This is a thread to collect concrete improvement exercises and cubing best practices. Once their are enough items this post will be moved to the guides section.
Best practices
These are things you better pick up early because they will be much more difficult later.
These are concrete things you can try to improve a certain aspect of your solve.
- Doing part of your solve blind: the idea behind this is to remove the need to look at what you are currently doing and thus being better able to look ahead. You might solve the cross blind to improve your cross to f2l transition or solve 1 or 2 fl2 pairs blind to avoid a pause between pairs.
- Using a metronome to improve look ahead: You start by setting the metronome on a slow speed like 60 bpm (a turn per second) and try to turn every time the metronome ticks. If you don't miss any ticks you can increase the speed, else decrease it. This forces you to look during your turns and improve your look ahead. The goal is to eventually get to your normal turning speed at which point your solve won't have any pauses but you can still use it to learn to turn faster. (I try to increase my "look-ahead speed" by 0.1 tps a day)
- Do casual solves, try to discover new tricks: Try to do things in different ways than you normally would, try combining steps or parts of steps. Some of the things you find will be useful in your real solves. When you look your trick up later you will probably find much better ways of doing the same thing. But that's okay discovering it yourself first will give you a much deeper understanding of the trick and make it much faster to learn. You could even try to come up with your method for the cube to get a deeper understanding in the cube as a whole. I ended up finding my own method of partial edge control and 2-side-pll recognition. If I had experimented more I may have found my own way of doing f2l or keyhole. I could also have learned my self how to make an x-cross. You could also find new ways of doing some f2l pairs, the possibilities are endless...
- Timing 1 "official" ao5/12 a day: to graph improvement, this mainly just motivates you and helps you see how effective your practice was. Note: if your learn something new your times might temporarily spike.
Your tricks
As I said in the start this a collection thread so post your own tips,tricks exercises and best practices in the comments and I will add them to the post. (This is actually the main reason I made this post, I want new tricks/shortcuts)
Also, I should probably make an other thread for this, but is their some set of interesting tricks somewhere (like f2l,x-cross,partial edge control,... "small" thing intuitive things to skip steps or avoid bad cases)?
I think I will also make a guide for my partial edge control and 2-side-pll recognition. I may also make a guide on how to come up with your own method since that is something I think more people should do but that would be really long and I don't know how many people would read it.
This is my first real post (except for my introduction) so please leave feedback. Spelling mistakes (I'm non native so I'm sure there are lots), grammar errors, back explanations,...
Best practices
These are things you better pick up early because they will be much more difficult later.
- A new method, just learning CFOP? Well it might be time to find your preferred method instead of taking the easy route of learning new techniques bit by bit replace your beginners method 1 by 1. (beginners guide to choosing a speedsolving method)
- Being color neutral, if you learn this later you will have to relearn a lot of your recognition. So it's better to do this early when you don't have to worry about relearning f2l, pll or oll recognition yet. If your already too deep into 1 color you could learn 2-side-color-neutrality, since opposite sides tend to be fairly similar.
- Insert in the back during f2l: This will give you open front slots to look-ahead to. This is fairly advanced but it shouldn't be to difficult if you get used to it early. But take at least a week to get used to f2l before you try this.
- Fluently executing notation: To choose algorithms it will be really helpful to be able to execute an algorithm (without mistakes) when you read it. To learn this you should start scrambling your cube with computer generated algorithms. (from timers or sites like this)
- Align PLL algorithms to your hand: Instead of aligning an PLL-case to the correct center than doing a cube rotation to align it with your hand and execute the PLL to solve the cube. Align the PLL-case to your hand (with U-turns), execute the PLL and do final U-turns to solve the cube, this is much faster since it doesn't require regrips, with practice this can be executed in one fluent motion.
These are concrete things you can try to improve a certain aspect of your solve.
- Doing part of your solve blind: the idea behind this is to remove the need to look at what you are currently doing and thus being better able to look ahead. You might solve the cross blind to improve your cross to f2l transition or solve 1 or 2 fl2 pairs blind to avoid a pause between pairs.
- Using a metronome to improve look ahead: You start by setting the metronome on a slow speed like 60 bpm (a turn per second) and try to turn every time the metronome ticks. If you don't miss any ticks you can increase the speed, else decrease it. This forces you to look during your turns and improve your look ahead. The goal is to eventually get to your normal turning speed at which point your solve won't have any pauses but you can still use it to learn to turn faster. (I try to increase my "look-ahead speed" by 0.1 tps a day)
- Do casual solves, try to discover new tricks: Try to do things in different ways than you normally would, try combining steps or parts of steps. Some of the things you find will be useful in your real solves. When you look your trick up later you will probably find much better ways of doing the same thing. But that's okay discovering it yourself first will give you a much deeper understanding of the trick and make it much faster to learn. You could even try to come up with your method for the cube to get a deeper understanding in the cube as a whole. I ended up finding my own method of partial edge control and 2-side-pll recognition. If I had experimented more I may have found my own way of doing f2l or keyhole. I could also have learned my self how to make an x-cross. You could also find new ways of doing some f2l pairs, the possibilities are endless...
- Timing 1 "official" ao5/12 a day: to graph improvement, this mainly just motivates you and helps you see how effective your practice was. Note: if your learn something new your times might temporarily spike.
Your tricks
As I said in the start this a collection thread so post your own tips,tricks exercises and best practices in the comments and I will add them to the post. (This is actually the main reason I made this post, I want new tricks/shortcuts)
Also, I should probably make an other thread for this, but is their some set of interesting tricks somewhere (like f2l,x-cross,partial edge control,... "small" thing intuitive things to skip steps or avoid bad cases)?
I think I will also make a guide for my partial edge control and 2-side-pll recognition. I may also make a guide on how to come up with your own method since that is something I think more people should do but that would be really long and I don't know how many people would read it.
This is my first real post (except for my introduction) so please leave feedback. Spelling mistakes (I'm non native so I'm sure there are lots), grammar errors, back explanations,...
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