Smash Ultimate Tips: The Dangers of Overtraining

Welcome to Smash Ultimate Tips! This entry will give you tips on avoiding overtraining. The act of overtraining involves spending too much time on the game. However, in doing so, you’re reinforcing what you already know and committing it to muscle memory. But in the long run, this will not help you learn at a faster rate.

While I understand that it’s fun to play the game you love for hours on end, if you’re training to ascend to higher levels, you might want to alter your training plan. In doing so, finding new direction will help you improve to the competitive levels you’re seeking to attain.

In the anime, Dragon Ball Z, Trunks and Vegeta trained past their Super Saiyan forms to fight Cell. However, in spite of all their hard work, neither could defeat him.

Keep in mind that these tips will help you with any game you play to include traditional fighting games as well. In theory, this could probably help you at any discipline in life you’re willing to learn.

What is Overtraining?

Overtraining is when you play for 8 hours a day ad nauseam. Yes, for practice and getting good, playing for hours at a time is important. However, especially at lower or mid-level, emulating the scheduling habits of top players alone will not help you improve as quickly. Moreover, it will become more difficult to balance real-life commitments such as work, school, and family.

Georgia Smash player, Mugen f.k.a. HyperKirby, claims to not own any copies of Smash despite his high placings.

Reinforcement is important, however, and I will go over that in a future entry. However, playing for hours and hours a day alone will only help you improve so much. Muscle memory and consistency are an important part of training. But you’ll need more than that to succeed.

Training is a learning process, not just a grinding process.

Remember the Dragon Ball Z example? Goku figured out that just going all-out in power would not help their chances against Cell. Rather, he changed his direction. In doing so, he reached even greater heights than Vegeta and Trunks before entering the Cell Games.

I want to make sure that your game has a similar direction as well. Rather than going all-out for hours at a time, your approach and direction will be more important than just the time you spent grinding.

What to do Instead of Overtraining.

Watch YouTube videos of players using your main. You could watch a top player, such as Fatality, using Captain Falcon in tournament sets if you use Falcon and want to improve. You could also watch Izaw’s channel for “Art of x” and pick your main and go from there.

Sometimes it feels like players are naturally better without even training for hours.

Channels like Poppt also feature “Mind of” top player videos. These will give you fundamentals to work with such as proper ledgetrapping.

I recommend asking questions to better players. If you find someone good on Twitter or Discord, or even at local tournaments, you can play them and then ask what they called you out on. They can point you in the direction to help defeat your own bad habits.

Top players such as VoiD didn’t play Brawl competitively. Yet he was beating top players in Smash 4 who had years more experience.

Finally, I strongly recommend finding a coach on Metafy that can help you improve. These players are paid to help build you better habits and improve. Then it’s on you to ingrain these habits into your play. But once you have proper direction, you will find yourself improving much faster.

Remember that word: Direction. Having direction will point you where to go and how to approach it.

Additionally, Metafy is the surefire way for top players to help you improve. If you can’t seek advice from high-level players in your region, setting up a coaching session will give you and a coaching player dedicated time together.

Top players swear by Metafy as coaches. Up and coming players found tremendous improvement and growth even after just a single session.

Hopefully, this entry will save you time on excessive training while allowing you to balance your life. Instead, you can use extra training time to find resources such as frame data, YouTube matches, and character tutorials. And if you really want to improve, definitely hop onto Metafy. Short sessions with strong direction and a great trainer will boost you much faster than hours of grinding.

If you enjoyed this content, please consider following my blog. Also, if you’re seeking a coaching session, consider booking me for coaching on Metafy!