Dance Game Ergonomics #2

Played a bunch of StepManiaX on the 38" stock bars last night.

I started my session on the adjustable bars set to 36" (middle setting). Arms gave up really quickly and felt like they were less flexible overall compared to playing on 38" stock bars. Felt like my session was being cut short because I couldn't hold myself up on the bars, which felt wrong because when I play Pump all of my "holding myself up" comes from my legs themselves, and not my arms. Similar to doing actual cardio exercise outside of dance games.

I gave into the tilt mid-session after realizing my arms were getting worked like crazy and my legs weren't getting worked and swapped out the adjustable bars for the 38" stock bars. I think I am a 38" stock bar gamer permanently after playing too much Pump. 🤣 

I would go as far to say that as long as the bar is not an extreme amount relative to your overall height, having a high bar is not a disadvantage, and is in fact actually a good thing as it forces you to use and train all of your leg muscles when playing the game, similar to running.

There is an edge case I'll use to illustrate when the bar being too tall is a bad thing. I have a friend who is 4'10. If you take the SMX stock bar height in inches (38) and divide it by her height in inches (58), you get a calculation that the bar height is roughly 65% of her height or more. No good for her, because she can't get proper leverage on the bars. They serve purely as a balance point for her.

I am 5'10 on the other hand. If I take the SMX stock bar height in inches (38) and divide it by my height in inches (70), I get a calculation that the bar height is roughly 54% of my overall height, which is very good because the bar sits at that perfect height for me where I can't leverage my body weight onto it to lift my body with all of my arm muscles, but it sits high enough that I can push some of my weight "off" of it to keep body weight shifted forwards onto my legs and the panels. Even though I'm not tall enough where I can use the SMX stock bars the same way that I would use the DDR stock bars (flinging myself around monkey mode with my arms), I think this is a huge benefit because I still can use them as an anchor point, but without lifting heavily with my arms and putting immense strain on them.

I figured out during my session yesterday that just moving my arms around while playing prevents me from hurting my forearms.The higher the bar is relative to my height, the more I need to move my arms around while playing doubles in order to not put them into a position where I'm hurting yourself. As I've played more and more Pump I kind-of just figured out how to unconsciously do this again. I used to do it a lot when I first started playing SMX, but then when I started playing more DDR I would have a tendency to just lock in and not shift my grip.

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