You want to continuously improve your skills through training in Rocket League, but it is rarely effective, why? That's because you may have been training in the wrong ways. In this guide, we will tell you how to do properly Freeplay and custom training to achieve the skill level you want in Rocket League.

Rocket League has two amazing in-game tools to help you get better as fast as possible, those in-game tools are Freeplay and custom training. Most of you probably have spent a good amount of time using one of these tools, but when higher ranked players give advice to lower ranks they'll often say something like just go into custom training or just go into free play. While it's pretty unclear what you're supposed to do with these tools in order to improve yourself as fast as possible, because there's definitely a right way of practicing and a wrong way of practicing, so in this guide we start off by going over how to train properly in free play and then move on over to custom training, and make sure you stick to the end because we will finish off with a super useful training technique.

How To Train Properly In Rocket League?

How To Do Freeplay Training Properly?

There are plenty of specific drills you can work on in freeplay like the wall bounce game or the mini pad drill, but here we are going cover how you should practice in freeplay if you don't have anything particular in mind. Anyway, many people use free play to warm up before going into online matches which is probably the best way to warm up, but that shouldn't be the only thing you use it for. Free play is super useful for even just improving your mechanics, especially for the the ones who don't have very good ball control. This includes air dribbles, regular dribbling, bounce dribbling and pretty much anything that doesn't include a situation where the ball is already flying at you from a certain direction. If you don't have any particular skill in mind that you want to improve in such as the types of dribblings, you can always use free play to improve the speed of your game. 

So how do you do this? Well if you ever watch a pro go into free play to practice chances are this is what they'll be doing. 

- The first step is to hit the ball with some power, the second step is to also hit the ball with some power and the third step is again hit the ball with some power, now we do think you get the point. 

- No matter how you do it, you want to keep smacking the ball as hard as possible then immediately follow it up with another powerful hit as fast as you can, and keep as much momentum as possible. 

- Try and make each touch as powerful as you can, but still make the time between each touch as short as possible by conserving your momentum as much as you can. 

- You can experiment around with holding power slide to keep your momentum going a certain way it's pretty fun once you get into it.

- You can use wavedashes half flips aerials to meet the ball faster as it rolls up on the wall anything you can think of that will move it around faster, you want to go so fast that you'll be forcing yourself to miss, that's how you know you're getting better. 

- Doing this for half an hour every time you open up the game will tremendously improve your skills from your game speed to overall mechanics. 

Like we mentioned there are a ton of super useful drills you can do in free play alone but we will save that for a future Rocket League guide.

How To Do Custom Training Properly?

There are so many inefficient ways to practice with custom training:

Offensive Training Packs

There's two main things that we see people do wrong with these: 

- The first one is that people wait until the ball is either closer to them or closer to the ground before they hit, it mostly if you probably realize this but if you really want training packs to help you you've got to hit the ball as early as possible. If you're only flat or goal hitting a redirect shot way back here and closer to the ground, may be just fine for you. But by the time you get up to diamond or champ, people is easily cut you off before you can get the touch, that's why you've got to hit it as early and high up as possible before the other team can get to it, even if you're only goal. Developing these good habits now is going to make it way easier for you to rank up in the long term.

- The second thing we see people doing wrong is they jump way too early to hit the ball at the correct angle. This is a huge issue because you're not even breaking the rule of making the shot easy for you by letting it drop too low before you hit it. However you would never jump this early in an actual game that would just be the pre jump of the century right there. You're getting to it pretty fast. but in a real game situation you should never decide that you're going go that early, because if you suddenly decide that you don't want to continue going for it right here. Well too bad because you've already jumped and committed, so you have to wait until you land. In a real game situation, you should be waiting till you're way closer before you jump in the air, the reason for this is so you have time to turn back even once you're this close to the ball, so you're not really getting to the ball any slower but you're also not fully committing until you're way closer. It's way less of a risk. 

Because of this, when you're doing your training packs you should be waiting on the ground to jump until the last moment before you would need to tap the brakes to sell at the ball what. It's a little bit of a complex topic but that's essentially the best way to explain it. So to recap for offensive training packs, make sure you hit the ball as early as possible but you're not jumping way to earlier for an easier angle on the shot. 

Defensive Training Packs

Most of you probably don't spend much time on defensive training packs, but if your diamond is lower you probably should. We see it so often that people at those ranks are able to make some sort of saving, but they can't place it in a safe spot for their team to follow it up, which actually leads us to the most common mistake in doing these training packs which is getting to save just to save it. The thing about defense is that getting the save is only the first step, a good save is one that puts it towards the corner or just in a spot where the opponents can't get a follow up shot, a bad save is in fact the save but it puts the ball in a position for the offense to take another easy shot. So when you're doing these defense training packs, focus on saving the ball with a specific purpose to, not only keep it from going in your goal but also touch it to either a corner or out in the air where the other team can't follow it up.

Rocket League Play Faster Custom Training Pack

Pack Code: F001-A333-AAEB-2766

Here is a super useful training pack which created by Youtuber Wayton Pilkin, to help you learn to play faster. The thing about this pack is that it forces you to hit these shots in the correct way, but there are two rules you need to follow for it to work: 

- First one is that your first touch on the ball it needs to happen on or before that final deep of the countdown. If you touch it just after that doesn't count you didn't get there fast enough. You can check yourself by turning up your audio in-game and listening for which sound comes first, the last beat of the countdown or you hitting the ball. 

- The second rule is that you need to go grab the mini pad that you're lined up with before jumping for the ball. Obviously you can't actually grab it since you have infinite , but get close enough to it to where you would have grabbed it if it were possible. So on this one for example you would need to go straight to this mini pad before you can jump up for the ball, since that's the one that you are lined up with, and then you need to make sure that your first touch on the ball happens before or on the last beep of the countdown. 

When you follow these rules on this pack, you'll notice it suddenly becomes really hard, it forces you to have super fast aerials and hit the shots the way they would actually happen in a real game, no other training packs force you to do that. Realistically you probably can't complete this whole pack following both of these rules unless you're at least champ 3, even then some of you probably can't do it.  This training pack is even really hard for most grand champs and players at the pro level could even use this to improve the game, it's that tough of a training pack. If you're only platinum or around there forget about needing to hit the ball before the last beat but still try and hit it as early as possible or else that'll just defeat the purpose.