The Traditional Muscle Memory Advice
I’m sure you’ve all heard the age old aiming advice of sticking to one sensitivity and mastering it. Through learning the amount of force you need to apply to the mouse in various situations and repeating that motion enough times, through muscle memory you’ll develop perfect aim and be able to hit flicks every single time. But that also means that if you change anything, your sens, mousepad, mouse, or start using programs like mouse acceleration, that variance will ruin that muscle memory and force you to relearn everything. But if that was the case, how can people like TenZ change their sens and peripherals all the time and still hit flicks like this? Shouldn’t he have ruined his muscle memory?
What Muscle Memory Actually Is
The reason why TenZ can still do this is because muscle memory is a misnomer, it is a real thing in motor skill development but the definition given to it in gaming is incorrect. Getting good aim isn’t about learning the exact amount of force needed or the exact distance you have to move the mouse to move a certain distance on screen, it’s about developing the fine motor control to move your crosshair exactly where you want it, even with unfamiliar settings or peripherals. Once someone has developed those motor skills enough, they can adjust to and aim well on a new sensitivity almost instantly.
Environmental Variance Proves the Point
The most obvious proof for this is that true consistency in your setup is impossible, even if your sensitivity remains the same. There are always outside factors at play when it comes to aiming that affect the amount of force you have apply to the mouse to travel a certain distance on screen. Mousepads and mouse skates wear down over the course of weeks, and humidity causes the amount of force needed to vary from day to day by slowing down your mousepad. All of this means that memorizing the amount of force required for specific movements, and therefore aiming at a high level consistently, would be impossible if muscle memory worked the way people described. But developing good aim isn’t impossible, people can and do adjust to that variance, typically players with good mechanics won’t notice the small changes in friction.
Why You Should Change Sensitivity
But even if that is true and aim is dictated by fine motor control instead of memorizing distances, why not just play the same sensitivity anyway? The short answer is that you should think of your sensitivity as a tool, each has different strength and weaknesses and since changing it doesn’t hurt your aim, we can select the sensitivity best suited for what we are doing.
Sensitivity as a Tool for Different Games
The most obvious example of this is swapping games, the average sensitivity among pros is much faster in apex than it is in valorant because of the different things required for each game, apex has much faster movement speed and requires you to make wide angle motions much more often than valorant does. If you played at a very low sensitivity in valorant and wanted to pick up apex, it woldn’t make sense to keep your sensitivity the same for that reason, it’s better to change to a different sensitivity that is more suited to the game. The same logic applies for roles within games, it’s fairly common for overwatch players to have different sensitivities for different characters, since what is optimal for each varies so heavily. Even in valorant, some players switch sens depending on if they are attacking or defending, holding angles is something that benefits a lot from the stability that a slower sensitivity offers and you’ll do this way more often on defense, whereas on attack you’ll need to react to people in unexpected positions and clear angles very quickly, which is much easier when you don’t have to throw your arm across the mousepad for every one.
The Science: Changing Sensitivity Improves Mechanics
On top of that, there is actually a study which shows that changing sensitivity is good for developing your mechanics. I’ve linked it in the description if you’re interested but to summarize; there were three groups of participants which had to complete a task which involved squeezing a device to move a cursor across a monitor. The first group completed 1 training session per day, the second completed 2 sessions per day 6 hours apart, and the third did the same but with one key difference, the amount of force needed to move the cursor changed between sessions. The three groups were all tested the next day and while both group 2 and 3 outperformed group 1, to quote “The gains in performance, such as a speedier and more accurate completion of the task, nearly doubled among those in the group who were given the altered second session.” This also lines up with common advice given to people looking to break through aiming plateaus, which is basically just to change something up. This can be anything, sensitivity, peripherals, even something like changing my mentality has gotten me out of slumps before.
The Muscle Group Factor
So, if science shows that changing sensitivity helps, why do so many people say they aim worse after changing it, and see benefits when sticking to the same one? I think this comes down mainly to muscle groups. When aiming, you are using a mixture of three things, your fingertips, wrist and arm, with different sensitivities placing more stress on different areas. Sticking with one sensitivity for a long period of time gets you to be more proficient with the muscle group it emphasizes.
Personal Example: Low Sens Limitations
Using myself as an example, I used to play cs on an extremely low sensitivity. It was so low that I didn’t need to use my wrist at all to make small adjustments, everything from wide flicks to microcorrections was done with my arm. It offered me more precision as using a lower sensitivity makes it easier to make smaller movements more accurately, but when I tried to pick up other fps games I struggled due to them requiring me to make larger movements more often. When I did change my sensitivity to compensate for this, I realized how poorly suited the arm is to making those smaller movements, its less controllable since it’s pivot point is further away from the mouse than the wrist’s is. And I couldn’t use my wrist for those movements either, I had never had to use it for aiming before so my control with it was terrible. It wasn’t until I started aimtraining on a higher sensitivity that my fine control with my wrist matched and then surpassed that of my arm, which is when I was finally able to excel on games besides counter strike.
Sensitivity as a Training Tool
This also demonstrates another benefit of changing your sensitivity, which is it’s potential use as a training tool. Since some sensitivities are better suited for different things, we can do the opposite and use a suboptimal sensitivity to emphasize and improve upon different skills when training. Through playing a sens that doesn’t fit the task, any issues in our mechanics are made more visible and easier to isolate. An example of this would be using a very low sensitivity on a task that requires fast and long distance flicks to work on your arm speed, or using a high sensitivity on a precision focused task to focus on fine control with your wrist. By isolating these skills and practicing them independently, you will improve at that skill far more than if you were playing the same task on your normal sensitivity.
When NOT to Change Sensitivity
All that being said though, there is still one situation where I don’t think it’s good to change up your sensitivity, which is right after dying. I’ve seen people tilt change their sens a lot and have even done it myself, and in my experience all it does is take your mind off of the game and on to how your sens doesn’t feel right. At least for me, when my sensitivity did feel “off”, it was a sign that there was a weak area in my aim. Changing my sensitivity to try and fix this would have only made other areas weaker without properly addressing the issue, which can only be done through concentrated practice. My mentality surrounding changing sensitivity is to switch it up often when training to focus on different skillsets, but keep it the same during actual matches so I can put 100% of my focus on the game itself instead of thinking about my sensitivity.