to learn through trial and error. Today, there’s tons of videos that can help you set up LiveSplit, get a capture card,

and learn whatever game, but there’s very few videos tackling the extremely layered process of how to actually get good at any speedrun. This is going to be that video. So whether you’re a seasoned speedrunner, completely new, or just a viewer, this will serve as a guide on how

to get better. I have consulted 5 of the best speedrunners I know, who all have years in the game, alongside myself, we’ll bring you through the steps to becoming GOATED at speedrunning.

Before we get started I wanna let you guys know about this video’s sponsor Surfshark VPN.

I personally first used Surfshark back during the COVID years and it's super handy. I lived in the UK at the time and listened to a lot of underground rap, and YouTube was outright blocking most of the videos for the whole genre. Since these songs weren’t on streaming services either,

my only choice was to use Surfshark to change my location to somewhere else in the world to access it, and it was super easy to do. On mobile it’s literally one click of a button, and now I’m in

another country. When my plan ran out at the time I just had to suck it up that I didn’t have Surfshark anymore. But I got a message from my mom that roughly translates to “The shark ran out, can you buy me the shark.” To which I remembered that I had hooked her up with SurfShark and she

was using it for privacy protection and to access a larger library of netflix shows cause Denmark genuinely had next to nothing. So if my mom can’t live without SurfShark that’s a sign that you gotta get it. And there’s a good deal going on right now. To get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN,

go to surfshark.com/tharixer or use code THARIXER at checkout. That’s 4 extra months if you go to surfshark.com/tharixer or use code THARIXER at checkout. Thanks to SurfShark for sponsoring, now back to how to become GOATED at speedrunning.

Before we even begin to play the game we must take care of something important.

Our bodies. Specifically our hands and wrists. Stretches are not something you do when your hands start hurting, you do them to prevent injury for the future, so I’d recommend starting now. Stretching before runs or practice can also help circulate

blood in your fingers, and depending how intense the game you’re running is, not stretching could heavily limit your abilities to perform. Just don’t run with stiff or cold hands, terrible idea. Here’s what I do. I bend my hand backwards and hold it for around 25 seconds

to get that nice stretch along the forearm. This is gonna feel weird when you first do this, but trust me it gets better with time. After 25 seconds I turn my hand around and stretch the other way, again for 25 seconds. I do this with my other hand too now, and after that I roll

them in circles, making sure I really get that stretch going. If your game involves the shoulder, you can use a stretching band. I used to do this before doing runs of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, but unless your game requires some kind of excessive mashing or stick rotation,

this is probably not necessary. If you are struggling with wrist pain right now, I’d recommend checking out these two videos from Silent Wolf and simply that cover a book called The Mindbody Prescription. They both had horrible hand pains and were able

to recover with the help of this book, so check it out, wrist pain is no joke.

The very apex of any leaderboard is gonna feature players that have mastered their games fundamentals. This is understanding your character’s movement to its core, or being able to fully internalize certain lengths of cooldowns or animations. Getting good at any

game requires a lot of playtime, and the more you play, the more you internalize its controls. To expand on what I’m saying, I’ve brought in Muty, a masterclass speedrunner in games like Quake, Half-Life, and Devil May Cry.

Muty: “There are many facets in, which you have to excel at to be a top level speedrunner. Part of that whole package is getting the raw fundamentals down. There’s probably a reason you picked the game you speedrun, and there’s a good chance that reason is you enjoy the game mechanics and the speedtech.

Whether it’s bunny hopping in Half-Life, controlling your mid-air momentum in SMB1, recognizing enemy attack patterns in souls games, inventory management and menuing in Resident Evil. Every game has a cornerstone mechanic, and it is quintessential, that you develop your mechanical skills to the point where you develop a sixth sense for the game. Being good

at the fundamentals means you do things generally faster than most, you get to learn harder strats, you learn new strats faster. You can correct mistakes on the fly, you can get more creative and come up with your own new strats and so on. I have noticed in many games over the years how having

good mechanical skills would mean the difference between those contending for world records, and those who are not quite there yet and sadly, may never make it. As to how to get fundamentals down, my personal recommendation would be to play around with the aforementioned mechanics. If there

are mods or tools that allow you to practice the basics, go for them. Like for example, in Half-Life we have multiplayer servers with a custom game mode called “kz” where we play on community made maps that solely involve bunny hopping and movement, with the goal of finishing

the map as fast as possible. As movement is the undisputed boss of Half-Life speedrunning, every newcomer that comes along gets recommended to play on these custom servers, to the point where it has reached meme status at this point. Even if you have been speedrunning a game for a long time,

it is never a bad idea to go back to basics, and do nothing but mess around with mechanics.

Acquiring any games practice tools is definitely something I can strongly recommend. For example, in Ratchet & Clank practice I use Racman, a practice tool that can connect to your PS3 via IP. Every time I derust this game I use the tool to warp to planet umbris,

give myself all the items and weapons I need, and begin using the map as a playground to strengthen my fundamentals. Obviously not every game has these kinds of advanced tools, but if they do, learn how to use them. For movement heavy games, make sure you watch tutorials and movement guides

that can teach you about the fundamentals. Even if you were able to figure out some basic concepts by yourself, you likely missed some small nuances that could be learned through something like a video. Going back to Ratchet for example, I have a movement guide on this channel that

goes into depth on a ton of advanced techniques. If you wanna get good, you have to be willing to watch something like this, replicate what you see, and master these techniques yourself.

This is Jonathan Fatal1ty Wendel, he’s one of the very first pro gamers to travel the world and sustain a living from winning tournaments in games like Quake III, Painkiller, Unreal Tournament 2003, and more. I play this clip to countless people, because, not only does it ooze that cool

early 2000s PC gamer vibe, but I feel inspiration in how he delivers this short speech with such confidence. And it really still rings true, the only way you’re gonna get to number 1, is to practice. And frankly, it’s gonna be half this video. And while practicing sounds simple, making

sure you’re efficient is rather nuanced, so let’s get into some surface level info to ease you in.

First, are runs practice? I hear this statement debated a lot in the speedrunning community, and I’m here to tell you yes, it definitely is, just not very effective. Let me show you why.

I’ve come up with a visualization I like to call “The Dirty Glass Theory” here I am with.. a dirty glass and let’s just say, this is your current personal best in material form. It’s.. messy, you got a lot to clean up. Especially this spot right here, and this section. Now let’s say doing

one big wipe across this glass is doing a run, the glass got a little bit cleaner, but not by much. Let’s say you do another run, and another run, it’s getting cleaner, but those super dirty spots are still bad. So instead of spamming runs over and over again in hopes that those sections

will magically be cleaner, we need to really scrub those areas and focus on them to make it clean.

So what’s the best way to go about that? Well I’ve brought in Spyro 1 world record holder Composer to talk a little bit about efficient practice.

Composer: “I think the most important part to improving at speedrunning efficiently, is by doing efficient practice, which I think can be categorized in a few different ways. I think that practice can be categorized as either active or passive practice. Passive practice is just repeating sequences of movements or tricks over

and over and again to build consistency, which is important. But you must also do active practice. Which is practicing with the intent to analyze the way you go about things, the way you line up and do setups, the way you do certain movements. And analyzing to see if

there’s places for improvement, places to change the way you do things and see if other runners' setups or movements are more consistent for you or faster. I think that not a lot of people spend enough time doing this kind of practice. And this is THE most important for improvement.”

To give you the most straightforward advice on how to get better at active practice, you have to be willing to learn correct technique from the get go. This is done by watching the top runs on the leaderboards. When watching these runs, pay attention to everything they do that

is different to you, even down to the smallest of things. To play at a world record level, you have to be able to visualize the world record lines, jump timings, and spacing in your mind. If you aren’t able to do this, watch the run again and again until you can replay

it back in your head with your eyes closed. If you can, try to watch these runs on YouTube rather than Twitch if you have the option. Comma and Period on your keyboard enable you to advance the video one frame at a time if you’re looking to get ultra precise. Once you’ve analyzed a

handful of runs, one thing you can do is type it down somewhere and create a priority list of what you want to incorporate. I did this one time when I came back to Mirror’s Edge after not running it for a few years.

The game was full of so many small new optimizations that it got a bit overwhelming trying to take it all in, so I wrote it down, and started color coding the things I wanted to practice. Because I was rusty, I usually prioritized things that I knew were easy to

incorporate or saved the most time for relatively low effort. It’s kinda like going back to the gym after not having gone for a few months. You’re not immediately gonna go back to your max weight, but rather take it slow and work your way back up to where you were. Similarly in speedrunning,

when your skill begins to return, that’s when you can start focusing on the smaller time saves with bigger risks involved. If you tackle just a handful of these more difficult strategies every week, you’ll be doing over half the stuff the world record run is doing in no time.

Another great analysis tool is creating comparison videos. I know not everyone knows how to use editing softwares, but if you know some basics, split screening two strats next to each other will give you clear visual confirmation on whether or not your strats are faster or slower compared

to the world record. I’m a sucker for these, and sometimes games will even have built in ways to time strats, that skip this whole process, like the Spyro 1 practice codes for example.

Cool? Cool. Now, let’s talk about nerves. Composer: “The second most important thing is simulating nerves in a practice environment. How many times have you found yourself practicing something and it feels pretty good, but then you hop into runs and suddenly it feels bad again.

This is because in a run things feel different, things feel more nervewracking. And there are ways to simulate these nerves in a practice environment. And my favourite way is using “Streaks”. Set out a goal for yourself with a trick. Say I wanna hit this trick ten times in a

row, or maybe if it’s a bit of a harder trick, say five times in a row. What you’ll notice is when you are ONE away from finishing that streak, when you’re at 9 out of 10 or 4 out of 5 you’re gonna

feel nervous. You’re gonna WANT to hit that last attempt. Cause you know if you mess up, you have to go right back to 0. And while this isn’t a perfect analogue to being nervous on a pace. It at least gets you a little bit closer, to the mentality you’d be one when you’re nervous.

This can also be applied to movement categories. Let’s say getting JUST under 2 minutes in a level is quite hard, but achievable. Set out the goal of getting under 2 minutes five times in a row on that level. What you’ll find is, this will teach you where it is important to push your movement,

and maybe where it’s a little less important because it costs you consistency. Setting out these streak goals not only help you simulate nerves, but it also puts you in a mentality to find what is actually important to push, and maybe what’s a little bit too risky to push.”

A runner's relationship with nerves can make or break a legend in the hobby. Many are scared to feel nervous but we have to understand why it happens in the first place.

Nerves are built up from a feeling of losing something you worked for. When you’re new to speedrunning and you get your first really good pace into the end game, you will experience your first true rush of adrenaline, and you’re gonna be shitting yourself. Your hands are

sweaty, your heart rate goes so fast it’s hard to think straight, and while this all sounds awful.

This is why we speedrun. That exhilarating feeling of sculpting your own masterpiece, you wanna see it through to the end. But sometimes, you will choke under the pressure. So how does one avoid this? I have two tips. One, is to embrace the nerves. Enjoy the moment and feel alive,

take the adrenaline as a reward for you playing well, and hype yourself up for the end of the run. Instead of thinking “oh god I hope this won’t go wrong,” it should be “Whatever happens happens, I’m glad to be experiencing this moment.” That will leave you free of expectations,

and help you stay grounded. My second tip, experience numbs the nerves. When I was new, the pressure would crush me. I’d finally reach the end game after trying for weeks, and I’d choke instantly. But after thousands of dead runs, and lots of practice,

my nerves have turned to steel. My heart rate on some of the best runs of my life, is nothing like it used to be.

And that’s not luck, it’s confidence. The more you put yourself in that high pressure situation, the less power it has over you. It’s the same reason veteran esports players perform well under pressure. They’ve simply been there too many times. During this Jak 3 grind in 2022,

I came very prepared. I was giving myself multiple chances at the world record a day, and the nerves disappeared with it, and suddenly, it stopped being a once in a week miracle. Nerves happen to all of us, but doing streak goals is one of the best ways to help simulate it,

and putting yourself in high pressure situations will strengthen your mental game overall. Choking is natural, it happens because you care, but don’t lose runs cause you weren’t prepared. Lose runs for the right reasons.

All the way back in 2018 when speedrun content was fairly fresh on YouTube, Karl Jobst made a pair of practice tip videos with one of them focusing on the “50/50” rule that I’m gonna reiterate on here. This concept is essential if you want to grasp efficiency quickly, and it can be applied

to nearly every skill in the world. The idea is simple, you have a target, and you must hit it.

But we all know hitting a target, especially when it's really small, is essentially impossible to hit with 100% accuracy. But to ensure that our chance of success is still as close to 100% as possible, we need to understand how we miss. The center of the target has the most room for error

so in most cases it’ll be the aiming point, but in video games there’s not always a clear visual indicator, and what you perceive to be the center will not always align with the actual center.

Let’s say I am trying to turn this difficult corner in Ridge Racer Type 4. Let’s again say I am able to get past it without hitting the walls 90 out of 100 times, but the 10 times I miss,

I want to ideally be too inside 5 times, and too wide 5 times, thus resulting in a perfect perceived center aiming point. Let’s apply this to a frame perfect trick. Say I am able to hit this 75 times out of 100, but with the 25 times I miss, 21 of them are a frame early and 4 are a frame

late. This means I have a tendency to be early, and my perceived center is slightly shifted to one side. If there are two things humans are amazing at, it’s forming habits, and pattern recognition.

We recognize that there is an imbalance in our perceived center, but quickly become stubborn, and lack the willpower to break the habit. The best way to break this habit is overcorrecting.

If you are missing a trick too high, focus on hitting it too low, if you are overshooting, try to undershoot your next attempt on purpose. It sounds counterintuitive because, of course we don’t wanna ever miss. But, say I’m consistently too early and then I finally miss too late, it

shows me how much margin the trick has. Being able to envision leniency becomes far more clear.

There is an exception to this rule however. There will be situations where the time loss on either side is not equal. To take an extreme case here, let’s say that missing a trick too high loses you 10 seconds, but missing too low outright softlocks your game. Here, you should

air on the side of caution, and shift your center slightly more towards too high. Of course you want to hit the trick, but it's smart to think ahead about where you want to miss as well. The 50/50 rule is quite possibly the most broken strategy in the entire world for improvement. It can apply

to literally anything that you wanna get good at, and I encourage you to use it wherever applicable, but for speedrunning, make these error based corrections during practice. Not during runs.

Overcorrection is best applied when we’re able to practice the same segment over and over again with little time wasted in between. This is why you should use save states or position codes if you have the option. Whether you’re playing on an emulator, a modded version of the game or

something else, having tools that decrease your cooldown between attempts is a must for making adjustments and getting in reps fast. I got the world record in Mega Man X4 by simply loading the same save states over and over again in all of the areas in the game I sucked at for about 30

minutes each, an hour or two every day. I must have loaded these two spiral staircase rooms 400 times combined. They both have a ton of enemies that come at you with the background providing no visual indication of when they’ll appear. I just had to keep loading that save state until I

learned the pattern of when and what spawned. I also practiced on DuckStation with a DualSense, and swapped to a DualShock 1 when actually doing runs on console. I know some won’t feel comfortable with using two different controllers like this, but I just adapted.

If it still feels awkward and you care enough, you can get an adapter online for cheap.

Your hours spent practicing matter a lot too. Many assume that in order to get good at speedrunning you need to grind all day every day, but the name of the game is quality over quantity. Learning any motor skill, speedrun practice included, seems to be the most optimal when you spend roughly 2

to 4 hours per day. This is when you’re the most focused. You’re able to analyze mistakes well, and you can correct them accordingly. Practice for longer than that, and you will begin to fatigue. It turns from deliberate, focused practice, to low quality repetitions.

After practicing for the day, you’re gonna want to get those nice 8 hours. Yes, good sleep is necessary for improving at speedrunning. This is something called Memory consolidation. And to explain it to you like you’re 5. Think of practice as planting a seed and sleep as helping it grow.

When you practice the next day, everything feels more consistent and automatic. That’s the real payoff from the day before. Now of course, you’re not gonna be a god gamer in 1 day. So this is where you gotta be persistent if you really care about this shit. You need to be continually

practicing, it doesn’t have to be every day, in fact I don’t recommend that. There should be room for runs and breaks, but if you wanna get better, I’d say, for people who are more pressed for time, find a few days a week where you can put in 1-3 hours, and 2-4 if you’re someone with more free

time. For the love of god, be deliberate with how long you play. We gamers get carried away fast, you gotta stay disciplined. Practicing for 6 hours 2 days in a row is not gonna yield the same results as playing 3 hours a day over 4 days. You can also improve during

the practice session itself, you’ll find that you can suck at something in the first hour of play, but by hour 3 something clicked. And that’s what practice is for, it's for experimentation, and trying things out, and at times that won’t always go well, sometimes practice goes poorly,

and I want to assure you that this is normal. But some will cherry pick one bad session and say “practice doesn’t work for me.” When in reality, they probably just don’t find it fun.

Yeah, practice for many feels repetitive, slow and unrewarding, and it’s hard to improve at something you fundamentally don’t enjoy. And honestly I can relate to this, I had a rocky relationship with practicing, but over time I grew to love it. How I learned to enjoy practice is appreciating the

incremental improvements I make every time I play. It can feel like a slog when you’re just starting for the day, but once you get into the zone and you can see yourself getting better and better with each rep, that’s when it gets really good. Just knowing that your PB is gonna

get absolutely demolished the next time you do runs should be more than enough reason to make you wanna practice. It's not only fun, it fuels your long-term fulfillment, which is something I’ll talk more about at the end of the video. Even when you do enjoy practicing, targeting which

areas to practice is gonna be very subjective depending on the game and person. A good place to start is to focus on areas you know you’re not very good at. To become the most well rounded player you can be, always target your weaknesses. In a similar vein, try to avoid practicing things

that you are already proficient at. Overpracticing the same thing can have diminishing returns. When you’re at a point where it feels like you have everything down, your default should be to build consistency with the games hardest sections. In Mario 64, top level 120 star runners will

usually spend a while practicing carpetless. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. It’s a trick that’s late in the game, and missing it is run over. For tricks like these, you have to understand that you can only get so good at them. Hitting them every single time is not gonna happen.

There will be a point where you plateau, but this shouldn’t be an excuse to not practice it. You might not be able to get to a literal 100% success rate, but get as close to it as you can.

The last thing I’ll mention for this section is Individual Levels, or ILs for short. How many times have you seen an IL runner swap to full game only to demolish the leaderboards? In my experience this happens a lot. This is someone who takes each part of the game, grinds out amazing

times in all of them, leaving them with little to no weaknesses across the entire game. Of course they’re gonna be good when they do any%. So my advice, do ILs. It can be for a 30 second long stage or a 10 minute chapter. Since the run is now quite short, resetting is not a big loss,

which means you’re able to incorporate more experimental and risky strategies that you will find more consistency with as you keep doing that same IL. The pipeline of something being TAS only to being IL only, to then being possible in full game is all too occurring. Get a head start,

be daring, and push strategies into runs that nobody else is willing to do. When you finally get around to doing attempts there are quite a few different do’s and don’ts in regards to seeing success and having fun. Some are preferences and depend on the game,

but some are essentials you must incorporate to improve. First off, warm up. If your game has a level select of some kind, go to a few of the harder stages in the game and do a handful of repetitions each on all of them. I recommend doing this for about 15-30 minutes, but whatever works

for you. This is because you want to prepare yourself for what’s about to come. Re-enforcing that, yes I do remember this sequence of buttons I need to press, and yes, I can get this run.

Despite your preparation, you will fail and be forced to reset when you’re running, and when you do, keep track of what you’re losing runs to, and pay attention to any patterns. I’ve watched runners who make it to the halfway mark in their run, throw it to some easy trick, immediately

start a new run, then throw it in the exact same spot again. Don’t do this. It’s a huge waste of time, and can easily be prevented with one change. When faced with this, use error-correction. When you lose a run to a trick that you feel like you should have hit, stop your attempts, and

spend a few minutes doing that thing you failed to make the correction and prove to yourself that you can do it. If you don’t, and just start a new run it's gonna be yet another gamble, because your idea of what it takes to hit it is misaligned with the center, and now we’re back to

the 50/50 rule. One thing is knowing the mistake, another is doing it a few times to ensure you have the timing down. It’s stubborn and unrealistic to assume that you’re so good at your game that you will just magically make that adjustment next time. Just practice it quickly, make that

correction and go again. After all, you want to ensure that there are no shaky interruptions so you can enter the flow state.

Xem: "Flowstate is the act of completely losing yourself in whatever you’re doing. It’s the zone where play feels effortless and where your synapses are firing with such intense excitement that you truly feel alive. I believe most people know what this feels like,

but what if I told you I think flow is achievable at will. Step 1, detach yourself from results.

This does not mean don’t be nervous, because of course you’ll be nervous on a great run if you really care. But you will never play perfectly so by accepting that chokes can and will happen you eliminate the anxieties of expectations. Step 2, whatever you’re scared of messing up,

do it immediately. Flow requires you to play at the edge of your abilities, if you waste even a single moment doubting yourself, you won’t be truly happy with your run anyway. To speedrun, is to create living art, and art isn’t allowed to be boring. Step 3, have fun. The more fun you

have, the more speedrunning will simply feel like breathing. World records don’t matter, leaderboards don’t matter. All that matters is enjoying this moment of expressive beauty.

If you don’t understand how to start, then simply pretend. Show up, try your best, be an imposter, do poorly and try again tomorrow. If you improve at flow 1% every day, you’ll be 37 times better this time next year.

Thank you Xem for the insight, I really agree with detaching yourself from expectations and having fun. If you’re simply existing in the moment you can just focus on your play and nothing else. I find that I play at my absolute

best when I am playing at full focus, or if I’m having friendly banter with my chat, nothing in-between. I’m either in the flow state, or so distracted that I’m operating under full muscle memory. If you want more insight on this topic, I recommend checking out this video from Waifu that

gets into the nitty gritty about flow state, choking and how to avoid it a bit more.

Flow state can be achievable under the right conditions, but of course every game is different.

I’d say it's easier to achieve for games where the fate of the run is completely up to you, but for the ones with RNG it’s a different matter. You could be locked in for 30 minutes straight, only for some terrible luck to occur that can take you out of the flow state. It

can be very frustrating to experience such a sudden interruption, and how exactly do you deal with those emotions? I think it's best I leave that answer in the hands of someone who lives and breathes RNG on the NES.

Summoning Salt: “Okay so how do I deal with RNG? Obviously I run one of the most RNG heavy speedgames out there in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and when you run the game at a high level, a lot of times it feels like there’s way

more RNG than there is.. actual execution, and.. it can be tricky but for me personally I always just have to remind myself, as long as I am doing everything correctly, I am doing my job, and y’know, the game is gonna do what it wants to do. But I need to focus on what I can control,

and that is executing everything as perfectly as possible, and the game is gonna do what it wants to do. Y’know sometimes that can be pretty frustrating, when you play over and over again and y’know, you’re not getting the results cause you’re not getting the luck,

but.. I dunno I feel like for me.. A lot of speedrunning is the mental game, and I tend to get more frustrated when I make mistakes versus the game giving me bad luck. It’s almost like, every run where I do everything correctly but Tyson does the 8 second delay or Don 2 doesn’t

give me stars, it’s like.. a miniature ego boost, cause it’s like, alright.. this was totally out of my control, this was not my fault. I couldn’t do anything about this, so whatever? So I kinda build up my confidence a little bit that way, and uhh there’s no magic way to get better luck obviously

but, it just comes down to how badly you want the record, and how badly you want the goal time. Like I wanted Sub 2 Tyson really badly and I decided.. I just wanna focus on playing as best as I can,

and I don’t care how long it takes I’m just gonna keep doing this until I get the luck for Sub 2. And it took, y’know like 9 months, but I decided I wanted that record badly enough. So, just comes down to a combination of getting your mental game strong and wanting it badly enough,

and then fine tuning your execution so that you’re doing everything that’s in your control.

There will be times where you get bad RNG, and there will be times where you mess up, and in situations like these you’re gonna contemplate resetting. Resetting is probably one of the most nuanced parts of this hobby. It’s something all runners have to do, but some

are more trigger happy than others. Resetting hundreds of times in the early game cause you keep losing 2 seconds in the first level is a bad mental trap that will leave you underprepared for the rest of the game. The way you escape this trap is to treat the run equally from start to finish.

Lots of runners will be disappointed with their early game if it was just a few seconds slower than what they usually do, but be totally fine losing 20 seconds on the last 3 levels.

Your final time doesn’t care about where you lost it. 5 seconds early, 5 seconds late, it will still be the same time regardless. So take more early games where you play a bit subpar, you never know how great your late game can be. I also recommend finishing out your dead runs if

you don’t have that much left to go, it can be healthy to reflect on the run and look at the splits.. Like damn, this run could have had some sauce without this and this mistake. It’s an encouraging feeling, and if you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy finishing runs or find it boring, I

highly suggest you check out this 12 minute video from Dayo on the topic. He covers various subjects including the approach of reactive vs proactive resetting. Where you sometimes should play the rest of the split out instead of immediately hitting the button so you can truly assess whether

or not you want to continue. Give it a watch. In this section I’m just gonna give you some various tips that didn’t necessarily fit into any of the other categories of this video.

Let’s quickly talk about mashing, as it’s quite essential for a lot of games. There are loads of different methods to being optimal at button mashing but the two that I recommend is the sliding method, and double thumb method. There’s also the vibration method but as someone

who's used this technique a lot and turn 30 this year, avoid this technique if possible, it f***s up your tricep and it’s not even the fastest method anyway. There’s not much I can say that isn’t already covered extremely well in this video from Silverboxer. It explains how to do

each mashing technique properly, and covers some interesting history too, go check it out. Next I wanna talk about collaboration and respect. If you’re aiming for the top, remember that others are chasing that goal too. In speedrunning, there’s almost this unwritten rule that when

someone beats your time, you congratulate them, because they didn’t just beat you, they beat the game. The real goal is to go as low as possible, and that only happens because glitch hunters, routers and runners build on each other’s work. So respect your competition,

no matter the community. Like you’re literally the only two active Scooby-Doo! Unmasked runners actively playing, don’t get toxic. Aside from this sounding like a really funny YouTube video, it’s always best to collaborate. When you feel stuck in your practice, talk to other runners, if

you’re struggling with consistency, work together. It all leads to a healthier environment and you might even make some friends along the way. Lastly I wanna talk about running multiple games.

If you’re in the speedrunning scene, you’ve seen the type, some insanely talented runner who keeps bouncing between games and categories. You know they could be amazing if they chose to commit to one thing, but have the attention span of a f***ing iPad baby.

If you wanna get better and you’re doing this, it’s hindering your potential way more than you realize. Spreading your effort across too many games makes it harder to actually improve. Sure, drop a game if it’s not for you, but when something clicks, commit to it. Stick to it

for months or even years. When time save becomes more scarce, keep pushing. Ironically, a lot of my own growth as a speedrunner HAS come through running multiple games, but the difference lies in the time frame. I usually stick to a game for about 3-8 months

before moving on. This gives me time to build real skill, that I can use to reach the top of the leaderboard. Improvement takes sustained effort. It’s like learning an instrument, jumping between ten of them won’t get you very far, but spending months on one will.

There was a tweet I saw back in 2021 from former Celeste WR holder Marlin that read “Speedrunning is a fun pastime activity but overprioritizing it or going as far as equating your success in a hobby with your success in life can be a very damaging mindset.” At the time,

I hated this tweet, I didn’t wanna admit to myself that speedrunning was really all I had in life.

But after all these years, I understand now. Having other things you care about outside of speedrunning is very important for your life balance. When I was in school I couldn’t wait to speedrun Jak 3 when I got home, granted I really hated school, but in hindsight the space it gave

me away from the game made me cherish my time playing it more. When I finished school and had no job, I was playing all day, and suddenly I felt a lot more burnt out. Not only that but my ego got

way more fragile, as I began to care a lot more about losing my world records. It was all I ever did, and it was all I was ever good at, so I tied my sense of self with my success in speedrunning.

To sustain a healthy relationship with any hobby, you have to not overdo it. Since speedrunning is a hobby where you’re sitting a lot, I suggest balancing it out with something more physical.

Every week, I hit the gym twice, and play disc golf 2-3 times, and that works well for me.

I definitely speedrun less than I used to because of this, but honestly the balance has not only made me appreciate my time when I do speedrun, I actually feel better at it than ever.

Of course you can still get good at speedrunning if it’s all you ever do, but the rest of your life will suffer as a consequence. So if you've ever reached that stage, it might be best to take a

break. Either stop running for a while, or perhaps pick up a different game for a fresh start.

AverageTrey: “So something I think that is highly underrated in speedrunning, is the power of taking breaks. I am the master of taking breaks, I’ve utilized it by complete accident early in my speedrun career. And then later on I realized it was actually a good idea,

and this can be as simple as just like.. switching categories in the same game that you’re playing. I personally recommend like if you run just one specific game, find like a secondary game and just like, take a break from your main game, and just only focus on your secondary game for.. like

maybe a few weeks or a few months. And you’ll find that when you return to your original game again, after just like not even really thinking about it, not playing it at all, just.. put it totally on the backburner. Somehow you come back to that game and you have this.. mental refresh

where you just sorta see the game in a brand new light. You’re just able to improve a lot quicker, and just like.. When you were hitting a wall before it was just tough to get past a barrier of

improvement. Like for me personally I used to run Pac-Man World 2, and I was stuck at like trying to get a sub 50 minute time for the longest time, like I was just hitting my head against this wall,

just trying to get this sub 50 minute time. After like 500 attempts I finally get it.

Then I take a break from the game for a few months just focused on Mario Sunshine for a bit. And then when I came back to Pac-Man World 2 after like 6 months of not playing it at all,

within just like a couple practice sessions, my first day of attempts back I got a 47.

So it just goes to show like just.. Not even thinking about a game for a considerable time, it just changes your perspective on it. This has worked for me personally, in multiple different scenarios.

But yeah, just wanted to put that out there.. So.. Taking breaks! Don’t neglect it.

My intention with this video is to create one big grateful love letter to the speedrunning community. I wanna give back to the place that supported me when I was young, and provide a resource for the next generation that I think is missing on this platform. In the grand scheme of

things speedrunning is still in its infancy, and lots of people still have the stigma that it’s a waste of time. I think that largely comes from it being tied to video games. Something that is typically seen as a way to kill time, or de-stress. When you put a competitive element on

top of something not typically considered serious, it's met with skepticism. And I think that stigma is why improvement in speedrunning is rarely treated as something meaningful. It’s a major passion of mine but when I talk about it, I’m met with this cold stare that says “why are you taking

this so seriously, it’s just a game.” But so is tennis, or fingerboarding. You can be as casual as you want about both of these, but pursuing greatness in either is viewed very differently.

Is it cause one has money behind it, and the other doesn’t? Who f***ing cares if it makes you happy.

You know lots of sports that are cultural juggernauts today began as something people dismissed as weird or pointless. Only cause the people never gave up on what they loved, did their sport grow. Why are we gatekeeping passion? The literal fruit of life that all of us

live by. Matter of fact, f*** anyone who tells you to not pursue what you love. They don’t understand passion like you do, so prove them wrong by keeping at it. Wake up every morning, live it, breathe it. It doesn’t have to be speedrunning, it can be anything. There’s stuff in this video you

can apply to any skill. And once you do, you’ll feel how good long-term fulfillment feels.

The collective issue among the youth in society today is “locking in.” People are addicted to their phones, constantly overstimulated, living a life full of short term satisfaction. Stop engaging in these destructive habits, find your path in life and send it. If you’re deep in the mud, nobody is gonna pull you out of it but

yourself. Quit using the word motivation, “oh I just need the motivation” my guy, you need discipline. Is putting your faith in your feelings really going to get you to your destination? Dude there are times where I really don’t wanna go to the gym,

there are times where I don’t wanna tackle this trick that I’m dreading, but I f***ing do it anyway.

Because I’m not thinking about what I don’t wanna do right now, I am thinking about who I’m building towards becoming. And so should you. Don’t do it for me, do it for yourself. Find what you’re passionate about and stick to, finetune your craft and be

relentless with it. Cause it’ll leave you with some of the best moments of your life.

You see the passion here dude? That’s f***ing passion. All the thousands of hours spent finally paying off. No matter how many attempts it takes, no matter how many times you choke, keep going. You will achieve what you set out to if you just keep going. So what if you suck,

everybody f***ing sucks when they first start at anything. Don’t let this stop you man, you have one life.

One life, to do whatever you want, the world is yours. And if you chose speedrunning, you better not stop until you’re proud.

Cause you’ll never get the time you want by wasting it.