Strategies
Strategies, shortened as just "strats", typically refer to the most effective methods of moving in a room. This is commonly seen in Individual Levels, where runners try and get the fastest possible time from entering a room to exiting it. Sometimes a strat can involve the use of more than one room or encompass an out of bounds section like a Secret World. Learning strats is recommended for runners or racers of any level looking to improve their consistency or speed.
Examples of Room Strats
Prime
Echoes
Corruption
How to Learn Strats
Deciding What to Learn
When you want to improve your speed by learning a strat, you first have to decide what strat you want to learn. A good starting point is to think about rooms that you tend to struggle with in your speedruns or races. If you cannot think of any in particular, view videos of your past runs and try to spot mistakes in your movement. If you find something that could be improved, like inconsistency or difficulty, then that is a good candidate to learn a new strat for. If you feel that your current strats do not have any clear room for improvement but you still want to be faster, then it may benefit to search for Individual Levels and/or look at higher level speedruns where you can directly compare your strats to others. Many runners compile their fastest room times in Playlists that can be used to reference strats and ILs.
The Learning Process
When learning a strat, it is recommended to follow movements as closely as possible with low Urgency to get an idea of how it's done. If you are referencing a dedicated video for a strat, check the description or comments of the video to see if there are instructions or comments on how to perform the strat, as well as input displays or data listed if Practice Mod is used. After getting an understanding of all the parts of a strat, try to string them together over repeated attempts. You can use tools like save states in Dolphin or similar emulators to return to the same spot or the save/load position options in Practice Mod that can make the learning process easier. After improving your consistency at the strat, the next step is to slowly increase the Urgency of the execution, or, put more simply, doing the strat faster. This is where performing Individual Levels assists greatly, as timing your fastest rooms can give you a better idea of your speed. If you are struggling to figure out a strat, a good way to gain a better understanding is to join the Community Speedrunning Discord linked on the Main Page and ask about the strat. Sharing a clip of attempts can help greatly.
Implementation
While performing a strat repeatedly in practice is important for consistency and speed, implementing it into runs and races can be tricky, as sometimes existing muscle memory may take priority when doing runs. One method of trying to implement it into runs is by starting a run from a Segment that is before your new strat or strats and completing the run from there, possibly doing multiple runs. This can help with "rewriting" muscle memory for your strat in actual runs.