get a faster reaction time

I’ve been playing video games all my life.

One thing I’ve always been quite proud of is my reaction time.

This is a fundamental in life. This matters a lot in sports. Not so much in the gym…

But this isn’t about strength training for once.

I feel like talking about what it really means to react, to process data.

You know what reaction time is at its base level.

“The time in which it takes one to react to external stimuli”

But it hit me when I started thinking about this topic that you have many different types of external stimuli.

I’ve given them my own terms.

1. Binary stimuli

2. Task paired stimuli

3. Predictive stimuli

Binary stimuli is your initial understanding of reaction time

This is anything that’s instantaneously recognised and acted upon.

• Clicking a button the second something lights up.

• Starting your race the second a gun is fired.

• Having a guy in your crosshair and firing.

Binary stimuli is easy to understand, it’s pure instinctive reaction.

It’s rare for any sort of processing to be involved in this. There’s no adjustments or safety checks. It’s just fire.

Measuring this would be able to sure someone’s base mechanical ability to react, but this isn’t all that matters.

It’s very rare in life that something is going to be pure instinctive reaction.

This type of stimuli is mainly left to start races, and binary button presses.

It’s in cases where a stimuli can either be present, or not.

It’s binary.

Although this might be a great way of measuring potential to react, seeing a boxers punches doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to dodge.

That brings us into our next type of stimuli.

Task paired stimuli attached motor pathways to a stimuli

Have you ever dropped something?

Yeah me too…

After a career of dropping things you get good. Countless attempts to catch it before it hits the ground means. You start to catch it.

You’ve practiced a specific type of action/pathway and you’ve now tied it to this stimuli.

Get hit a thousand times and you learn to dodge.

This is the real way reaction time presents in life.

It’s what actually matters most in sports.

What wins you games isn’t how quickly you can press a button when a light goes off.

It’s how good your task paired stimuli reaction is.

I know some guys who think binary stimuli reaction speed is the only thing that matters, it’s a thought that makes sense, just not true 😔

If you’re entering new territory with never before seen mechanics, yes. Binary stimuli reaction time will help.

Otherwise it’s all about practice.

At first you have to actively think about your response.

This processing time starts to get shorter and shorter.

Eventually it feels like there’s no processing time at all.

This is where it becomes that third stimuli.

Predictive stimuli is the way you turn task paired stimuli back into binary stimuli

Okay, okay.

I’ll admit this is a bit of a stretch.

It won’t be exactly as fast as with binary stimuli, but it’ll get close.

Predictive stimuli is all about knowing something is going to happen.

It’s instinctive.

When you’ve done something enough times you reach that point where you don’t comprehend your processing.

It becomes subconscious.

Once this is happened the predictive stimuli starts to build like a spider web.

Before you’ve even reached the point you need to react to other information has been processed and has predicted your reaction.

Not only are you super fast in your reaction, but sometimes you don’t even get to the stimuli that others would be reacting to.

Imagine being able to know where a baseball goes from the very beginning of someone throwing it versus when it’s half way through its journey.

Who will get to the place it’s going to land quicker?

The same goes for peoples positions on a video game, sports fields etc.

When you start to treat information that comes before the task paired stimuli as your stimuli you become unstoppable.

In time the prediction becomes subconscious too.

That’s all well and great, practice matters a lot, duh. But how can I improve this short term?

Sure.

• Good sleep

• Caffeine/stims

• Motivation

Good luck with this.

Go hard on some bot lobbies or do good at your sport or something!

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher