This is actually something I have spent a significant amount of time studying up on recently in the medical library at my school while the USA quarantine was in place for most of march-may.
You wouldn’t believe how many studies have been published on the best way to learn a free-throw.
Surprisingly, all of the same principles for certain types of athletic training (such as golf or ping-pong) apply perfectly to the motor skill involved in using a mouse. I hope that some part of it proves helpful to you.
Aim is a motor skill that you build through practice. It takes time and effort to do so, and when trained correctly, will improve a little bit every day.
It is not something you can read about and then apply in game. It is not something you have to “memorize” and recall later.
Here are the best tips I can give you
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What you practice is what you learn. If you practice sloppy, that’s what you will do in actual trial situations. If you practice correctly for some period of time and then practice incorrectly for a subsequent period of time, part of that incorrect practice will overwrite and negate a portion of whatever improvements you would have made. Being DELIBERATE about practicing and staying FOCUSED when practicing allows you to build a motor skill significantly faster than you would simply by using a mouse for eight hours a day.
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When you are practicing, be as precise as possible, and don’t worry about speed. The human body has very little trouble adapting the timing of a well choreographed series of muscle movements when it comes time for adrenaline to kick in. Just because you are slow and methodical while practicing does not mean you will aim slow after your epinephrine level shoots up during a do-or-die overtime situation.
Best example I can give - Dancers learn to perform each step exactly in sequence and do not worry about coordinating all of the steps together to match the rhythm of the music until they can perform them all PRECISELY
3a. There is absolutely such a thing as overtraining, even for a motor task that requires minimal energy expenditure. You have a limited window of complete concentration that represents the maximally efficient period for developing a motor skill. The longer you try to push this, the less efficiently you will learn, and if you keep trying to force it after your attention has wandered you will start counter-acting what you have just learned by replacing it with something sloppy and less deliberate.
3b. Studies that have been done over the last three decades have shown that the ideal way to train a motor skill is to do it in short bursts. If you want to get in eight hours of practice, it is significantly more beneficial to break it up into eight separate one hour sessions than it is to try and do two four hour sessions. It is likely to be even more beneficial to break it up further into eight sets of two 30 minute sessions with a break in between. More frequent training sessions that last for shorter periods of time consistently offers the best results.
*This number is only an example to demonstrate the concept, eight hours a week spent practicing a motor task is quite excessive, it generally does not take that much time investment. The point is that deliberate practice, in small chunks, multiple times per day with breaks in between, allows you to learn much faster and more efficiently than trying to do too much in one sitting. I would start with something like 30 minutes to an hour per training day total, split up into two or three 10-20 minute blocks, and then train every other day. These kinds of tasks are often quite tedious, and it won’t help you to improve if your focus fluctuates or if you are dreading having to go through all of it. Three times a week for half an hour twice a day (a total of 3 hours per week) can help you improve drastically, doing this efficiently allows you to improve much faster than you might expect despite spending only a small amount of time training.
4a. Varying your practice routine has a significant positive effect on how well you will be able to bring your practice into a trial situation. It is a principle called “variable interference”. If you do the same type of training every day in exactly the same sequence, you will begin to do it on auto-pilot and you will begin mastering the training, rather than mastering the skill you want to apply to the game.
4b. Using multiple different tools to train your aim is likely to be beneficial as it prevents you from developing a skill that ONLY applies to your training tool. I would recommend getting in the habit of practicing in more than one “aim lab” type game and alternating which one you use on any given day, along with trying to do the same kinds of exercises in overwatch itself.
4c. Doing multiple different tasks that you perform and complete in full on every practice day in a random sequence is more beneficial than spending all of day 1 doing task A and all of day 2 doing task B.
- As strange as it sounds, poor performance during practice is more frequently associated with improved learning and retention of motor skills, which results in superior performance during real situations. Try to be precise, but allow yourself to make mistakes, because it very likely helps to maintain your focus when you are not able to move how you want to move.
As an example of a sort of “training regimen”, this is what it might look like
In game exercises
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Five minutes, or a certain number of repetitions, of simple muscle memory exercises: moving the mouse back and forth from a single small point to a different point and then clicking once you reach it. The tiny rivets on the garage door on the practice range near where the training bots move back and forth near the boxes are great for this.
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a couple of minutes of following a predictable moving target like the training bots with your mouse and trying to keep your aim on top of it as much as you can.
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a couple of minutes of walking around shooting at stationary targets.
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a couple of minutes of shooting at predictable moving targets.
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five minutes of practice using one of the workshop mods that creates bots that will strafe back and forth to try and dodge.
Aim lab type trainer practice
A short disclaimer
Some of these tasks in these trainers are actually not ideal for developing a motor skill, since while having a score feedback system can be helpful for measuring progress, it can also cause you to focus on the wrong thing, like improving your score.
It is very important to keep in mind that making mistakes during practice IS ACTUALLY BENEFICIAL TO THE LEARNING PROCESS and you should try not to become frustrated or distracted by poor performances during practice. Remember, you are trying to build the motor skill, not earn a spot on a leaderboard or outdo your scores from the previous day.
The tasks I find most helpful in aim-lab are, in no particular order:
- spider shot
- strafe tracking
- motion shot
- micro shot
- multi shot
For kovaaks fps trainer I find the tile frenzy and different variations of tracking exercises to be the most beneficial, but I don’t remember the exact names off the top of my head.
Finally, if you own a small mirror, it can be useful to set this up every once in a while where you can see your hand/mouse while you are doing these exercises. Having that visual connection between seeing what you are doing and seeing it on the screen can accelerate the development of motor neuroplasticity. Don’t stare at it, but put it where you can see it out of the corner of your eye while looking at your screen. This can also help you to identify specific bad habits you may have that you may not even be aware of.
To explain using a personal example - I used to have a bad habit of taking my index finger off of my mouse button after a clicking at the end of a flickshot and holding it in the air above button until my next shot. I had no idea that I did this, and this can greatly reduce the accuracy of your follow up shot.
This is already a very long post and might be more in depth than you may want right now. Still, I had been meaning to write something up like this for a while and this was the perfect opportunity, so I hope that it provides something you will find personally relevant and helpful.
Aim hero’s in this game have different aim style some of shoot faster some are slower. So you will need to play with the hero a lot to practice. Death matches between dps queue time are great practice and warm up. But as I said earlier when you feel like you are getting better blizzard is gonna change the rate of fire and all your muscle memory and practice gonna gone to waste and you will have to do everything all over again 
