Advanced movement.

Turn on any pro Warzone player's stream and you will see enough slide cancels and bunny hops to make your head spin.

And it's not just because they're trying to look cool.

Advanced movement gives you peekers advantage in gunfights and can make you extremely hard to track in close quarter fights.

But it's not as easy as the pros make it look to combine these moves to break your opponents ankles.

Yeah.

Learning how to consistently outmaneuver my opponents was something that I struggled with for months.

What you won't see watching the pros is that you're very likely to get absolutely smoked when you first start using advanced movement because the margin for error is extremely small.

If you use these movements in the wrong situation or press an incorrect button during a gunfight, you're more than likely be begging your teammates to hit the nearest buy station for a quick reading.

Now, on the other hand, if you don't use these movements at all, you're putting yourself at an extreme disadvantage against good players and you're going to get camera enough to start your own Instagram page.

It's a tough spot to be in.

And I know that some of you are stuck where I was.

So today I wanted to share with you four key insights that I learned the hard way that'll help you take these individual movement skills and combine them to start creating high reels of your own.

Well, to explain how I got here, let me take you back to when I got serious about improving my movement.

Okay, maybe a little bit further.

Right here.

This clip's pretty old, so let me clean it up a little bit.

Okay, there.

This was my movement a year and a half ago.

I would say it looks pretty different.

And before I get roasted in the comments, yes, I was on console at this point and I know that 80 FOV makes you look slower, but you can still have cracked movement on a lower FOV, which I'm demonstrating here.

Now, if we get back to the original clip I was just showing you, about a minute later you can see what happens.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say my movement needed some work.

Also, does anyone else miss how far you used to be able to throw C4?

Ah, those were the days.

Anyways, it was around this time in the middle of 2020 that I discovered someone streaming on Twitch who would make me rethink how I wanted to play the game.

Way before the explosion of Movement Kings on Rebirth Island, there was one streamer who stood out from the rest with his explosive movement on Verdansk.

I'm talking about the original Movement King,

Jowo.

I remember thinking his movement was absolutely insane the first time I saw him play.

He played super aggressive and consistently put his opponents in skates.

Even if he had some self-proclaimed issues finding the 1, no one could deny that his movement was cracked.

I knew immediately that I wanted to play like that.

So naturally, I practiced my slide cancels and bunny hops, and I started to run around the map and play more aggressive.

And man, did I get smoked.

What I failed to realize at first is that advanced movement is pointless without gun skill.

You have to practice both.

My slide cancels were fine getting around the map, but as soon as I got into a gunfight the movement completely messed up my centering and caused me to miss way too many shots.

And I figured this out pretty quickly after rewatching some of my gunfights, so I started practicing my movement while shooting at targets.

And this is when I started to see massive improvements.

My KD started to consistently go up, gulags became easier, and I was dropping more kills in each game.

I even invested in a PC to get every advantage that I could.

And after a few months of work, my movement and gun skill felt really consistent.

Everything was going so well until…

It was like a switch had flipped.

I went from being one of the better players on the map, to losing way more gunfights even with the movement that I had learned.

I was even getting sent to the gulag by players using hardly any movement at all.

I mean, how did…

Uh, okay?

Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against skill-based matchmaking, but since Warzone doesn't have a ranked mode, it wasn't apparent to me at first that I was now always playing against way better players.

So it was frustrating.

But, after a lot of struggle,

I finally realized that the advanced movement that was working against the lower-skilled players was something that was not going to work in the higher-skilled lobbies.

And fortunately, one day on stream, I heard the advice that I needed.

So that means you gotta train your brain to not be dumb and overchow knowing you have no escape, if that makes sense, Connor?

Another way to say this is I needed to stop over-committing to gunfights.

But it's hard because the internet will tell you that slide-canceling around every corner breaks cameras and gives you peekers advantage, which is all true, but it doesn't mean that you're going to win every gunfight.

Because what's also true is that this game has a low time-to-kill and guns with almost no recoil, so any decent player on the map can gun you if you happen to jump into their crosshairs.

So if there's an opponent around the corner for me, instead of slide-canceling out far past the wall, one smarter option would be to hug the corner with my slide-cancel and strafe back into cover while I'm shooting.

This gives me peekers advantage and information on his positioning, so now I can decide to re-challenge, run away and play it up, or bait the push.

And if we go back to that previous gunfight that I lost, there was absolutely no reason for me to bunny-hop out into the open.

I don't have any cover that I'm jumping to, and I just exposed my entire character's hitbox.

I also slide-canceled directly toward him for no reason, right as he was peeking, and gave him free shots.

I should have played the corner head glitch right here, and I probably would have won the gunfight.

Now there's a million different scenarios like this, but the point is, don't over-commit to a gunfight if you don't have to.

You always want to keep your options open to reposition if necessary.

And you do that by using the environment around you to enhance your movement.

Now this insight might seem simple at first, but it honestly took me months of work and thinking about every movement I was doing, asking myself if this movement was necessary or putting me at a disadvantage.

And by doing this, I was finally back to winning gunfights in the sweatier lobbies, and I was able to get my KD above 2 on Verdance before I started to play more Rebirth.

So I probably should have been happy with my improvement at this point, but because I'm a weirdo who can't seem to just have fun, I wasn't.

For some reason, it wasn't enough for me to win my one-on-ones or get high kill games every once in a while.

I wanted to be able to win gunfights when I was being shot in the back and wipe teams in 1v4 situations like the best players.

But when I got the opportunity to do so,

I usually panicked and messed something up.

Even if I did get a decent clip, my movement seemed slow and not that coordinated.

I didn't know what to practice to get better, so I tried playing more solo quads and even changing my controller sensitivity.

But that didn't really help.

What was the secret to take my movement to the next level?

Well, I struggled with this question for a while, and then one day I stumbled onto something.

I queued into a custom game with a plan to practice peeking corners.

This was something I had seen a lot of good players do during gunfights to get information on their opponents, but I had never really practiced it before.

And as I was sliding back and forth practicing,

I realized that it was actually kind of hard to put two slide cancels together.

It was difficult because I had to be able to get my centering right, and I kept jumping on accident.

But I started practicing this each day, and it eventually got easier after I realized

I needed to watch my gun go up before I started my next slide, or else I would jump.

And one thing led to the next, and I started to wonder, well, how short can I make these slides to go back and forth faster?

And when I started to work on this, something in my mind clicked.

I had seen Jowo do this slide cancel loop a million times, but I had never thought to practice it.

And this is where I had messed up.

Players with good movement switch directions fast enough to make their enemies miss too many shots.

It's no different than an NFL player juking an opponent.

You get their momentum going one way, and then you quickly go the other.

But because I hadn't actually practiced this,

I was changing directions too slowly and often missing the button timings, which left me in bad situations.

And even more than that, I had never really practiced putting together all of the different movements that I knew, and that needed to change.

I needed these movement combinations to be in my muscle memory.

So to do this, I started creating movement courses on the speedball map to simulate in-game situations.

The idea was similar to the modern warfare shooting range, but specifically for movement.

So for example, I would start with a slide cancel loop here, and then bunny hop the gap to this wall.

I would peek each side, slide into this half wall, and snake a few times.

And then I would end with a slide cancel into a drop shot here to pretend I was taking the angle away from an opponent on the other side of the map.

And here's what it looked like from my POV.

And then I would repeat, going back the other way.

And a little later on, when I was comfortable with the movement,

I would then start shooting at targets to practice my aim.

And the next day, I would make up a different course.

So after a few months of practicing these courses,

I finally started to develop good movement.

This way of practicing was so effective for me, because I was committing these movement combinations to muscle memory, and I didn't have to think about them in-game.

They just happened.

Now I promised four key insights, so here's the last one.

You need to practice at game speed.

And lucky for you, I have just the exercise to do this.

You want to go back into speedball with just one bot, and you want to screenshot this loadout.

And this exercise is simple.

You can only shoot after you slide cancel, bunny hop, drop shot, or snake.

And this drill is great, because it forces you to use more movement than you might be comfortable with, but you still have to use the cover around you to stay alive.

And that's pretty much how I improved my movement over the last year and a half.

I hope you enjoyed this video.

If you did, please give it a thumbs up, and subscribe to my channel.

Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.

The journey wasn't exactly easy, but I hope that this video encourages you and shows you that it is possible to improve and compete with the best players.

And if you're struggling to get better, don't get discouraged because you are here.

I promise that if you work on these four principles, you'll see insane improvement if you give it a little bit of time.

And that's all I have for you guys today.

If you want more in-depth movement training, you can start with my slide cancel video right here.

And I'll see you in the next video.