How To Develop Your Own Aim Training Regimen

It can be tough to jump into the world of competitive FPS games. You’ll often find that you’re not just competing with the opposing team; you’re competing against your teammates, as well as yourself. You will have on days, you will have off days, and you will have days where you wonder if you’re completely out of your element. That’s fine; that’s the process of learning and being challenged.

The trick to smoothing out that rough experience is increasing your overall consistency day to day. You’ll still have good and bad days, but when you improve your overall consistency, the gap between those two poles of performance will be narrowed dramatically. 

At the core of every FPS game sits that shooter part, which revolves around your aim. You will still need to develop your mechanics, fundamentals, and game IQ, but all of that progresses with and develops around your aim. Similar to most things, this will improve with experience, repetition, and of course, with a training effort. Which brings you to us.

So, you’re here, and you want to jump into aim training, but that’s open-ended. Aimlabs has nearly 30,000 training tasks available, so we’re going to have to focus on narrowing that down and making the most of the tools you have available. First, we will have to go over some of the basics of training.

Identifying Your Aim Training Goals

Step one, we need to identify what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you just looking for general, all-purpose aim training, or are you training for a specific game, such as VALORANT, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or Rainbow Six Siege? General aim training will likely translate across most FPS titles, but Aimlabs features tasks specifically designed around different games and can help you develop your reflexes and hand-eye coordination around specific game situations, scenarios, and weapons.

Next, you will want to get comfortable with purposeful training. It’s no different than exercise or weight training; you may want to work on strength training, or you may want to work on your cardio, or you might want to focus on building muscle. Your aim is the sum of a lot of different parts, flicking, tracking, target switching, and more. Keeping that in mind going forward, we can work on tailoring your training around your needs and goals.

The last thing you’ll want to remember is to maintain realistic, attainable goals. Telling yourself that you’ll be on the stage at the next VCT Masters may be setting yourself up for failure, but setting milestones around your VALORANT stats, such as improving your headshot percentage or average damage per round in the next episode, is something you can reach in that time and something you can track.

Sampling the Options

As mentioned above, Aimlabs has a staggering amount of available tasks, many of which are custom tasks built within the Creator Studio by players like yourself who wanted to tailor tasks around their specific needs. Thankfully, there are a lot of playlists out there built by pro players, coaches, and other players based on different games or goals.

These playlists are a great starting point, and you can benefit from exploring the playlists that are designed around your specific game of choice, as well as playlists that might be for a game you never play. Sampling outside your specific corner of FPS can help as you might stumble onto a task, or a type of task, that you wouldn’t have otherwise considered relevant for your aim training goals.

Let’s start with running through a few playlists throughout your first few sessions. Try one playlist before jumping into your game of choice that day, then reflect. Did you notice anything different? Were they positive or negative? Now, take a moment to isolate that down. Were your flicks on point? Then, the flicking training could be paying off and worth factoring into your aim training regimen. Was your aim trailing the target? You may want to find some tracking tasks to work into your daily routine.

Setting Time and Setting Limits

It’s crucial to remember that aim training does not have to be an all-day process; too much training is a very real thing and can slow your overall progress. This is more about setting a routine and developing it through consistent effort. Set a reasonable amount of time that you can spend on aim training before your standard gaming sessions. Even if you spend 15 minutes a day with purposeful training, you’ll see the benefits over time. Still, you’re going to be disappointed if you attempt to brute force results by throwing yourself into training 8 hours a day.

After a few sessions, reflect and feel out if your sessions are too short or too long. Then ask yourself: Am I having fun? Your aim training efforts still need to be fun and engaging because if it feels like a chore, it will be harder to stick with and probably not beneficial. You improve the most when you’re enjoying the effort that you’re putting in. If your training routine is getting stale, switch it up! You may have plateaued on a specific practice; when that happens, change can help keep things fresh, fun, and functional.

Flexibility is Critical

Getting stuck in a specific routine with little variation is easy, but this limits your growth and potential. You know the old ‘skipped leg day’ meme? It’s about balance and addressing multiple needs. Your aim is multi-faceted, and as your aim improves, certain areas of your aim may progress further and faster than others. As you occasionally reflect on your progress, you should make an effort to identify your strengths and weaknesses and adapt your training accordingly.

You can do this by making changes as needed, and that flexibility is great, but you could also help maintain that balance and flexibility through design, setting different practices and disciplines for different training days. They have leg day, right? You can have flicking day, a day of the week where your training features more flicking tasks, and then you can slide that routine in more days if needed.

Consistency Within Reason

Your aim training efforts do not need to be a week-long grind. You are not an actor with a deadline to prepare their body for their superhero suit in a few months. You can have off days, and you probably should, but it comes back to that reflection and analysis. If you’re seeing diminishing results by training every weekday, try reducing it to 3 or 4 days a week. Have things have picked back up? Then you’ve found your training sweet spot. If not, you may need to add or subtract some more sessions.

The key is the repetition of the practice, not the overwhelming amount of it. Once you have found that rhythm for your training, your brain will have adapted and begun to make the most of it. Stay consistent, but keep that consistency reasonable.

Keeping Track of Your Training Regimen

That reflection and analysis will require some organization. That doesn’t mean that you need multiple spreadsheets to pour over every stat, but organizing the tasks you are playing in the different training sessions will help you keep track of the tasks that you’re playing each day.

Head to the Custom tab in Aimlabs, from here, you can create your own playlists and have total control over what tasks and how many tasks are featured on the playlist. You can name each playlist based on the day of the week you’ll be training, and you can share these playlists with friends, teammates, or the overall aim training community.

Your Next Steps

At the risk of sounding cliche, you have to make sure that you stick with it. All your favorite athletes and esports stars continue to train and practice throughout their careers. Even when you have reached the milestones you had initially set for yourself, you must continue to train to maintain that skill level. If you follow the advice above about setting more realistic goals, then as you reach those, you set new goals to work toward.

Keep a keen eye out for fatigue, feelings of discouragement, or the process not being fun. If you’ve hit any of those walls, re-assess and adjust accordingly. Much like athletes and bodybuilders listen to their bodies, you need to listen to your brain and your body, too, because aim training is also a physical process.

Pay attention to yourself and your progress, and keep working at it. If you find yourself lost along the way, remember that the aim training community is a big, collaborative place. Seek out help, feedback, and tips, and you’ll get yourself back on track in no time.