Photo of Chris Chike / iamchris4life

CHRS4LFE's 4-Panel Form Guide

Preface

This guide assumes basic understanding of the recognition/execution of general patterns that appear in 4-panel charts. My goal is to help you increase overall stability and stamina by minimizing the amount of effort required to execute these patterns. I'm not presenting this guide as the definitive truth for optimal form; I know there exists different playstyles and types of bar usage between players (and builds of the players themselves) which can vary greatly, so something that works for me may not work for everyone else. However, I am presenting this guide as the results from years of studying the ideal form by trial and error. It's my hope that all players will be able to adopt at least some of these guidelines into their playstyle to improve their overall performance. The best place to practice form changes is on lower-level charts or on dead runs, which are song runs that no longer matter because you already messed up earlier on in the song.

General

  1. Default form should be flat-footed. Your heel should make contact with the pad on most steps (exception for Up and some crossover patterns)
    1. Your feet should come down at a very slight angle towards the toes for Up and towards the heel for Down. The angle depends pad recession
  2. Keep your feet and body facing forward as much as possible. The more your feet and body are turned, the less stability you have
    1. Resist temptation to angle feet based on pattern direction. Constantly moving the angle of your feet back and forth decreases stability and uses more energy
    2. Angled feet also increases the likelihood of fat-footing arrows, which is when your foot steps on an arrow but the edge of your foot inadvertently triggers an adjacent arrow, potentially causing an erroneous early judgement
    3. The exception to this is for crossovers or brackets (explained later)
  3. Stay within the inner circle on the panels’ design (visible on DDR panels)
  4. Aim for the inner corners of Up and Down. This minimizes the triangle of movement between Left, Up, and Down with your left foot (and Right, Up, and Down with your right foot)
  5. The less time it takes to get from arrow to arrow, the quicker your reaction time will be, allowing for faster reading speeds
    1. Increase stability by keeping each foot on pad as long as possible before moving to the next arrow
    2. Minimize amount of time feet are in the air for each step
    3. Minimize how high you lift your feet up with each step
  6. Step as lightly as you can get away with to trigger the arrows
    1. Resist temptation to step hard. It's not required for better timing
    2. Maximize downward force vs horizontal force (If your foot makes contact with the pad at a 30° angle, only half of the force exerted from your foot will contribute to triggering the arrow)
    3. The force from your feet should be downward when they make contact with the panel
  7. When executing fast movements, avoid stepping outward in anticipation of moving to the next arrow because that impacts stability and stamina (I call this winding, as in your foot is winding up to launch to the next arrow)
  8. Your feet should stay in one spot when hitting the same arrow consecutively. For example, for the box pattern URURLDLD, it’s common for a player to hit the first UR in the usual spot but then hit the second UR further out on the arrows, winding up to move to LD, but that creates more distance your feet have to travel
  9. Uniformity of movements is a concept that should generally be kept in mind for all your foot movements across the pad, regarding both travel distance and foot turning, but it’s especially important for crossovers/scoobies that require a foot to travel among 3+ arrows. The more uniform your movements are, the more stable they become
    1. Using the crossover example RDUDL, we know that your right foot should be angled at 0° when it starts on Right, and 45° when it crosses to Left. Applying uniformity of movements, we can deduce that when your right foot hits Up, it should hit Up’s inner center angled at 22.5°. In theory, this creates two equivalent movements for your right foot to move Right ⇒ Up ⇒ Left, in terms of both travel distance and foot turning
    2. Conversely, if your right foot hits Up’s inner right corner angled at 10°, this leaves a longer distance needed to travel and a greater angle needed to turn when your right foot moves Up ⇒ Left, compared to Right ⇒ Up. This increases the likelihood of losing stability as the patterns get faster because it’s harder to control a smaller movement followed by a larger movement than two equivalent movements

Crossovers

  1. More specifically, crossovers are over-side (Down crosses) and crossunders are under-side (Up crosses), although crossovers generally can refer to both of them depending on context
  2. Your feet should be angled no more than 45° when executing crossovers. The more you turn your feet for crossovers, the more you’ll have to turn them back to return to face-forward position, introducing an unnecessary loss of stability (related to General Point #2).
      Scoobies are an exception to this (explained later)
  3. Proper anchor foot placement is important for reducing the workload of crossing foot
    1. Example: for a LDR crossover, the more to the right you plant your right foot on Down, the less your left foot will have to cross over your body to reach Right
    2. Anchor foot should be planted with weight on the heel for Down crossovers and on the toes for Up crossunders, to avoid fat-footing an adjacent arrow
  4. Crossing foot should hit the inner top corner of Left/Right for crossovers and inner bottom corner for crossunders
    1. If the crossing foot also needs to hit Up/Down (i.e. LDUDR or LUDUR), Up/Down should be hit towards the inner center instead of the inner corners, unlike in the case with general form. This is to equate the distance your foot has to move to Left and to Right (an example of uniformity of movements discussed in General Point #9)
  5. General Point #6b is something to keep in mind here. It’s common for a player’s foot to slip when crossing to Left/Right. This happens when too much horizontal force is used when crossing the pad, causing the foot to lose traction and slip
  6. General Point #7 is also relevant here because winding is especially common with fast crossovers
  7. Avoid anticipation turning, which is when you preemptively turn for a crossover before the crossover actually happens. Anticipation turning causes your feet and body to be turned longer than they need to be, introducing another unnecessary loss of stability (also related to General Point #2)
      Example: For a tower/drill that ends in a crossover, like LDLDLDR, it is tempting to immediately turn your feet to the right in anticipation for the incoming crossover, but it’s important to do the first LDLD with your feet straight then turn accordingly for the following LDR

Scoobies

  1. Scoobies require your left foot to be on Right while simultaneously your right foot is on Left, which I refer to as being in scooby position
  2. Crossovers Point #4 still applies, but when in scooby position your feet should be angled slightly less than 90°
  3. The angle of your feet should be the focus rather than the angle of your body
  4. 45° ⇒ 90° ⇒ 45°
    1. Your feet should be around 45° just before entering scooby position, 90° (slightly less) when in scooby position, 45° immediately after, then returned to straight as soon as possible
    2. Ideally, your feet should not swing more than a 90° change in one movement
  5. Generally speaking, scoobies are really just unresolving crossovers that resolve as crossunders (and vice-versa) via scooby position. This means crossover form heavily influences scooby form, so it’s important to sharpen crossover form as a part of sharpening scooby form
    1. An unresolving crossover is one that takes you away from face-forward position, whereas a resolving crossover takes you back (resolves) to it. Normally I actually use the terms winding and unwinding, but I won’t here for the sake of disambiguating the meaning of winding in this guide
    2. Example: RDLRUL = [unresolving RDL crossover ⇒ scooby position ⇒ resolving RUL crossunder]

Brackets

  1. It’s natural to think that your foot should be placed directly over the corner brackets at 45°, but that’s not exactly ideal
    1. Your feet should be at a slightly smaller angle like 20°, placed so your toes land towards the inner corner of Up for UR/UL brackets and your heel lands towards the inner corner of Down for DR/DL brackets. This is to reduce how much your feet have to turn going in and out of bracketing
  2. It’s important that all brackets are hit with your foot at slight downward angle exactly like the one mentioned in General Point #1a for Up. This ensures the toe arrow will trigger before the heel arrow. Otherwise, it’s common to get delayed hit timing errors because the toe arrow triggers slightly after the heel arrow (and we primarily time with our heels). Essentially all brackets should be executed as Ups over the pad's brackets
  3. Maintaining a slightly wider form (i.e. stepping a little further out from the center) during bracket-heavy sections of charts can increase the likelihood of stepping in the correct position for the brackets
  4. Return your foot to face-forward position as soon as possible after a bracket is executed. This minimizes loss of stability from having your feet angled (related to General Point #2)

Footswitches

  1. Resist temptation to lift your entire foot as quickly as possible because that negatively affects stability (related to General Point #5a)
  2. The proper technique to lift your foot off an arrow for a footswitch is to spring, leveraging dorsiflexion (for Up) and plantar flexion (for Down) over the center panel to spring off the arrow without actually lifting your foot in the air
    1. For fast footswitches, utilize the impact of hitting the first arrow to spring off it immediately
    2. For slow footswitches, don't spring off the first arrow until just before hitting the second arrow
  3. General Point #4 should be kept in mind; this will ensure your feet never collide

Sideswitches

  1. Sideswitches are footswitches on Left/Right instead of Up/Down, executed as footswitches crossed over
  2. This utilizes form techniques from both footswitches and crossovers
    1. Sideswitches can be either toe-side (LL facing left or RR facing right) or heel-side (LL facing right or RR facing left)
    2. Many sideswitches precede or succeed crossovers. In fact, the motion to execute sideswitches is very similar to that of crossovers.
      1. The foot on the same side of the pad you’re doing the sideswitch on (same-side foot; right foot for RR and left for LL) would be like the anchor foot of a crossover, and the foot on the opposite side (opposite-side foot; left foot for RR and right for LL) would be like crossing foot
    3. The positioning of your feet is also similar to that of crossovers, except your same-side foot (anchor) is over the bracket angled at 45° weighted towards Left/Right instead of Up/Down
      1. The exception is the rare case of the same-side foot ending the sideswitch but the following arrow is an Up (heel-side) or Down (toe-side). In this case, your same-side foot should more over the corner metal panel than the bracket and slightly less angled to avoid fat-footing the Up/Down
    4. Use the same spring technique from Footswitches Point #2 with the relevant feet
    5. Example: LDRRU is executed almost like LDRDU, and LURRD is like LURUD

Jacks

  1. Jacks mostly rely on controlling the bounce of your foot off an arrow to land on the same arrow at a precise speed
  2. General Point #5b/5c is applicable here because it allows greater speed and control
  3. When the jacks are fast and in groups of two, you can adopt the double stroke technique from drumming called “diddle”, where the drummer uses the bounce of the drumstick to hit the drum twice with one motion. In this case, you are executing the jack with a single downward strike and bounce motion

Doublesteps

  1. Executing doublesteps is very similar to executing jacks, except you control the bounce of your foot towards another arrow instead of the same one
  2. It’s important to keep your other foot firmly planted while executing a doublestep
  3. General Point #4 also applies here, which reduces the distance your foot needs to travel to execute the doublestep

Step-Jumps

  1. Step-jumps can be treated as an extension of a jack (R ⇒ RD) or a doublestep (D ⇒ LR) with a jump added in
  2. Remember General Point #5a here: the more time your feet spend in the air, the less stability you have
  3. Related post of mine

Closing Thoughts

It might help with form changes if you think of patterns not just in terms of arrows but also foot placement and pressure distribution between heel/toes for each of them. For example, any left foot Up would have left inner corner; toes ⇒ slightly downward angle foot placement on Up associated with it, and similarly any right foot Up would have that but with right instead of left. More importantly, something like a left anchor foot Up for crossunders would have left inner corner; on toes, etc.

Remember these are all guidelines based only on my study and experience. Even I am unable to follow these perfectly myself, so don’t worry if some things don’t make sense or if you’re unable to incorporate them into your routine. Form changes can take a long time to ingrain into your muscle memory. There are still changes I’ve actually been working on for years. They’ll more than likely impact your timing at first, which is why I recommend practicing on dead runs or lower-level charts.