April 2019 Post

Someone emailed me with questions for their project about 4x4 and 3BLD, and I thought it was interesting enough to share this.

1. When you first started out these events, how did you plan to improve?

3bld: For speed-related skills you want to move from intuitive decision making to muscle memory, and you can do this by practicing things over and over without really doing anything any different; the important thing is repetition. The intuitive part of blind solving is the setup moves, and since there are so many, it takes tons of practice to quickly go from a letter straight to the associated setup moves, rather than thinking about how the piece will actually move.

4x4: Again, tons of repetition. I'd practice one thing until my brain got a little more comfortable with it, and as soon as I started to get comfortable, I'd learn something new to keep my brain in a state of building some sort of skill. First it's all about knowledge, then once you have the knowledge, your practice it to turn it into muscle memory. Once it's almost there, I go back to acquiring knowledge and so on.

2. How long did it take you to get to where you are now with these events?

Not sure since I don't practice either of these that much anymore, and 4x4 depends a lot on your 3x3 time. But if you spend a couple of months on it, you should be able to get to 4X of your 3x3 times. In my first ~3 months of 4x4 I averaged around 12 on 3x3 and around 1 min on 4x4, so clearly I wasn't at the 4X mark yet (48 sec)

For blind, it took me about 2 months to average around 5 or 6 minutes with a decent amount of accuracy. I'd be far less accurate if I tried to go for 3 to 4 minutes, but I was capable of doing it.

3. Were there any specific practice habits or strategies that helped you out?

Spend about 90% of the time practicing what you've learned over and over, and around 10% of the time learning new things. The ideal goal is to make all the solving as brainless as possible so that you can go fast (active thinking is slow, but muscle memory is fast). But in the early stages you should not be able to reach complete brainlessness, otherwise you're practicing too much and learning too little. Always have something you're working on, but still focus more on practice than on learning. This is true for all speed-related things, as your brain works slowly when you're unfamiliar with what to do.

4. Are there any other recommendations you have overall for improvement?

Write down the things you want to improve on in the future, but don't work on everything right away. Whenever entering a new domain of knowledge, there will always be enough to overwhelm you if you really look for it all. The only way to make it manageable without feeling like you're missing out on crucial information is to keep notes on what you plan to explore later on. This goes back to practicing more than learning: once you know the next thing you should do to improve, just work on that until you're at least decent at it. After that, you can start adding more.

A simple example on 4x4 is understanding all the cases you can get for 3-2-3 edge pairing before worrying about look ahead and how to look for pieces better.

For 3bld, write down the scramble and the letters you've memorized before attempting the solve, then do it while looking. That way you can isolate the memorization and execution phases so you don't have to worry too much about the next step, which is faster memorization and faster recall during execution.