Improve gameplay outside of coaching sessions

While attending coaching sessions and following your coach’s instructions is crucial for improvement, there are other ways in which you can improve your gameplay outside of session time and enhance your training into being more efficient.

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In this article I will explain the most common mistakes made by students that can stunt your progress and how to create better habits.

I’ve been a professional coach for over 7 years, working with individual players and teams, coaching all roles and champions.

Whether you are looking to reach a particular rank or unlock your full potential as a player – I’m the right person to guide you!

During my many years of coaching I found that there are common mistakes and bad habits that many students share that slow down their improvement. In this article I’d like to explain those mistakes and how to build good habits to bring both your training and ranked performance to a higher level!

Warm up!

Most people really underestimate the impact of a warm up game before hopping into a ranked game. Your win rate can really suffer if the first game of the day since you don’t have your head in the game yet. Whether you’re playing early in the morning after a cup of coffee or late in the evening after work, generally during your first game you won’t be 100% focused on the game and the aspects of it that your coach wanted you to practise. How to create a better habit?

Solution is simple – do a warm up game before ranked!It can be a 10 minute practice tool game to work on your last hitting, it can be a normal game, flex, even aram (arams tend to be less effective, but are also shorter, so it can work for people who are really short on time to play).

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Distractions

Distractions are EVERYWHERE and there are a lot more of them than you think!While we cannot avoid all of them (such as parents walking into your room for example), the ones that you can get rid of – do so!

How to create a better habit?

Are you chatting with a group of friends while gaming? Your attention will be split between the game, listening to their stories and talking back. Leave the chat for after the game, this way both the game and your friends will have your full attention at designated times. Mute discord notifications, it can be both distracting and annoying to have them pop up on your screen every few minutes (or seconds!). Listening to music? While it can help some people (such as students with ADHD that can use it to help them with maintaining focus) it can also distract others. Try playing with and without music to compare in which game you felt more focused. Also, if you are sticking to the music in the background make sure it’s not too loud, you don’t want to block out extra game info such as pings or ability sounds. Avoid watching something on your second screen if you’re using one, try to dedicate 100% of your attention to the game in front of you.

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Breaks and mental resets

This one is probably the biggest cause of students going on lose streaks and ruining their own progress! Spamming many games in a row, one right after another sounds great, just think of all the games you will do and all the training. Surely it will help, right? Absolutely not! How to create a better habit?

The simplest piece of advice is take a break after 3 games in a row. Make it at least 15 minutes long, but it can also be more than this. Use this break to get away from your PC, grab a sandwich, make a cup of tea, chat to your housemates, walk the dog outside, or anything else you wish to do, but let your brain relax a bit.

After 3 games you will start to lose focus and start underperforming, especially if you were really focused in those previous games.

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Managing tilt and negative emotions

Managing tilt can be hard and different things will work for each person, it’s a pretty broad topic that I would be happy to discuss individually with you in a coaching or a verbal session, but for the purpose of this article I’d like to highlight that TILT is the biggest issue as it makes you your own enemy. While tilted you will be underperforming a lot more, because your brain is occupied with all of those negative feelings and trying to process them. This can lead to worse mechanics, more positional mistakes, lack of map awareness, poor decision making – this escalates into dying many times in a row and making the tilt even worse, creating a snowball effect which will ruin your own games. Teammates can make games hard and challenging so don’t make it even harder by going into a game while not in the right mental state to win!

How to create a better habit?

If you had a very frustrating and tilting game, take a break after it. DO NOT queue up right after it, this is the biggest source of lose streaks that I have ever seen. Even 10-15 minutes will do, more if you need it. Again, I’d encourage you to take this break away from the PC, but if you chose not to, then use this time to chat and vent to friends or listen to music, watch a funny cat clip on Youtube or whatever will help to take your mind off the frustration. Switch off the in game chat or mute all players and use the chat to communicate only the most important things necessary. While the chat is a great opportunity to communicate and lead teammates it is unfortunately misused by the community to harass other players, vent out their tilt (often in a very toxic way) and get themselves into chat restrictions. My recommended option is /mute all and only type important commands into the chat such as ”no summoners x lane” or ”give up dragon” etc. Even if the tilt of one of your teammates isn’t directly pointed at you it can be both distracting and discouraging to see all that flame in the chat. Criticism presented in the way of toxic flaming isn’t going to be well received, since the recipient will go on the defensive and refuse to listen, often making them argue back, losing focus on the game and performing worse. Don’t let a random player make you lose focus and play badly, this is exactly what they want, so why give it to them? Why give up all your hard work to prove something to a stranger you will never see again? Just focus on yourself!

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Sleep and other nagging stuff

Last but not least – self care.While it might sound like your mother nagging you, things like sleep and food can actually improve your performance. (Good) Sleep is an essential component of good performance, both in esports and sports. There are many other benefits to getting enough sleep, but the one I am going to discuss now is how it can improve your performance by making you think more clearly, providing higher focus, reducing stress and improving mood. After having discussed all of the above factors – this is the cherry on the top.Being tired and sleepy will lead you to make more mistakes, making you have a harder time concentrating on the game and your training goals, you will be more likely to make bad choices ingame and being prone to tilt.

How to create a better habit?

Try to keep a regular sleep schedule and aim for at least 7-8h of sleep, I’m sure you have heard it before and it can sound a lot easier than done. Trust me, I know, life can get in the way and there were months where I was sleeping for about 3-4h a day. That was absolutely not enough and it had a big impact on both my game performance as well as actual life. But I made improvements, and so can you.

Simplest things that helped included no screen time 1h before bedtime, dragging myself out for at least 1h walk every day and taking a warm bath/shower before bed. Again, if you’d like more help with this topic feel free to reach out to me or talk to a doctor about potential improvements. Eat and again, try to eat regularly. Avoid heavy foods just before you go to play as they can cause fatigue and loss of focus.Try to eat relatively healthy stuff. Again, life can get in a way and not all of us are able to do so immediately but it’s something worth looking for. You can talk to a nutritionist or look up some articles about this online, but at least not being hungry will help you to focus on your game and delay the onset of fatigue which as mentioned in the paragraph above will help you to stay concentrated and perform well for longer.

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Book a session with me!

Thank you for reading the article, I hope that it will help you to create better habits and I’m sure that it will help to improve your overall performance in the game.

Feel free to message me on discord with any questions you might have!