New to Speed Runs, where do I start?

Hello, everyone. I apologize in advance if this is in the wrong section, but I feel that my question is general enough to be posted in the General Zelda Chat section.

It was only just recently that I've been interested in attempting to do speed runs for any of the Zelda games and I feel like trying out Twilight Princess first. I'm aware of the resources available to me, such as techniques, videos, routes, and known sequence breaks, but my general question is: what should I do before attempting a full speed run? How did you use your time before you did your first speed run?

Should I get to a particular point in the game and practice a sequence break continuously? Or practice a technique until it's second nature? Or do I attempt a route and keep trying until I beat it to just start a new one and repeat the process?

I'm just asking for a general approach and asking for advice as someone who is new to the speed run scene. I have beaten all the games by normal means, (minus Minish Cap, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Swords), but only once. And I would love to beat them faster and differently. I appreciate your responses and advice.

You should probably start with the easiest, most time saving tricks.  Long Jump Aattak (LJA) and early City in the Sky are both pretty easy and save loads of time, so you should probably start by practicing those.  Early snowpeak is also pretty easy, but I can't remember if this saves time without early master sword.  Early master sword does save a very large amount of time, however its pretty hard for beginners so you might want to save that for latter.  Practice LJA and early CitS, and maybe early snowpeak, and the various small timesavers inside dungeons, then try your first run.  After that, if you are feeling good about your skills, you can try stuff like early master sword and zora armor skip and anything else you think you might be able to do and try again.

the easiest game to learn is MM.

all you need to do is learn how to hover and thats it

to hover you get isg
then hover

I would start by just playing through the speed run route trying to do as much of it as possible. If you have to take breaks or stop to look up how to do tricks (or learn them along the way), that's ok. The idea would be to just get a feel for what it is going to take to do the route. Then I would look back and evaluate what took a long time to get, what parts were troublesome, and go practice those the most.

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Spirit Swords

Spirit Tracks or Four Swords.
Oh and welcome to the Zelda Speed Run forums.

Runnerguy2489 wrote

I would start by just playing through the speed run route trying to do as much of it as possible. If you have to take breaks or stop to look up how to do tricks (or learn them along the way), that's ok. The idea would be to just get a feel for what it is going to take to do the route. Then I would look back and evaluate what took a long time to get, what parts were troublesome, and go practice those the most.

I think this is the best advice in the thread.

Thanks again for the responses! I really appreciate the help. And I feel welcomed, thank you for that. =)

I'll go ahead and take Runnerguy2489's advice and simply run through the route, leaving out some of the more advanced time savers for a later date. (EMS always looks like it's executed with simplicity in videos and I wanted to do that first, but wow...)

I'll ask questions in the proper sections as they arise and will make periodic checks on this thread if there's anymore tips someone can offer

EMS is a relatively easy trick to pull off, and there's quite a bit of Lakebed Temple hijinks that you miss out on by skipping it. BIT should be skipped though, not because it's hard to pull off (it isn't), but because if you're playing the GCN version, you have to pull off a Rupee Dive to beat the game...

Well that, and your not really missing anything route wise if you skip it.

It isn't much advice but when I started I didn't know that TAS was paused frame by frame and was really hard as BALLS in real time, so my only real advice other then keep trying, is don't try anything in any video with TAS in it, it will only end in disaster... and a LOT of anger.