Best Warm-Up Routine for Valorant

Follow this warm-up routine to become more consistent in your Valorant matches 

You logged into Valorant and started playing a competitive match right away. It turns out your aim is all over the place, and sloppy movement is getting you killed easily. If this sounds like you, it’s time to adopt a warm-up routine before playing Valorant ranked.

Warming up before your matches helps you be more consistent while aiming, improves your movement and makes you more confident in your gunfights. Thankfully, Valorant has an in-game practice area called Range, where you can shoot bots and sharpen up your flicking, tracking and movement. 

We looked at the practices of pro players, such as Ayaz “nAts” Akhmetshin, Nikita “Derke” Sirmitev and several other talented names, to compile this warm-up routine below.

Valorant Warm-Up: Flicking

Most of us like to head to a quick deathmatch to improve our aim before a ranked match. Masters Berlin winner nAts prefers to practice in Range even before the deathmatch. 

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There are several aspects of aiming in Valorant, including flicking, tracking and counter-strafing. We’ll dedicate this section to flicking, as it tends to get the blood flowing for the rest of the warm-up. 

Flicking refers to moving your crosshair quickly to a target. You can practice this in a few ways:

• Shooting still bots in Range
• Practicing Streak by eliminating 100 bots
• Doing the Speed challenge with Medium or Hard mode

Pro Tip: When practicing flicking, it’s better to be accurate than fast. Focus on putting your crosshair on the bots’ heads before shooting. You will be slower, but it will train your aim to be crisp.

Valorant Warm-Up: Tracking

Flicking will help you to shoot down enemies quickly, but when the opponents are using their movement to avoid your shots, it’s essential to track their heads perfectly.

New Valorant players overtrain flicking and usually don’t pay attention to practicing their tracking skills. This leads to them whiffing their shots at moving enemies. 

There are many aim training apps to practice tracking. Thankfully, you can do it in Valorant’s Range by:

• Putting bots on “Strafe” mode and tracking them
• Tracking and shooting the drones outside the shooting range

Valorant Warm-Up: Counter Strafing

After practicing flicking and tracking, it’s time to focus on counter-strafing. 

Counter-strafing is the practice of moving, stopping, shooting and repeating until you land a death blow. To perform this, move left or right using A and D on your keyboard when in a duel. Then stop your movement and shoot. Keep repeating as you stop, shoot and move until you kill the opponent.

Practice this on the bots in Range. 

Pro Tip: Make sure your first shot is always accurate after you stop your movement. 

Valorant Warm-Up: Deathmatch

Deathmatch is the last step of your aim warm-up in this routine, where you get into a regular Deathmatch lobby (not Team Deathmatch) to learn crosshair placement and practice your flicking, tracking and counter strafing. 

Pro Tip: Again, focus on being accurate over being fast. You may get killed way too many times, but it is a learning process that will lead to faster aiming the more you practice.

Advanced Valorant Warm-Up: Agents

Abilities in Valorant can be as necessary as your aim, as proper utilization of them can lead to easy victories. Practicing different Agents can be a smart move alongside your aim warm-ups to become a more consistent player.

Here are a few ways you can practice the abilities of different Agents:

• Custom Game: Load up a custom game to practice lineups, Raze movements and skill jumps.
• Team Deathmatch: Team Deathmatch allows you to practice your abilities on other players in a deathmatch setting. It helps you warm up with Duelist Agents like Raze, Jett or Reyna.

Along with aim routines, physical warm-ups can help to get your blood flowing. If you have been sitting for too long while playing, make sure to walk around and do some jumping jacks to get back in the flow.

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