I've been typing for a while. Looking back at my race logs on typeracer I have my first race on jan 7th 2016 getting a score of 64wpm with 92.8% accuracy, today I managed a speed of 121wpm with 100% accuracy, I'm going to reflect on my progress, common pitfalls and the future.

be able to touch type

Learn from one of the resources you can find anywhere, if you're still looking at your keyboard to type, you're never going to get past a certain speed because you have another layer of processing that has to occur before the keystroke comes out.

don't make mistakes

The most efficient way to get faster at typing is simply to not make any mistakes while typing. This might seem like an impossible task, but the good thing is that there exists a wpm at which you can type at 100% accuracy it's just that it might not even feel like a "per minute" speed because you're literally going so slow, that's ok and you don't have to type like that all the time. Instead you probably type at a certain speed, but when you encounter a word that's either new to you or you know will cause a problem, then slow down to your 100% speed typing and type out the word.

When you slow down to your 100% wpm and type out a word it's like investing in all future times you're going to write that word again, so don't be lazy you have to do this if you ever want to become faster, if instead you go fast and fumble the word, then it's likely that you'll do it again in the future which will slow you down, don't slow your future self down.

breath

when you're racing then a key thing that helps me play better is to breath and pretend like things are not a big deal (because they are not), when you play this way you keep your mind relaxed, the reason it relaxes you is because the alternative is that you're holding your breath because you really want to win and you're extremely focused on doing so, by doing that you start to build tension in your body and if you make a mistake it amplifies your emotions which will in-turn cause you to make more mistakes getting more and more frustrated, when you do this you'll find that you quit out of races early and will get angry if you're not up to your usual pace.

Going along with the same ideas as the above paragraph, you need to be able to reset your contextual state in order to go faster and remain calm this helps supress choking, for example if you're racing neck and neck with someone and you know things are almost over, then in this context you'll feel an immense pressure to go faster than you're already going and not revert to a slower speed when you hit a difficult word likely causing you to make a mistake and "choke". By breathing it helps you not focus on the context that we just mentioned so that it's almost like you're typing the first word of the race again, in this mindset the first couple words you type have the same importance as the last few, and so you put in the same amount of effort everywhere in the race, which is a very good way of winning races, rather than bringing it all out at the end.

key ordering

When you're decent at typing and follow the above ideas, you can start focusing on smaller details, a common issue that I have when typing is when I try typing a word but I get the right keys with one error when I typed one key in front of the other, for example "keybaord" these problems usually happen when you need to synchronize keystrokes between your left and right hand with very fast timing, for this I don't know a general remedy but to also slow down a bit when you feel a word may have this issue, just like the 100% wpm speed, but in this case you know you can type the word perfectly, but you know you might accidentally type one or two chars out of order. Also just typing over the years usually corrects these problems so keep typing.

future

I don't type competitively but I enjoy playing races on typeracer, in order to make future progress I will mainly focus on not making mistakes and getting 100% accuracy on my races, and breathing.