Dance Games - Conscious Breathing & Stamina
In dance games, I seem to have a maximum stamina capacity that is relative to how much effort I've put into training myself. Time training, time recovering, optimizing diet, etc.
It seems like I can increase my maximum stamina capacity only so much until I start to hit greatly diminishing returns.
In Dark Souls, you can raise your endurance level to raise your stamina stat. But eventually raising your endurance level stops increasing your stamina stat. I've noticed a similar thing happen to me with dance games and the diminishing returns on training myself physically.
But recently, playing Gargoyle D22 on Pump, I had to start thinking about consciously breathing because I noticed that if I made an active effort to breathe through my nose and out through my mouth at the beginning of the song when my legs felt fine, my legs didn't get as gassed out when they start to feel the burn in the latter half of the song. I started applying this to every song I'd play, where now I always try to consciously breathe even when I'm feeling good stamina-wise in my legs at the beginning. I think I'm starting to treat the exercise from dance games less like sprinting, and more like distance running.
It reminds me of how in Dark Souls, if you exhaust your stamina meter completely sprinting, you have to wait for it to refill completely before you can sprint again. So a strategy that players use is letting go of their sprint to refill their stamina before it bottoms out. It's like breathing, but with your thumb.
So in my brain, I was just like:
"if I can make it unconscious muscle memory to breathe with my thumb in Dark Souls while thinking about other tasks, I can do that with my nose and mouth for breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth while using my eyes, ears, arms, and legs to hit notes."
Since applying this, I've noticed that I've been able to push myself even harder than I did before and I feel like I'm breaking through that diminishing returns barrier, since I am now refilling my stamina bar actively while I play instead of just draining it and wondering why my legs/arms don't want to cooperate when my heart/lungs feel fine-- I think the latter is a sign that I'm not using them enough to fuel the legs/arms with oxygen.
