How to click faster

• Rest your forearm on the desk and hold the mouse lightly. A tight grip tires the hand within seconds.
• Click with the fingertip, with the finger hovering just above the button, and let it bounce back instead of pressing hard.
• Keep your wrist level and relaxed, not bent up or pressed on the edge of the desk.
• Pick a mouse whose button you can press with little force. A light button with a short travel is easier to click quickly.
• On a touch screen, tap lightly with the pad of your finger and keep the same spot. A tap that is too short may not register.

Clicks per second depends on how long you click. In a run of 1 sec you can burst without tiring. Over a run of 100 sec your hand slows and the number falls. If you want a burst, practise short runs. If you want to hold a pace, practise longer ones, and the pace that lasts is lower than the burst.

Whichever you choose, compare a run only with runs of the same length on the same device. A short run always gives a higher number than a long one, so a mixed comparison tells you nothing.

These ranges come from click-test sites that publish neither a method nor their data, so they show what people report and not what is possible or normal. A range is not a goal. The page on the average clicks per second says more about why the ranges are weak evidence.

The higher techniques ask more of your hand. Learn regular clicking well before you try another, and check the rules of any game or server you play, because some of them ban certain ways of clicking and many ban programs that click for you.

1. Shake out your hands and take a first run of the CPS test of 5 sec to warm up. Your first run is often your slowest.
2. Take two or three more runs of the same length, with a few seconds of rest between them.
3. Look at the second-by-second counts under your result. A fast first second that fades means you started too hard, so try an even pace.
4. Change one thing at a time, such as your grip, your finger or the height of your hand, and see whether your results move.
5. Stop when your hand starts to ache or your numbers drop, and come back another day.

Compare the middle of your runs across several days and not your single best run. A single best run says more about luck than about you.

Fast clicking is a sprint for small muscles. Take breaks, shake your hand loose between runs and stop if it hurts. Jitter and drag clicking in particular strain the hand and forearm, and drag clicking is also hard on the mouse's switch. If a pain stays after you stop, rest and see a doctor. No score is worth a sore hand.

A run with more than 30 clicks in a second is faster than one hand reaches, and it is kept but not compared. So is a run whose clicks are spaced exactly evenly, like a machine's. That is a statement about the run and not about you: it most often means that several fingers or a click-repeating program took part.

If you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, the spacebar clicker counts presses of the space bar in the same way.