Name: Every mistake I made in 1000 hours of aim training and how you can avoid them.
Uploaded: 2025-06-20T16:44:32.000Z
Duration: 16 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is what my aim used to look like back in the day, and this is how it looks today.

Over the years, I never really thought of myself as someone with good aim.

I was mediocre at best, but nowadays I feel much more comfortable with my overall mouse control, and I genuinely feel like I owe that confidence to aim trainers.

There's one question that comes up again and again, do aim trainers actually work?

There's so many absurdly good aimers that swear by them, and even if you're new to mouse and keyboard, I genuinely believe you can jumpstart your aim, and even surpass many players who have been playing for years, in a relatively short time, just by utilizing aim trainers.

But there is an important caveat, not everyone who spend time with aim trainers thinks they're useful.

Some people feel like they've wasted their time, and wish they could take it all back, because they didn't really get any better in game.

And others attribute all of their current aim skill to aim trainers.

I recently crossed the 1000 hour mark, but the path I took was definitely not optimal, and not how I would go about it today.

I want to share the major mistakes I made, how I broke through certain plateaus, and the approach I'd take if I was starting over.

Hopefully this helps you avoid the same pitfalls, and make your progress more efficient.

But in order to train aim, we kinda need to know what aim is, and what we're actually training.

And it's not really as simple as just hitting the enemy.

There's a lot of thought you can put behind how you go about it.

Have you ever actually thought about how you aim?

It's a weird question, but a really valid one.

Your approach, or how you go about it, really depends on what the situation is, and what your goals are for said situation.

For example, notice how similar the enemies appear to be in these two situations.

Both are following a predictable falling arc.

However, our goals here are completely different.

In the first example, our goal is to identify the target's path, and set ourselves up for a shot, by placing our crosshair at a leading position.

After our initial shot, if possible we can go for another leading shot, by flicking our crosshair in as much of a straight line, to avoid any excess movement.

Whereas, in the second example, our goal is to identify the target's path, smoothly acquire the target, and track its predictable movement.

Which is easier said than done, and requires you to be able to understand the target's pace, and maintain smooth and stable movements.

The point is that these could be considered patterns.

The more you play FPSs, the more you'll notice that your opponents tend to move in similar patterns game after game.

A lot of these situations can be somewhat different, but if we were to define them, we would come up with a broad aiming category or umbrella.

A really clear example of this would be tracking.

It then becomes a matter of training that certain category or skill.

But what are the most relevant aiming categories that are worth training?

Voltaic is an aiming community that is passionate about aim and how to improve it.

Voltaic broadly identifies a number of categories and has created benchmarks which you can use to assess your proficiency in them.

These benchmarks can be an excellent way to become more accustomed to the different aiming skills and ideas.

And congrats, you've already avoided probably my biggest inefficiency.

I've probably spent roughly 400 of my first hours playing this one task that doesn't really have much going for it.

The equivalent one for Kovacs would be Tile Frenzy.

And while they could potentially help train certain aspects of aim, for an important reason we will discuss later on, I think the time I spent on them would have been far more valuable spent elsewhere.

Once you get accustomed to the different aiming categories, your next big focus should be about technique.

Saying that you need technique to put your mouse on a dot sounds absurd.

How hard can it be to just click on a target?

But aiming, much like any other motor skill, is far more nuanced than it seems.

On the surface, it's just about pressing the right keys in the right order.

But every piano teacher will tell you to keep your fingers curved, your wrists elevated and your muscles relaxed.

Because these small details allow you to perform the task more accurately, efficiently and smoothly.

By studying how the most consistent players approach the task, we can break down the elements of their technique and understand what makes them so effective.

So, what exactly is technique when it comes to aiming?

Well, there are two interconnected ideas to consider.

This is the how, the mechanics of your movement.

How do you engage your fingertip muscles for precision?

These small subtle adjustments can make or break your consistency.

This is the what, the way you tackle the task at hand.

In the first clip, the movement between targets is fast but there's no real flick happening.

It's more of a smooth, continuous motion.

In the second, each movement is a distinct flick, followed by a micro-adjustment and hit confirmation to nail the shot.

This approach is usually called the Bardos method.

There are different valid approaches that can be used at a high level.

And the more you play, the more you can develop your own style that might fall somewhere in between.

At this stage, it's important to stay open to refining your technique and exploring different approaches.

However, not all advice is created equal and you should probably be a bit selective with how you go about it.

Creators like MarioW and RidBTW have made extensive content going over the different established categories and what a proper technique might look like in each one.

I will also be sharing the content I value the most, depending on how beginner-friendly they are, along with what they offer at the end of the video.

After spending a decent amount of time learning all the different ideas, this is where quality over quantity really starts to shine.

It's not about mindlessly grinding tasks or repeating scenarios, you want to train with intention.

Time still matters, but quality time spent on the right scenarios can make all the difference, and can help you improve at a faster pace.

Every time you execute a flick, track a target, or click on a tile, you should be asking yourself depending on the scenario, am I being smooth?

Could I have been more precise or efficient?

Or did I execute the technique I'm going for effectively?

This could be done in the moment or in the form of vod reviews as well, or both, depending on what works for you.

There are many different aiming keywords like fluidity, hit confirmation, smoothness, flick, micro-adjustment, edge tracking, and honestly many more, and you quickly realise that ones that may initially sound simple, like smoothness, aren't really that simple.

The best definition for smoothness I've come across so far was the one shared by Voltaic, which states smooth aim has no excess movement and a continuity of motion that comes from having fine control over the acceleration and deceleration of the mouse.

And while this might still sound a bit confusing, the elements become much more apparent when we put it side by side this bounce 180 run by Snowy.

This can be too much and I think we kinda need to take a pause here and discuss what we're looking to get out of aim trainers.

If your goal is to become better at a certain FPS game, then at what point are you actually being counterproductive?

When it comes to becoming a better player at a game, aim is only a single piece of the pie, and how big the piece is solely depends on the type of game you're interested in.

In Valorant for example, the pie would be other variables like positioning, map awareness, utility knowledge and many other ideas that would fall into the category of game sense.

There are other variables that lead into mechanics as well, like pre-aiming and crosshair placement.

This is not to say that aim training is not useful, however, in aiming, like any skill, there comes a point of diminishing returns, and pushing through might require more time for a lesser gain.

Whereas that time could have been far more valuable if it was targeted at other game-oriented weaknesses.

This is one of the main reasons why people feel like they aren't really getting any better at the games they're training for.

For new to intermediate players, this should already be more than enough to set you on the right path.