Warming up

A pianist warms up. A runner warms up. A typist who skips the warm-up types worse for the first two minutes, makes more errors, and counts those errors against the day's stats.

The fix is sixty seconds of deliberate slow typing before any real session.

What a warm-up does

Three things, none dramatic on their own.

Recalibrates the hands. Your fingers were just doing something else -- holding a phone, drinking coffee, scrolling. They have to find the home row again, and the first dozen keystrokes are usually less precise than the dozen after.

Wakes up the working memory. Touch typing is mostly automatic, but the part of attention that supplies words to type is not. The supply lags during the first minute, which is why beginners often go fast then slow on a one-minute test.

Establishes accuracy as the rule. If the first session of the day is rushed, the rest of the day's sessions tend to inherit the rushed feel. If the first session is slow and clean, you spend the rest of the day comparing yourself to that benchmark.

How to warm up

Open Zen mode. Type whatever comes up at half your normal speed for about a minute. No goal. No errors to fix. The cursor will move; that is the entire ambition.

Then run a home-row drill. Two passes. Slow.

Then start your real session.

The whole warm-up takes two minutes. It almost always saves more time than it costs by raising your accuracy on the first real session.

What not to warm up with

Sprints. A 15-second top-speed test is not a warm-up. It is the opposite of a warm-up. Sprints belong at the middle of a session when the hands are loose.

Difficult material. Code drills, advanced vocabulary, English-50k. Save these for after the warm-up. Difficult material at the start of a session means you start with a low accuracy score, and your average for the day takes the hit.

Reading. Some people open a book and start typing it cold. The book is fine -- the cold is the problem. Run sixty seconds of Zen first, then start the book.

Cooling down

A cool-down is also useful, though less so. After a long session, run a slow, easy pangram drill for thirty seconds. The pangram includes every letter, which gives the fingers a small final stretch on rare keys before you walk away.

The total ritual:

• Two minutes Zen
• Two minutes home-row drill
• Real session
• Thirty seconds pangram cool-down

About five minutes of warm-up and cool-down for a twenty-minute session. The numbers improve enough that the math is favorable.