Cubing "Stamina"?

[waffle=ijm]

I completely agree with blah. some of my reasons below.

It's completely pointless and in fact counterproductive to do so many solves with bad habits. If your purpose is not to let new concepts/ideas/methods/algorithms sink in, doing >100 solves is pointless in my opinion. It only gets you even more used to the bad habits you already have.

Yes. People should really take the time to evaluate their solving habits. See what goes wrong where and actually try to fix it. Practice makes perfect they say, but what point it to practice the same thing without changing around stuff.

The purpose of practice is to get into good habits - to get them to become second nature. If you don't have such a goal in mind, practice is not going to help you a lot. For instance, if you're going to do U3 or U4 or even U5 moves to recognize PLL everytime, doing 500 solves is only going to make you more dependent on that bad habit as you get more and more used to doing it.

Good habits are key. Continue to practice newer and better stuff and you'll get better. Continue to practice useless unneeded crap, and you'll be like your solves...plain crap...

You always need a goal in mind for each practice session. Tell yourself something like "this practice session, I'm going to make sure I don't pause for more than 1 second between each F2L pair" or "this practice session, I'm going to make sure there is absolutely no pause between my cross and the first F2L pair." Keep reminding yourself of that throughout the session. Like I said, the purpose of practice sessions is to get yourself to improve, consciously. In my opinion, sitting there cubing mindlessly and just hoping that you'd improve is a waste of time. Sure you'll improve that way too, but you should also know that having a clear goal in mind and always being conscious about it is definitely going to make you improve more than just cubing mindlessly.

You know how some people just post stuff without thinking and then later regretting that they posted it and they try to delete the post but it's been quoted like 12348123794612934 times? same goes with solving habits. it's better to start being aware of the mistakes in solving then trying to make up for it later on when it's too late.

The final goal of practice is to get you to have no faults in your cubing form and technique so that you can reach your maximum potential without having to think about it; so that good cubing habits becomes second nature; so that you don't regret doing an unnecessary cube rotation that made you slower by a split second; so that you don't regret doing an unnecessary AUF that made you slower by a split second; so that everything about your cubing practices are as humanly optimal as possible for the scramble you were presented and you have no "regrets" about the way you went about solving it. In other words, the purpose of practice is to get you to do a solve and NOT go "it could've been faster if I..." when you're done.

Yup. If you regret something about your solves it merely because you didn't put the effort in the time you had before that. Stop thinking about all the faults in solving and then feeling sorry about yourself later.

 

[joey]

Really good post Blah. I've often thought this.. but reading someone else's thoughts makes me think I should *actually* put this into practice.

 

[Kwayetus]

Dont know but after 9 hours of cubing last night (with like a few 5-10 minute breaks...) the cube started to look spherical... I knew I had to stop

 

[Sin-H]

Dont know but after 9 hours of cubing last night (with like a few 5-10 minute breaks...) the cube started to look spherical... I knew I had to stop

my cube always looks like a parallelepiped when I did too much xD sometimes I stop then, sometimes I don't.

I've never had any problems; just once for about 1-2 weeks, my strains always hurt when I cubed :S

and during my avg of 1000, after 400 solves, I just HAD to take a break. I had spasms xD

about blah's post:
This is totally true, but why do a lot of really good guys still practice for hours then?

There always is a lot to improve, but:
10-secs-people have good habits, hardly any delays and cubing IS their second nature. Furthermore, we don't have to practice for hours and hours just to keep our level, as far as I'm concerned. Sometimes breaks even improve my times. Sometimes I don't practice at all for months and my times stay the same. I guess it's just that we are completely hooked and it's fun and it's a passion and it's more than just a hobby and we have no life xD [ignore the last reason ^^]