How Do You Practice?

There's one thing I have just been trying for the first time today, so I'll tell you how it worked in a week or two. I just got the idea by reading this post. When I was younger I used to take piano lessons. I find piano, or music in general, very similar to cube in a way. You need to learn algs composed of moves ( partitions composed of notes ), you repeat them until you know them, you have the notion of rhythme and so on. Anyway, one thing that changes, is that a piece of music will always contain the same notes, whether the cube got different notes each time you play it ( different scramble ).

So the idea was to actually work on one piece at a time. Therefore I just do the same scramble 5 times, then time it, move to another one that I solve 5 times, time it, and so on. At least today, I could drastically decrease my times this way ( I'm more or less 40:xx-ish, so there's big room for improvement ). I found that the solve I timed was done with ease and calm to get faster times in the end. Not a revelation since I did it 5 times before. But the good point in doing this, is to show yourself you can go further, and more importantly, you can work on one thing at a time. Today, most of the time, out of 5 solves, the 3 last ones were almost always identical. In the first one I take my time to get a good cross, then find the best F2L pair, solve the F2L with as few cube rotations as possible and so on. On the one or two next solves I usually found out one or two details I might have missed on the previous solves which allows me to optimise it a little, and sometimes find better way to solve my F2L pairs.

I'll keep doing a few of these everyday for the next two weeks, see how it helps and will come back to give feedback. Did anyone already try something similar ? Any comment or suggestion is appreciated.
 
Back here after a few days. I haven't been doing it intensively, but I did it for a few days ( what I suggest two posts above ). And it definitely triggered something. My F2L got much more consistent. It is definitely good to learn how to deal with harder cases, and learn how to perform them faster. Since you solve many times the same case you can really work again and again the same case, and then move onto the next one. What I also did was, whenever I had a really bad time, I redid the scramble a few times, but without timing, just to understand where I screwed up and what could have been done better.
 
Actually I'm still improving, it's like a half second per month. However, my LL sucks so I need to start focusing on that.

Did you ever learn new algorithms? I'm thinking about looking at my slowest algs and possibly changing them up, trying new ones. If not, which set of algorithms do you use?
 
That's your strength not your weakness... your TPS is the only reason you're sub 15.

I know. But at the same time, time my a few of my LL's. I'd be willing to bet most aren't sub 4 (in a normal average, anyway. Generally when I get sub 10 averages my LL happens to be really good). I don't spam TPS in algs like I should.
 
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