As I said in the last blog, practice is by far the most important part of improving in megaminx. But how do you know if you’re actually benefiting from doing so many solves, or if it’s just a waste of time?
Here’s a few tips on how you can improve the way you practice megaminx, and get faster:
- Do slow solves - do as many slow solves as you can, and do them on a daily basis. You’d get to know where you’re going wrong and improve on those parts of your solve in a much more efficient way than you’d be able to when doing regular timed solves.
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Make sure you’re actually learning things when solving - review everything you’ve learnt over the past few solves at the end of the day (or if you’re doing a big session, every hour or so), be it a new way to solve a pair, or an OLL + PLL combo you just found the perfect fingertrick for.
- Be consistent - not in terms of practicing, or times, but in terms of ways you use to solve various cases. What this basically means is, if you get the exact same case twice (assume that we are talking about the last layer for now, and your fingers are at the same positions in both cases), you should do the exact same set of moves in both cases. I’m not telling you to remember every single case there is for LSLL, but try to keep ambiguity to a minimum.
- Get a good megaminx - this is not directly related to practicing, but indirectly helps a lot. If you have a megaminx that’s fun to turn, you’ll naturally want to do more solves, and that helps maintain the flow for big sessions. Personally, the periods when I’ve had the most improvement have always been immediately after I get a new megaminx (I improved my average by 7 seconds in 5 months after switching from Galaxy v2 LM to Gan Megaminx). My recommendation is the YJ Yuhu v2 Magnetic Megaminx.
- Practice at your own pace - don’t feel compelled to fit into a schedule, practice whenever you want and as much or as little as you want to. Doing 25 solves when you truly want to practice is better than doing 100 solves without putting your heart into it.
Just keep these simple tips in mind whenever you practice, and hopefully you’ll improve at a faster rate, and also enjoy the process more!
