Most people practise clicking by clicking a lot, which is how most people fail to improve. The gains do not come from raising the peak. They come from closing the longest gap — the widest pause between two presses inside a run.
The session
Twelve minutes, twice a day, is enough. Any more and the click fatigue threshold does the training for you, in the wrong direction.
- Warm up for 30 seconds at roughly half your best rate. Loose, no tension.
- Run three 10-second sets, with a full 60 seconds of rest between them.
- Record the longest gap from each set — not the CPM. The gap readout is the one that responds to training.
- Stop at the first forearm ache. That is the fatigue threshold for the day, and pushing through it costs you tomorrow’s session.
Why the gap and not the total
A run of 72 clicks in 10 seconds is 432 CPM whether the presses were evenly spaced or arrived in two bursts with a 400-millisecond hole in the middle. The even run is repeatable. The bursty one is a good day.
Closing the gap from 180 ms to 140 ms on a 10-second run adds roughly 60 CPM without your peak rate changing at all. That is where almost all realistic improvement comes from.
What to expect
40 to 80 CPM across two weeks is a normal result. If you gain 200, something other than your hand changed — a new mouse, a different surface, or a switch that has started to chatter.
If you gain nothing in two weeks, the limiter is usually hardware rather than practice. A trackpad caps you well below a mouse no matter how the training goes.
One rule that is not about speed
Rapid clicking is a physical activity with a real injury profile. Ache is information. Sharp or persistent pain, tingling, or anything that lasts past the session is a reason to stop for a week, not to change technique.