I recently got this question from a member (Gabe C.) but I’ve heard it before.

“When at practice, would it be better to train in ramping or semi?”

I believe I’ve answered this in a FB post or on a spreecast but I wanted to answer it more in-depth this time around. The way I view this question is like this. I see baseball players warming up before they are up to bat with huge weights on the bat. Once it’s time for them to step up to the plate, they shed the weights and now the bat feels as light as a feather to them. It’s all similiar to the Cell Block vids Scott has been working on. Resistance training so the real thing feels and becomes easier.

The same can be said for our firing modes. Throttling back your ramping BPS or even playing in semi will only make a more rounded player overall. I started playing right before Angels hit the market and everything went electronic. I was forced to learn how to shoot left and right handed with a non-electro semi auto gun. That skill has been lost along the way with electronic guns and ramping modes. We saw the changes the PSP made to the Pro division, it could come crashing back down on us if we haven’t learned it yet. To this day whether I’m in a ramping mode or not, I still pull the trigger like the good ole days. It’s engrained in my head and if the NXL ever chooses to move back to a semi mode, I won’t lose a beat.

So here was my answer to Gabe.

If you are having a private practice with your team (or maybe against another one) and you can convince everyone to play in semi, do it. It may be hard since some guys rely on ramping as such a crutch that they will be scared to ever come out of it. If you can’t swing that, throttle down your gun speed to 8BPS, regardless of what anyone else does. This allows you to save some paint and also acts like that weight baseball players put on their bat. You’ll be going up against opponents shooting the full ramp mode so you’ll have to smarter and trickier to win gun fights.

I’d say about 1 (maybe 2) weekends out from a tournament you switch to the mode you will be playing in, now with the feeling you have a machine gun!