If you need to get blood flowing before you play, these five take a couple of minutes.
1. Hand Rotations Interlace your fingers. Rotate your hands around each other, slowly increasing speed. Keep the movement as fluid as possible, with your fingers firmly connected and your palms in contact. Repeat in the opposite direction.
2. Hand Waves Interlace your fingers with your palms facing the ground and your elbows out to the side. Flex one wrist and let the movement flow through the opposite wrist and down to the elbows, making a wave. Keep it fluid, and keep your fingers connected.
3. Prayer Stretch Place your hands together at roughly face level with your fingers pointing upward. Keeping your hands in contact, lower them with your elbows out to the side. At the end of the range, push your hands back up to face level and pull your elbows together. Try to increase your range of motion slightly with each repetition.
4. Inverted Prayer Stretch Start with the backs of your hands in contact and your fingers pointing down. Pull your arms upward, flaring your elbows out. Once your wrists reach elbow height, push your elbows inward to apply pressure between your hands. As with the prayer stretch, increase the range slightly each repetition.
5. Hang Loose Stretch Extend your thumb and little finger while bending the middle three. Rotate your wrist back and forth, keeping the rotation going for the duration of the exercise.
Get 7 to 10 hours of sleep. That is not optional — it is what lets you remember what you learned, function properly, and remember to eat and drink. You cannot frag and flick while you are worrying about an empty stomach.
Do not neglect food or water. Three meals a day or fewer; more than that without exercise and you will put on weight you did not intend to.
Sit up straight. Do not slouch — you will not play as well, and the long-term cost is real. Microwave your food during prep phase. Take your bathroom break when you die. Evaluate your time and what you actually need to do in it.
If you have the same commitment to this game that I do, the temptation to let everything else slide is real. Do not. Change your monitor settings if your eyes start hurting. You are not developing thicker glasses or scoliosis over a video game. Your mental resilience, on the other hand, is worth building.
This chapter is from The Principles of Competitive Siege, a free guide by Szhutsen K. Liang. SiegeIQ puts the same thinking on your own clips: upload a round and get a breakdown of what actually went wrong. Try it free.