Finger Strengthening for Hitbox and Fightstick Fatigue
When using a Hitbox for the first time, you discover that your left and right input confidence is uneven.
* Post updated at the end with more ideas from the Hitbox Discord
I’d certainly heard that finger strength while using the Hitbox is a common challenge, I hadn’t paid it any serious attention until I started running drills.
The moment it all changed was when I was working on Hyde’s 236A, 236B input. The second input is a follow-up to the first and as such requires quick execution to get the 2nd attack to come out.
Everything was fine until I switched sides and had to drum 214A, 214B inputs.
I started dropping the 2nd command like crazy and realized it was caused by my middle-finger, roll to, ring finger.
Taking a look at some tutorials and watching for player 2 sided command inputs, confirmed I had the right form. Something wasn’t right.
After about 10 minutes of drilling I could feel fatigue in my ring finger and stopped to do some research.
The investigation
I brought this up to my wife who is a med student. She mentioned a few interesting things about the size of human hands and the proportional support they get via brain power.
In fact, the Cortical Homunculus diagram shows what portion of your brain’s motor processing functions are dedicated to just the hand and fingers.
While not entirely relevant to my situation — I did think it was pretty interesting to consider when using any form of advanced hand dexterity.
What about guitarists? I realized that I had a similar ring-finger issue those two weeks I tried to learn Banana Pancakes on Ukulele too. It was clear that my ring finger just wasn’t very strong compared to other digits.
The exercises
In the spirit of Alex Myer’s intent to pass along health information, please find 5 finger strengthening exercises below:
A full course of 17 (17!) hand and finger strengthening exercises can be found on the surprisingly well written article over at — https://www.emedihealth.com/hand-finger-exercise.html
The fun version
Aside from the FGC’s player pantheon to look to for advice, I knew there was a way more fun way to improve finger strength as a whole.
Alex Honnold is hands down the world’s greatest free-soloist (rock climbing without ropes). Jimmy Chin’s documentary about Alex; Free Solo, not only won the 2019 Best Documentary Oscar but also gave a glimpse into a hero of mine’s mind. His mental game would be a thing of envy to even a tournament pro like Diago. His physical training is hyper-informed and focused by clear goals.
As an an off-and-on interest of mine for 10 years I can say without a doubt that the finger strength of a rock climber is virtually unrivaled.
A lot of climbers attach a few simple “holds” into their home so that they can always just do a quick hang for forearm and finger strength.
No referral, Amazon link — look like decent ones but you can probably DIY too.
The best method however are to use “climbing fingerboards”
With these screwed into your wall (inside or outside) you can do hangs and pulls any time. Amazon or any local climbing gym will have them (and as always, support cool small businesses when you can).
A simple basic routine -
- Hang for 7 seconds, rest for 3 seconds. Repeat a total of 6 times.
- Rest for 3 mins, repeat 2 or 3 times.
- Hang with a slight bend in the arm, at least ‘engaging’ the arms a little: hanging purely on the elbow and shoulder joints leads to injury.
- [beastmode] Wear a heavy backpack or waist/ankle weights.
Here’s a random ‘top 10 2020’ article that I’m sure is fine to find a board — https://climbingblogger.com/best-climbing-fingerboards/
Hate rock climbing?
You can get pretty far with the exercises at the top, but an alternative solution is to grab a simple finger strengthener on Amazon.
These are usually made for guitar and piano players
1) 10 reps per finger
2 ) 30 second break
3) repeat; 3 sets.
4) Do it 2–3 times a day
If the exercises get too easy and you still feel you are running into fatigue, you can increase the ‘weight/resistance’ on some of these to like 8lbs a finger!
After a few months of doing that and it’s time to to really level up and face off against the FGC’s true execution god — Topkaku!
Edit : Some additional thoughts from the HitBox controller discord after reading this article
[discord]: this comes up every so often, and i’ll say the same thing i usually do
[discord]: grip trainers and finger strength training as a whole are horribly overrated for this sort of thing
[discord]: you want dexterity for speed and a certain level of stamina for extended play. strength is basically irrelevant past a very low threshold
[discord]: the best way to improve that in a specific task is practice, since so much of muscle memory is associated with specific tasks
[discord]: beyond that, consider how you’re executing these inputs. if you’re using too much force or an excess of motion, that can lead to sloppy inputs and unnecessary fatigue
[discord]: finger/hand stretches are important though
This is great insight and it might seem a bit counter-point to the rest of this article, however they do complement each other. You aren’t trying to destroy the hitbox with your jacked Alex Honnold’ finger strength, but you do need some.
Grinding long sessions helps build endurance and obviously just lab the hell out of the problem as your main workout.
Edit 2: A thought from the Garou discord
I was chatting about this article with a few people in the Garou: Mark of the Wolves discord and this came up
[discord]: can only play for about an hour on keyboard before my execution starts to falter.
[discord]: Yeah I can imagine that. On keyboard when you need to piano from left to right, it feels way easier than doing it from right to left
The 214 input on a Hitbox as described by the piano player. The same type of exercises need to be worked on to reach high-execution on a Hitbox (or just years using it).
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