Really? Because I took an entire year of sports psychology during undergraduate school.
I got to interview professional and Olympic athletes and coaches for two years when I was taking journalism and sports psychology classes.
One thing I studied was muscle memory in sports like pole vaulting or distance jumping in Olympic games. Every coach and athlete said that you must practice the entire sequence of events to prepare for an event. And that if a single flaw is found in someone’s form at any point during a routine that the entire sequence of motions must be retrained and practiced from the beginning.
Where this has it’s application in fighting games is simple. If you practice combos in training mode then you are simply practicing the muscle memory in situations where you do not have to think about an opponent. The combination of no mental strain (due to not having an opponent) and the ability to solely focus on physical inputs will mean that when you introduce the element of a human opponent, you will have extra mental tasks to comprehend, and less mental capacity to focus on inputs.
Let’s breakdown what percentage of your concentration you would assign to the various tasks required in a combo during training mode and during versus mode.
The first set is what you focus on during just training mode. The second set introduces the elements of human competition and all that goes with it (including having to focus on health gauge, round time, dizzy, etc.). The second set is called ‘isolated’ because I’m showing what happens when you focus solely on combos like in training mode during a real versus game. The third set is what happens for good players who understand that you can’t solely focus on combos and you must adjust your mental focus on all aspects of the game only dedicating partial percentage to landing combos within the match. The numbers are all theoretical and rough but the point is still there.
- TRAINING MODE -
Mental Capacity:
- Focus on spacing for jump: 25%
- Focus on inputs for combo: 75%
- - - -
- ISOLATED VERSUS MODE -
Mental Capacity:
- Focus on spacing for jump: 25%
- Focus on inputs for combo: 75%
- Focus on opponent: 0%
- Focus on health gauge: 0%
- Focus on dizzy meter: 0%
- - - -
- ADJUSTED VERSUS MODE -
Mental Capacity:
- Focus on spacing for jump: 10%
- Focus on inputs for combo: 15%
- Focus on opponent: 50%
- Focus on health gauge: 15%
- Focus on dizzy meter: 10%
If you become accustomed to isolating your brain to solely focusing on inputs of combos in situations where you don’t have to worry about opponents, the second the game introduces a human opponent, you are going to be overly taxed mentally and you aren’t going to be able to land any combos.
I know people are in love with training mode. But training mode should simply be to learn the combos once or twice. If you program yourself mentally in training mode then reprogramming yourself for a situation during a real match requires significant extra hours relearning everything.
If the sports analogy doesn’t compute for I’ll throw a music one our for you as well.
Imagine you play flute, you have to perform a 120 measure song, and you have two weeks to practice it. If you practice each measure separately, you’ll have to then spend extra time combining the inputs, to make one single piece of music.
If you practice one four bar measure, you can mentally prepare for that measure, and then mentally recover after that measure. And then you can take your time moving onto the next measure at a leisurely pace.
However if you are playing each measure back to back without stopping, then you cannot mentally prepare for each measure as you play them, you must have all of the preparation for the entire piece learned to play through once.
If you practice each measure as itself then bury yourself in a hole.
Combos aren’t just about inputs. They are about setting up the combo and knowing what do to after you’ve landed (or not landed) said combo. If you practice T.Hawk’s splash to standing forward and then 2-in-1 DP that’s nice. But what happens when your opponent blocks the splash? Training mode can’t prepare you for that.