I just wonder if friendlies is really the way to go. Is it? At the start of Ultimate, I was playing like 3-4 times a week, and I struggled to break 13th/9th. It felt as if I was just playing for the sake of it, and rather than learn something, I kept comprimising my hands. It got monotonous and sucked the life out of me. As such, tournament and friendlies just feel worlds apart. I used to say practicing in friendlies doesn't really train your for tournament; only tournament does that. So what am I supposed to do? Take my time to get loose in tournament and play as comfterble as I can, potentially sacrificing results?
Practice works for normal people. They just do it and eventually get it. When I do it, all I get is sore hands and the bitter taste of a wasted 3-4 hours of my day.
To be honest, I'm not really 100% with the "just practice" thing I see pushed a lot. I don't think it's inherently bad advice, but I think it can be too broad in how it's given. If it was just simply doing the daily grind, we wouldn't see young upstarts like MKLeo, Zachray, Sparg0, Pandarian, and Bocchi, beating veterans that have almost been competing longer than they've been alive. We wouldn't see the younger generations always being better than the older ones in other fields as well.
I think it can be helpful when you are first starting out, when you have a lot of things to work on, but I think more experienced players will find diminishing returns. I think this is because once you've solidified your style, you're not going to be significantly changing things in how you play. It can get much harder to figure out small details and nuances. You might accidentally get better at whatever it is you need to, but you're taking a rather broad approach just simply playing matches over and over, and the less you need to work on, the harder it will be to accidentally stumble on something.
I think you need a more specific and deliberate approach to getting better at this point. Rather than just simply losing or playing over and over, you need to first understand what your issues are, if you don't have that, you're just going through the motions. Mindless practice isn't really useful. And rather than getting lost in the weeds over something vague and broad like neutral, try isolating specific instances and fix them instead. I don't mean whiffs here and there, I mean things that might influence various aspects of the match.
Look over your replays and start isolating the things that significantly impacted the match. Things like losing a stock, taking a large and damaging combo, or even how you managed to do those things to your opponent. When you've identified those instances, work backwards from them, and study everything that led up to that. Try to determine whether they were flukes or if there's a pattern. Once you've understood what the problem is, then you can go about trying to fix them. When you've fixed them, then you can move on to smaller problems and repeat.
Using what I said above, I've looked over most of your recent tournament sets that I could find. The one glaring issue that stood out, is you losing most of your stocks at the ledge. You normal getup quite frequently and use ledge jump as a mixup rarely, and I don't see a lot of other mixups. Overall, it seemed like you didn't really know what to do, and your opponents seem to have noticed that, and are looking out for it. That Pikachu pretty much just has to FF Fair, and he can cover all the options you take most of the time. Your toughest opponents, especially the ones that eliminate you, all seem to be specifically looking for those two options.
If you compare your Corrin sets to your Zelda ones, you don't seem to have as much of an issue, because you mixup with neutral B in addition to the normal ones. Now granted, your most recent Zelda one was three weeks ago, so I apologize if you have already addressed this, but from what i can see, this is the most obvious thing that needs addressed. Yes, you can afford to be more polished in neutral, maybe be more patient so you're not doing things like D-Tilting when they're jumping over you constantly, but what actually makes you lose, is giving your opponent an easy opportunity to take your stock. You're actually running close sets, it's just you make it easier for them to take your stock, than they make it easy for you to do the same.
Be patient on the ledge. Zelda is very good off stage, so you can drop off if you need to. Yes, you lose invincibility, but you actually open up a whole bunch of mixups. If your opponent rushes to 2-frame, simply Up-air through the stage. If they shield, you can drop down then Up-B a little past the ledge and catch them with the hitbox or use the extra jump to feint and do another Up-air.
If they are patient and wait, you can simply jump above the ledge and wait to see what they do. If they try to rush you, Nayru's Love will stuff them or Up-B's first hitbox might catch them and let you teleport on stage(make sure you're completely clear of the ledge or you will bounce up instead). If they sit and wait, you can often just simply land on stage with no fuss. There's actually quite a lot you can do.
You can ultimately take all the damage you want, but if your opponent can't close out the stock, then you have a chance to come back or close his. The longer you can stay alive, the greater chance one of Zelda's large array of kill options can land. I think if you fixed this, you'd have a pretty good chance of becoming top dog there, as you can handle them in other areas.
Once you identify issues like this, that's when doing things like playing friendlies is beneficial. It gives you a no pressure situation, where you can focus on deliberately changing what you do. You can't really stop and think about what you're are doing at a tournament, because that would slow you down, but it doesn't matter if you lose a friendly, so you can take the performance hit in hopes of improving in the long run. You have to actively think this what I'm going to do now, then actually do it until it becomes ingrained after all.
As far as pushing through the pain goes, that isn't very good advice. Pain exists for a reason, it's your body's way of telling you it's time to stop. Temporary soreness is normal, but if you have pain lasting for several days, you need to rest more. Playing Smash, isn't like playing the piano, where proper technique will allow you to play for a long time. We don't use our upper body's musculature to help lift the burden on our delicate hands. Controllers aren't ergonomic and forces our hands in unnatural positions. Other fields that extensively use their bodies ensure frequent rest. Vocalists have very strict rest requirements, and generally don't sing more than a few hours a day. That's because your vocal cords don't heal easily and can have permanent damage done through over use.
Pushing through pain and injury might be the anime way, but in real life bodies don't just completely heal. Damage to the body accumulates over time, and not taking proper care of it, is what leads to issues later in life. You don't need to spend all day practicing something to get good at it. Consistent and more efficient practice is more important. Quality over quantity so to speak.
So in other words, if you want to retain full use of your hands and not deal with chronic pain and inflammation for the rest of your life, I suggest doing something a little more sane, than what was posted above mine. As someone who does deal with chronic pain and inflammation, and has since birth, due to unrelated health issues, I can attest to it not being fun.
