Beat Your Personal Best Typing Speed

Why Racing Your Past Self Works Better Than Racing a Number

Most advice for increasing typing speed boils down to "practice more," which is true but useless on its own -- it doesn't tell you what to actually do differently during a session. Racing your own personal best does, because it hands you a concrete, achievable target: a speed you have already hit at least once, under the same conditions you're typing in right now.

Compare that to a round-number goal like "I want to type 80 WPM" picked out of thin air. If you've never actually produced 80 WPM, chasing it from session one is just guessing. Your personal best has no such problem -- it's evidence, not ambition.

Step-by-Step: Turning On PB Mode

1. Open HeroTyping and set up the exact test you want to beat your record on -- mode, word count or duration, punctuation and numbers if you use them.
2. Open Test Settings and set Pace Caret to Your PB.
3. Start typing. A second, dimmer cursor appears and moves at precisely your tracked best for this exact configuration.
4. Finish the test. If your real cursor crossed the finish line ahead of the ghost, you have a new personal best -- HeroTyping flags it on the results screen automatically.

What It Looks Like When You're Winning (or Losing)

If the ghost caret pulls ahead of your real typing position mid-test, that's information, not a verdict -- you're behind your own best pace right now, with time left to adjust. The wrong response is panicking and typing recklessly to catch up, which usually produces more mistakes and actually costs you speed. The better response is easing into your normal rhythm and letting the gap close naturally over the remaining words.

If your real cursor is pulling ahead instead, you're on track for a new best. Resist the urge to celebrate mid-sentence and lose focus -- the last few words of a test are exactly where a lapse in attention erases a lead you spent the whole test building.

A Realistic First-Week Plan

Three short sessions, not one marathon:

• Day 1: Run your usual test (say, 25 words) with PB mode on. Just see where you land against your existing best -- no pressure to beat it yet.
• Day 3: Same mode, PB mode still on. By now you'll have a feel for where in the test you tend to fall behind the ghost -- usually a specific kind of word, not the whole test evenly.
• Day 5–7: Keep racing the same PB. Most people see their first genuine new best somewhere in this window, once the pacing itself stops feeling unfamiliar.

The One Mistake That Ruins This

Chasing the ghost too hard, at the cost of accuracy, backfires specifically because of how net WPM is scored: a word typed with even one mistake contributes nothing toward your speed, even if every other letter was correct and fast. Racing recklessly and mistyping three words to save half a second on each one is a net loss, not a win. See how net vs. gross WPM is calculated for exactly why a single typo costs a whole word's credit.

The typists who reliably beat their own personal bests aren't the ones who panic-sprint when they fall behind -- they're the ones who stay accurate and let small, repeatable speed gains compound over many sessions.

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