Why Warm Up at All?
You've felt it: the first game of the day is worse than the third. Your flicks overshoot, your tracking is jittery, and shots you'd normally hit sail wide. Then, somewhere around the 20-minute mark, your hands "arrive" and you start playing like yourself.
A warmup exists to move that arrival earlier — ideally before your first competitive round instead of during it. The reasons are mundane and physiological: your wrist and forearm muscles start the day cold and stiff, fine motor control sharpens with a few minutes of use, and your eyes and attention need a short ramp before they're tracking small fast objects comfortably. None of this is exotic sports science; it's the same reason a pianist plays scales before a recital. You're not building skill in a warmup — you're getting access to the skill you already have.
The routine below takes 10 minutes using AimBetween's five modes with 30-second rounds (the default). It runs entirely in your browser, so you can do it before the game client even finishes loading. Each phase has a specific job, and the order matters: big and slow first, small and fast last.
The Routine, Minute by Minute
| Minutes | Mode & settings | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| 0–2 | Gridshot, large targets | Loosen wrist and forearm, easy hits, build rhythm |
| 2–4 | Flick, standard settings | Wake up snap aim and stopping precision |
| 4–6 | Tracking, medium targets | Smoothness, sustained control, no clicking |
| 6–8 | Speed, small targets | Reaction sharpness at full intensity |
| 8–10 | One ranked attempt, your choice of mode | Perform under a little pressure, confirm you're ready |
Minutes 0–2: Gridshot, large targets
Start with Gridshot on large targets — about four 30-second rounds. Three targets are up at once, so you're constantly moving between them, but the big hitboxes mean nearly every shot lands. That's deliberate. The first two minutes are about blood flow and range of motion in your wrist and forearm, not about being tested. Move a little slower than feels natural and focus on clean, complete motions: move, stop, click, move. If your hands feel stiff or cold, add an extra round here rather than pushing on.
Minutes 2–4: Flick, standard settings
Switch to Flick with default settings. Targets appear at random positions and expire if you're slow — and expired targets count as misses, so this phase gently forces decisiveness. You're waking up the snap-and-stop motion: the fast initial movement and the hard stop on target. Expect the first round to feel scratchy. Don't chase a score; chase the feeling of your stops getting cleaner round over round.
Minutes 4–6: Tracking, medium targets
Tracking is the palate cleanser in the middle: no clicking at all, just keeping your crosshair glued to a target gliding through smooth curves. Your score is the percentage of time you stay on target, which makes jitter immediately visible. After two minutes of clicking, this phase re-teaches your hand that aim is mostly smooth pursuit, not stabs. Relax your grip here on purpose — if your forearm is tense from the flicking phase, tracking will expose it, and consciously loosening up now pays off for the rest of the session.
Minutes 6–8: Speed, small targets
Now ramp to full intensity with Speed: small targets with a short timeout, pure see-and-click reaction. This is the phase that gets your reaction loop firing at match tempo. Average human visual reaction time is roughly 200–250ms, and while a warmup won't change your baseline, it reliably clears out the extra sluggishness that comes with cold hands and a wandering mind. If you want to understand what's actually trainable here, read our guide on reaction time for gamers.
Minutes 8–10: One ranked attempt
Finish with a single ranked round in whichever mode matters most to you — hit the gold Ranked badge on the mode card. Ranked rounds use standardized settings and only your best score per mode counts on the ranked leaderboard, so there's a small, real stake attached. That tiny bit of pressure is the point: it bridges the gap between relaxed practice and the first pistol round of a real match. One attempt, win or lose, and you're done.
Adapting It: Before Matches vs. Before Training
The 10-minute version above is the pre-match configuration: broad, ascending intensity, ending on a performance rep. Before ranked games, run it exactly as written and then stop — your remaining sharpness budget belongs to the match, not the trainer.
Before a dedicated training block, trim it instead. If you're about to spend 20 minutes doing focused tracking practice, you don't need the Speed phase or the ranked attempt; you need warm hands and a smooth wrist. A training-day warmup can be as short as four minutes: two of Gridshot on large targets, two of easy reps in whatever mode you're about to train. The warmup's only job on training days is to make the real practice productive from the first minute.
- Match day: full 10 minutes, ascending intensity, end on the ranked rep. Then queue immediately — the effect fades if you sit in menus for half an hour.
- Training day: 4–5 minutes, low intensity, biased toward the skill you're about to train. Save your focus for the session itself.
- Short on time: if you only have three minutes, do one round each of Gridshot large, Flick, and your main mode. A short warmup beats no warmup.
How this fits into a week — how many days to train, when to rest, how to avoid burning out — is its own topic, covered in how often should you aim train.
Warmup Is Not Training
This distinction sounds pedantic and changes everything about how you should behave during these 10 minutes.
Training is deliberate practice: you work at the edge of your ability, you fail a lot, you concentrate hard on a specific weakness, and you're often worse-feeling at the end of a session than the start. A warmup is the opposite: familiar drills, comfortably below your ceiling, finishing fresher than you started. If your warmup leaves your hand tired or your focus drained, it was a training session wearing a warmup's clothes — and you just spent your best energy before the thing you warmed up for.
The practical rules that fall out of this:
- Don't grind scores in a warmup. Retrying Gridshot eight times to beat yesterday's number is training (and not even good training). One pass through each phase is enough.
- Don't experiment in a warmup. Match day is not the day to test a new sensitivity. If you're tempted, read how to find your ideal sensitivity first, pick a value, and change it on a training day — then leave it alone.
- Don't skip the easy phase. Jumping straight to small fast targets with cold hands is how you get sloppy reps and, over long periods, cranky wrists. The boring big-target minutes are load-bearing.
- Do watch trends, not days. Your warmup scores will wobble daily with sleep, caffeine, and mood. A bad warmup predicts almost nothing about the next match, so never let it psych you out.
The warmup also has a hidden second function: it's a daily systems check. Same modes, same settings, every day — so when something is genuinely off (new mousepad texture, accidentally changed DPI, a driver update re-enabling pointer acceleration), you notice within a round instead of three matches deep. AimBetween uses pointer lock with raw input, the same principle as in-game raw input, so what you feel in the trainer transfers honestly to the game.
Ten minutes is a small tax for starting every session at your actual level instead of 20 minutes below it. Pair the routine with the habits in crosshair placement — the highest-value habit in the game — and skim the seven mistakes that keep players hardstuck to make sure your warmup isn't quietly reinforcing any of them.