EPTThe Secretes of Athletes applied on SC2
How to improve, based on non-electronic competitive experience
![[image loading]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nA5gMsC5PcU/TaSMD1Bh0lI/AAAAAAAAFaU/lPN6-l_JWI0/s1600/cesar-cielo.jpg)
How to improve, based on non-electronic competitive experience
Above, you have the 50m Freestyle Olympic champion, and first olympic gold-medalist of Brazil, César Cielo Filho. He is the inspiration for about every competitive swimmer here, and more so for me as I used to swim freestyle 100% of the time.
Hello, I am Zephirdd, and I am a former competitive swimmer. I have about ~30 medals of State-level competitions including 8 gold medals, plus a few from outside of the State, and a few dozen of lesser level tourneys. As a former athlete, I am experienced with training schedules, and I am willing to teach you how to apply these on Starcraft 2. This isn't for the average joe - I'm talking about high level caliber training here.
I'll begin this by talking a bit about the training itself. First and foremost, you have to want to do it. I know this is probably the most cliché thing to say, but it isn't as simple as it sounds.
You have to want, and want it hard. You have to want to win, you have to want to be the best. You have to want to become better, you have to want to, by your very self, prove that you are a thousand times better than your opponent. Unless you are Idra, Naniwa, Boxer, or anyone at their level of play, you have no right to complain about balance, first and foremost. Unless there is a 5-95% winratio on a matchup, you cannot complain about balance, and even so you must want to be on that 5%, and not the 95% who lose to the same thing.
Training isn't just about wanting, but about putting total and complete dedication to it. I'm not talking about playing straight 10 hours a day, that's a good amount of dedication but it isn't enough. I'm talking about listening, smelling, eating training. At points of the day that you don't train, you have to think about how to improve. Eat and drink with the mind to have the disposition to train; there is no point on eating like a horse and taking a nap right after, and there is no point in drinking 10 liters of alcohol when you will feel bad when training. This paragraph - with a few modifications - was my coach's opening speech for the year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRFiTwQwcNk
Rocky's training montage was cool, but life isn't a montage.
Rocky's training montage was cool, but life isn't a montage.
Every year, we had what was called the training cycles, made of bigger and smaller cycles within it. The cycle has a focal point one important competition, possibly allowing a few modifications for less-important tournaments on the middle of it.
Our Macro cycle(yep, that's how it was called) would focus on the tournament that occured on the first week of June and December, therefore each year we had two Macro cycles, each starting right after a tournament was done. The cycle is a method of training used by athletes of all sports to create a schedule that allows your strength, resistance, technique and mind to synchronize at a point in time, grabbing your peak effectiveness on that point in time.
The human body is something interesting. If done right, you can maintain this "peak" time for as much as five days, however if done wrong your effectiveness will be below average - although that would still be better than what people have nowadays for their training schedule.
First, I think defining the terms above would be better here.
Strength - defined by the raw power of your body for the specific exercise. For us swimmers, the strength was very important to allow harder and harder trainings, as well as allowing you to spin your arms and stroke your legs much faster. It also allowed us to do some amazing stuff to train our other aspects. For SC2, you can define it as your hand speed.
Resistance - defined by how much you could handle your exercise. I was what could be called a velocist, or speedist, as my favorite styles were 50m Freestyle and 100m Freestyle. These are very short-term categories, usually lasting no longer than 27s(50m) or 57s(100m). A velocist has an intense technique and strength, lacking on resistance. Likewise, a swimmer that lacks some strength can make up on resistance - the body has an inverse proportionality for resistance and strength, and that's a biological fact defined by your muscles. This relates to SC2 as the ability of playing long, drawn games with constant speed(not necessarily high speed), something the known "macro" players like a lot.
Technique - defined by your ability to execute the exercise. For instance, the swimming technique would include the angles out of which you jump, the angles your arm dive into the water, the amount your body would turn when breathing, when to breathe, and many other stuff. You should have guessed by now, but this is the Mechanical ability itself, the specific mechanical ability of hitting the correct keys in the correct order, of controlling a fight or of scouting, all the timings for scouting and the exact set of reactions for what you see. Strength and Resistance connect directly to this as you need both to execute your technique correctly, but without technique there is no point in having either strength or resistance.
Mind - the less intuitive and most important aspect. I believe you saw the Rocky Balboa's montage above, and you thought "yea pretty cool". The mind aspect is something that you can work on, but it is incredibly difficult. Imagine that on the montage, Rocky spent a few weeks doing all that stuff daily, probably almost dieing out of energy during the first few, and progressively evolving. The mind aspect is the one that nearly nobody but the pros have: the one that makes you play another game after a loss, the one that makes you look for errors in your play, and not blame on balance. It's even more important for SC2, as it is the aspect that allows you to create strategies and to react to new styles properly. Strong minds won't be controlled by others, and will control their opponents. My coach always said that, if you have an addiction, and it is not the thing you want(ie. swimming there, SC2 here), then your mind is already weak and you need to work on that before anything else.
These four aspects, when combined, create the professional player, and only the one who can take the most advantage from your aspect can become the best. No kidding.
We trained these aspects with our training cycles, using the Micro cycles. It was a quite simple way to train:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TVsI7.png)
Because images are cool
First microcycle
This is basically what we used for our training cycles. We start the year cool, doing a Resistance training. In swimming terms, that'd be swimming about 5000 to 6000 meters from Monday to Saturday, as well as doing some weak exercises on the gym just to make sure your muscles don't all disappear out of nowhere. During these exercises, we would include breathing exercises - for example, swimming the whole 50 meters of the pool with one arm and breathing only every 10th stroke - as well as purely long drawn out swimming sections - swim 2hours nonstop, minimum 5000 meters.
The SC2 equivalent should be pretty straight forward. Long, drawn out gaming sections. Force yourself to play if necessary, but during this part of the cycle you should play as much as you can - this is done in order to prepare you to a long, drawn out section of games if necessary, for example the MLG qualifiers, or one of these 1024 player TL Opens.
Notice how it takes a loooooooong time doing this. The reason is that the body(and mind) will only absorb it if it becomes a natural part of you, as if the body doesn't feel ok if it doesn't swim(or, in this case, play). This period will be boring and tiresome. Take the chance to train or mind to want it!
The word that defines this cycle? Repetition.
Second microcyle
A Technique cycle. We would train different styles - for instance, I had to swim Butterfly, Backstroke and Breaststroke styles even though I only swim Freestyle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzhIjG39Haw
Yup, Day9 nailed it. Everyone - even if you think you have the best mechanics of the world - should dedicate this week or so to training your mechanical skills. Following the Daily #360 truthfully should be an excellent exercise and should be your daily schedule. You don't have to worry anymore about your 10 hour play sections, but playing a lot still helps. The point, however, is to refine your mechanical ability at this stage.
Multitasking maps and micro arenas should also be a fun way to test your progress, but you usually want to go single player like on the daily, and do every exercise - for ALL races! - possible.
Yes, I mean ALL races, even if you don't play Protoss you should do warp-ins once in a while. The reason is that this way, you also train your mind to know your opponent, to know points where it is hard for him, and most importantly to train your hand speed and accuracy. Good luck doing this, it's hard!
Third microcyle - March
Notice how blurred it is. In essence, what you do in this cycle is to create a few Strength exercises - constant microing of units, games with multitasking styles, even asking your training partners to play 1v2 against you or something like that. Then you also try out mechanical abilities, as well as having long training sections.
Although this sound like a lot, this isn't the top of the cycle. The idea of the March training section is to prepare yourself to the fourth cycle.
Do you remember qxc's post? [url="http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=272692"]Starcraft Training DBZ Style[/url]?
This is the point you ask for a mapmaker to create higher-speed maps. Nothing big, only 1.2x the "Faster" speed, something that is still doable but is a bit faster than you are used to.
Fouth microcycle - The Death cycle
Ohh How I loved those weeks.
For swimming, there is a training type called "VO2", or "Maximum Speed without Oxygen". It was the hardest type of training - the Strength training.
Here is how it worked: you get a clock and mark a time, say, one minute. You have exactly one minute to swim 50 meters and to rest, and then you do it again. And again. You must do it at FULL speed, which means you need to tire yourself to the max. Do it 40 times.
Then, on the next section(~2 days later), do it again, but with 50 seconds instead of a full minute.
Then, on the next section, do it with a 2'10" clock for 100 meters. On the next, 2'00". And then 1'50". And so on.
Notice how this amount of time allows you to do it without too much constraint. However, The idea is that you have to put 100% of energy right from the first 50 meters 'till the end. The faster you go, the more you rest; the slower you go, the less you rest. Arguably, it requires both Resistance and Strength to do it, but if you do it right you will improve your Strength by miles.
These "sections" have a "resting" section between them, where instead of swimming at full energy you just go at 70% of it. I swear I died a few times and came back to life during these weeks lol.
For SC2, you'll need these hyperbolic time maps. Go and do a micro-intensive game at 2x speed and win against an AI-controled microing player(mapmakers, the players need you!). Do it a few dozen times, making sure to win, and up the speed all the time. The result is that during the actual thing, your hands will be fast enough and your mind will react properly to do it correctly.
Remember the mindset thing? You need to continue these trainings hard, if you feel "this is impossible" then break your own limits and do it. That's how we did this, and that's how it is done for every sport where the athlete breaks a record. Saying things like "Human mind can't support a 4x speed game" is creating a limit that must be broken. Doing it time at time - first 1.5x, then 1.8x, then 2x, then 2.3x and so on - you'll eventually break that barrier.
Notice how you are not caring about strategy at this point. The main idea is to make your body and mind work overtime.
Training sections can last as much as 3 hours and the rest of the day you rest. It is crucial for this cycle that your sleep schedule is perfect, and for that you need to eat healthy food and avoid parties.
The last cycle: Mind
Notice how the previous cycles avoided any strategy part of the game; of course, this is a 6month cycle.
Still, that doesn't mean you can't work on the strategy aspect of the game before, however now is the Theorycraft time. This last week or so before the target tournament(the red lines) will be focused on creating playstyles and strategies. Metagame.
While "creating a build" also requires tons of refinement, any builds you had in mind during the previous cycles are to be refined now. Now it's time to spend a fuckload of hours watching replays and taking timings, when exactly to take a drone out of gas, where to put the exact pylon. For SC2, you could say that you can cut down on the Strength training in favor of having a longer Mind cycle.
However, there is another important aspect that seems to be missing from many players, and it's the mindset. Focusing on your game, focusing on your opponent. If you watched Day9 Daily #100, you'll remember that he said - and regretted - that he threw a few matches away because he was so tired. This part of the training should be dedicated to fix this kind of mind problem - Idra raging from imbalance, Naniwa throwing probes at a useless match. All of this should NEVER happen, and that's because you'll learn to focus.
You also won't let silly problems happen. Focusing your mind to not do bullshit, to not tilt during an unexpected attack. Focusing your strategies and achieving your goals one at a time.
You have to dedicate these last days going to a psychologist if necessary. Chatting about it with tons of friends, and just laying down and staring at the ceiling thinking about your strategies for each specific playstyle.
The Target
Yup! There is stuff for the tournament.
During the tournament, the idea is to keep your mind training and focus, and to warm up just enough, but the most important thing is to feel relaxed. Do not fret over anything, just focus and relax.
If you've dedicated yourself properly, you should win. You will only lose to those who dedicated themselves more than you. Now go and show how slow the game is when you've practiced at 10x speed, go and show these sketches of players how your training was that much superior. Go and prove to yourself, that it was worth it.
Win it.
Final Thoughts
The cycle shown here is a 6month cycle and should be tweaked for a smaller cycle as SC2 tournaments are so much more common. You must chose a tournament to focus, and you must create mind-training sections a few days before every match(For a GSL player, he should be constantly doing that alongside the other training methods). It works only if you dedicate yourself.
Yes, it's a no-brainer that if you play a lot you get better, but this is a general direction for pros to train correctly.
For further explanations, it is a great idea to find a real coach for any sport, and ask him how do their training cyclces work. A P.E. educator should know about that as well. Your hands follow the same rules as the rest of your body, and your brain is a muscle as well.
No go win.
