Physical Effort/Intensity and Read Speed in Dance Games

Had an experience recently where I had an epiphany that my ability to time my steps well is based greatly on setting up my settings in-game so that I have to put a little more effort into things so that I get my blood pumping to the rest of my body to get focused and "get in the zone" mentally. 

I recently lowered my AV a bit on Pump and adjusted my JT to default to internalize and read charts better, but I noticed that I started expending a lot less energy in general playing Pump and regressed a bit physically, since I wasn't doing any consistent running the past 2 weeks. 

After changing my settings back on Pump and hopping back on running every other day, I seem to have fixed things. But it was definitely a rough/rude awakening for myself, because it took almost a week to "get back" to where I was prior to messing with my settings. 


My observations about how settings affect how I play the game physically: 

Reading faster = Less time to react = More physical effort for me to accelerate foot from point A and exert pressure on point B in time to hit a note.

Reading slower =  More time to react = Less physical effort for me to accelerate foot from point A and exert pressure on point B in time to hit a note.

Reading faster = larger visual window to accurately time based off of visuals, easier for me to time in a loud/noisy environment 

Reading slower = smaller visual window to accurately time based off of visuals, harder for me to time in a loud/noisy environment

Note skin size = Affects perception how much time a note has to travel to the strike zone. Smaller notes seem to cause me to skew slightly later, larger notes seem to cause me to skew slightly earlier. Persists across both Pump and SMX-- noticed playing with Pump note skins that are slightly smaller in size from the default causes the same effect as setting SMX notes to - 1.

Sensitivity = Higher sensitivity pads seem to work a lot better in conjunction with playing later. My assumption is because I am using less physical effort to play when I have more time to react. Lower sensitivity pads seem to work a lot better with playing earlier, because I'm using a lot more physical effort to time earlier. 

Anyways, my conclusion of these observations is that I seem to time a lot better playing earlier when playing both DDR and SMX so that my footsteps sound completely synced to the music, but when playing Pump, it seems like playing like that leads to immense stamina loss when pushing harder charts before the hard parts of the chart even happen. So adjusting my settings on Pump to give myself more reaction time seems necessary so that I can internalize patterns and such better playing the game, but I'm thinking maybe I should limit Pump to only a small part of my regular dance game sessions, so that I can focus on internalizing new patterns, not care about my timing on Pump, and not "overwrite" my early bias on SMX/DDR so that I don't tilt out when I go back to play those games. 

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