Suggested level: 20+ wpm
In weight lifting and sports, it’s well understood that explosive movements push your body to its limits, creating superior improvements in strength and speed versus movements that are easy or typical.
For our tiny finger muscles we can also practice typing speed through explosive movements I call bursting.
In this type of exercise, approach each group of letters in your typing practice program with the intent to flow through them more quickly than usual. Then,
1) Take a brief moment to ensure you know where all the key movements will be
2) Visualize yourself completing the motion. This step needn’t take more than a flash but it is very important to improve the rate of learning and finger-brain connection
3) Press the letters in rapid succession, aiming for an unbroken stream of 2–6 letters at a time based on your skill
For larger words, you’ll have to complete them either with a second burst or just regular character entry.
Even if this technique appears to lower your speed while you are doing it, you are increasing your between-letter speed overall.
As with the amalgamate lessons, common patterns will soon become easy for character entry and easier to chord too. Soon you will find these same patterns are just as simple to press in succession as all at once. Chords you used to struggle with become so strangely easy that you question your memory of them being difficult.
(Note: If you fall in love with this activity and do it daily, make sure to combine it with sessions of the opposite, trying to chain your typing of words together without pausing or hesitating between words even if the character entry is slow. You don’t want to overtrain yourself to stop at every word.)
Suggested level: 25+ wpm
Sometimes you have a chord for the beginning of a word but not the full word. I just did just now, where I know the chord for “begin” but I wanted to write “beginning”.
In this case, you’ll find yourself often wanting to chord and then immediately backspace to keep going. A little confidence will allow you to execute this move accurately from the beginning, freeing up energy to focus on building muscle memory for the characters that follow. Some common ones are: ly, ing, ed, ion, etc.
Ultimately the goal is to get comfortable with the minimum time you have to wait between releasing your chord and hitting your backspace and character entry combo. This will depend on your Press and Release tolerance settings, so as you progress and dial these in, you will be able to chain these moves faster.
Exercise — First, practice and familiarize yourself with the following chords. These are all part of the starting library.