Cube Tutorial » Physical

How to get really fast.

Though the mental side may be the most interesting, there is also a strong physical side to speed cubing. You need a good cube and fast fingers, to have any chance of achieving world class speed!

The cube itself

The original Hungarian cubes from the eighties are the best I have used. You can still find them on eBay and elsewhere. I haven't used one since then, so I don't know if 20 years aging has hurt them. Others range in quality from awful to good, though it was a long time since I encountered a really bad one.

Springs in the "skeleton" are vital to quality cubing. Take the cube apart, and pull a center piece. There should be a spring inside that gives fairly good resistance, and moves about 1 millimeter. If the spring breaks, it's possible to replace it.

Though some cubes can get pretty good without treatment, I recommend that you grease it. Many lubricants work. I used candle wax first. It works fine, except that it needs to be reapplied twice a week. Later I turned to silicone grease spray, which works for months.

One weird thing with the silicon spray is that when you first apply it, it will act almost like glue, and will be very hard to turn for about a minute or two, and only after that will it be easy to turn.

In the Swedish championships, the cubes were silicon treated, but they were not "broken in", so we only got about half out normal speed. I won with 40.43 sec...

The cubes I can find now (made by Oddzon (buy here)) are good and fast mechanically, but have horrid paper stickers (under a thin plastic membrane) that wear out in no time. Some people paint them when the stickers are gone. I use regular colored vinyl film. It works fine, once you've found 6 colors of film. And you get enough vinyl for a 1000 cubes :-)

Even the best cube will wear out. That is natural, just buy a new one. I have used up about 15 cubes over the years.

Dexterity

I don't know the best way to use hands and fingers, but I know what I do. My style is probably adapted to my method, where you spend a lot of time turning the same two adjacent sides.

I'm right handed, but I use the left hand for turning, and the right hand for more or less just holding the cube. I don't know why. It took me several months before I realized I was doing this "left handed".

The grip

I have tried to illustrate my right hand grip in this cube. The red facelet is where I hold the thumb, the orange (you have to rotate to see) for the index finger, the yellow is the middle finger, and the ring finger is usually placed on the green faces. The white part is the two sides you can turn.

Use a firm but not too tight grip.

Think in "columns"

The sequence of two turns to the right can be done in one single movement by gripping the red "column" by tour left hand by the yellow facelets. The right hand should hold the grip as above.

Every sequence of two (and often more) moves can be done this way, that halves the number of movements you need to make. It takes a while to get to see sequences as moving columns in stead of separate turns, but it's very easy once you know it.

The Trigger

To do sequence on the left, hold with your left hand the thumb on the red spot and the middle finger on the yellow. The index finger should not be part of the grip, but should press gently on the white facelet, while you do the first turn. When it is almost complete, you will feel that you can turn the top layer with the index finger. Press, and complete the second turn that way. Meanwhile, start gently turning back with the rest of the left hand, still holding the grip between red and yellow. When the second turn is almost done, you will be able to do the third turn instantly.

This can be done ridiculously fast, 0.1 seconds or so. But start practicing at lower speeds...

You need a cube in good shape, or you will break it or get stuck.

Movies

Enough talk. Here is actual footage of how it's done. You need QuickTime 4.0 or later to watch.

This is Sune^TM at top speed. Seven moves in 0.70 seconds. It's in 30 frames per second. In frame 9 more than one full turn is done! To see anything of what's going on you need to step through it. If that's too confusing, first look at the slow version.

This is the same Sune^TM done slower to illustrate the finger tricks. The first three moves is a trigger, just as described above. The next two moves is also a trigger, but skipping the first move. And the final two moves are a simple column sequence.