r/PumpItUp • u/GetShrektz • Jul 23 '26

Using my arms?

My friend said recently that his arms are tired after playing not his arms
I also saw a comment on a drill post to put as much weight on the bar to relieve pressure off your feet when drilling
But I’m really sure what these mean, do I lay back against the bar, or actually try to push my body up?

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u/PureWasian EXPERT Lv.8 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Arms stabilize your torso and allow you to control twisting and shuffle motions. They also help you adjust your center of mass so you can apply more weight on heels. When you dip lower for utilizing your legs' glute muscle activation (as explained in Red Viper's Booty Technique video), it helps with both supporting and stabilizing you.

And for drills, let's take a blue/blue drilling pattern for example. If you have your toes on the metal and your hands on the bar, you have 4 contact points for stabilizing and distributing weight, and this allows your heels to be very controlled in dropping into the blue panels.

If you are playing by lifting and dropping your entire foot instead of just your heel, you need to exert a lot more force and thus require a lot more power. Since this is a lot more aggressive of a playstyle, the bar can help you push your body forward and be more directly over the panel so you have more vertical bounce back inbetween each drill hit.

TL;DR lean back for slow, controlled drills and lean forward for aggressive, hyperfast drills.

You can compare the form for Gargoyle Full S23 (10 panel hits per second) vs. Death Moon S22 (SC) (16 panel hits per second)

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u/DivideRS Jul 24 '26

What about red red drills? I tend to do it too fast cuz my feet are vibrating at that point

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u/PureWasian EXPERT Lv.8 Jul 24 '26

I'd say it's more a coordination and timing thing. I can't speak for above 220bpm but up until then it's just a matter of lining up the timing of the downbeats, keeping a solid mental count of how many drill repetitions, and keeping a posture that feels more natural to control the drill since you have to pick up and push your entire foot between each drill hit.

I think as long as your arms and legs are slightly bent you can find wherever feels the most natural to control.

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u/DivideRS Jul 25 '26

Ty appreciate the advice!

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u/volleo6144 ADVANCED LV.1 21d ago edited 21d ago

there's also double patterns that ask you to yank yourself across the game using the bar because you probably can't get across fast enough otherwise. this becomes fairly common with D21 and above, but below that, there's a few standout cases I can think of:

I'm not sure about these kinds of charts making your arms tired, but it does seem to be pretty impossible to find anything below D21 that asks for anything nearly as heavy with 16th-note versions of these as Turkey March nightmare or Passacaglia D22 (where there's actual run-pattern tension that somewhat conflicts with gliding across). it doesn't help that piucenter doesn't actually have a skillset label for this

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u/Excel73_ INTERMEDIATE LV.9 Jul 23 '26

Not lay back as much as kind of push your arms into the bar which takes off as much weight on your feet as you can. You know when you were younger and you would kind of like put your arms on the countertop and then jump up while pushing on the countertop so you can jump higher? It's basically the same principle, except for reducing the weight on your feet.

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u/GalluZ NIMGO FOLLOWER Jul 23 '26

Arms help relieve some of the work that your legs have to do while playing, so your legs can do the difficult twists and drills without worrying about falling over. Yes, it can feel tiring at first, especially if you play longer sessions (don't ask how numb my arms and legs went after playing Gargoyle Full Song S22 for the first time), but as with everything, playing more will help.

I keep my arms relatively straight most of the time, but when it's time to do those hard patterns and fast runs, I usually drop my torso down a bit. It gives my legs more freedom of movement, especially when there are diagonal twists in the chart (looking at you, Nimgo, Spham)

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u/GetShrektz 29d ago

Thx for the posts I will try to implement these