This time 20, which is about 200 books, is how many books I read this year because I can see you. So let me show you how I became a speed reader. Last year alone, I read over 200 books, and that is while being a member student and working full time. And a huge reason for this is just being able to read really fast and be a Speed Reader. If you currently identify at all as being an average speed reader, I promise you that by using the three techniques in this post, you’ll be able to at least triple your reading speed in just a few minutes of practice and become a Speed Reader.

Now, I feel like a lot of modern books or self-help books or business books literally have more chapters than legitimate points to make. And it becomes almost a fight for me to be able to save my time and not waste it on reading a lot of fluff and useless things. Now, before I take pencils, I just want to say this is not a technique that I recommend or use myself for things like Shakespeare or philosophy or works of literature or anything nice like that.

This is for the sort of authors that have one good idea and instead of tweeting it, write a whole book on it. And it’s therefore very frustrating to go through all of these things Super, super slowly. So these Speed Reader techniques will help u out there.

And also, I use this in my exam papers or other places where speed reader techniques tend to be a huge benefit. Now, this has been a lifelong journey for me, and I think it’s something to do with the fact that my attention span has more commitment issues than mine. So when I was younger, I would have to read faster and faster and faster to kind of be able to still not be distracted or stop reading at all.

So, yeah, I just developed this really fast reading skill to be a Speed Reader, and I’ve broken it down into three steps for how to learn to read. The first step towards becoming a Speed Reader is to train your eyes. The second is to train your brain, and the third is to train your attention. And that’s why I’m going to be breaking down today.

Speed Reader Skill Starts With Training Your Eyes

Now let’s jump straight into it with the first part to be a Speed Reader, which is training your eyes. And to do this, I would use a physical book potentially that doesn’t have a lot of images or weird text or things in them, but just have normal text, which is preferably uninterrupted with pictures inside. And the reason for this is because it’s a lot easier to train depending on how fast you want to learn or depending on how good you are at the moment.

You ideally want to pick a text which is slightly larger because the smaller the text, the harder this is going to be. So hard mode, small text, easy mode, bigger text. And I quite like the size of the text in this book. I think this is perfect to try to practice then, but you might want to go for even something slightly bigger than this. To start with improving your Speed Reader skills, the first thing you want to do is to pick a book that you haven’t read.

Please don’t pick a book that you’ve been reading again and again, because if you have, remember what you’re reading, it’s not going to be fair. You’re not actually going to be kind of stretching your skills a lot. And you might be cheating unintentionally by just knowing what comes up next. So pick a book that you’ve wanted to read for a long time but you’ve never read before And you should start with establishing a baseline.

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There are between 250 to 500 words on a single page of a book, depending on how big the spacing is. So just have an estimation of how many words are on a page, and then try to see how long it takes you to read two or three pages and divide that by the number of words so you have your baseline starting rate of reading.

This is absolutely not necessary to be a speed reader. I don’t do these measurements because I don’t care. But if you want to see that you have kind of a huge change or to see where you can get to it might be fun to quantify this if you’re into that.

Okay, so this is where we’re going to start our speed reader training with our eyes to read faster. And what we’re going to be doing here is something that you can learn in literally 30 seconds now in this post. And that is to just use your peripheral vision. And what that is is basically if you’ve ever had a cranial nerve exam or in medical school, this is what we learned to do to patients is you will ask a patient to look at you straight in the eye.

So if you look at me straight in the eye, can you see my fingers move? You probably can because you’re using your peripheral vision. And the same thing for me, even though I’m staring straight at the camera, I can see my fingers move on both sides. And this is what peripheral vision is. So how this helps with improving your speed reader skills is that what I would usually do or what we usually do when we read is we put that center of our focus.

So we have the central vision, and then we have our peripheral vision at the side. So what we usually do is we use our central vision, this straight direction of our eyes on the very first word. And then we take it all the way across to the last word. And then we go again and again and again. So the core laser of our focus goes all the way from left to right, from left to right, from left to right.

And we’re not taking advantage of this peripheral vision on the side. And we can imagine that we have this huge wasted space here when our center of the focus is over here and you can see how that would take so much longer to go through the whole text. So what we want to do is instead of skipping our eyes from the start of the sentence and the line to the end, we just want to skip it throughout the middle.

So instead of going from here to here, what we’re doing is flicking through the center of the text and using our peripheral vision to read the size. So this is something you can legitimately do right now.

So if you just pick up a book from anywhere or even as you’re reading this post, if you can just see this post and pay a bit more attention off that side focus, you can start to kind of realize just how much more you’re looking at than you are normally paying attention to and that’s what you’ll be doing with the text.

So just draw two lines down the center of the page. Or you can try and just do it naturally with your eyes, but just try to flick between the middle of the page as much as possible and just really flick only in the middle and be able to read everything from the sides. So this is how you can physically do the speed reader part. But of course, we have to also account for comprehension because you can see how potentially this is just scanning the text and not actually understanding everything.

Train Your Brain

So this is what leads me to my second point towards becoming a speed reader, which is how to train your brain to be able to be a fast reader. Now, this is the biggest issue that I run into when I’m trying to teach people in person how to be a speed readers. I’ve done it to my family and they always say the same thing, oh, I didn’t understand anything or I understand things so much worse. I can’t do this. And this is where I start to get a bit frustrated and I’m like, no, it’s normal, it’s good, it’s fine.

You just have to do that a lot longer and then you get over it. So basically when we’re reading very slowly, it’s obviously a lot easier to comprehend everything that we are reading. But when we are speed readers, there will be a huge amount of comprehension loss, which is basically reading things but not actually absorbing what we are kind of seeing.

So this is what we need to start getting used to being a good speed reader and what we need to start challenging. If we’re always reading at our 100% comprehension, we won’t be able to read faster and faster because the moment that we start to not understand things, we’re just going to stop and go back to our original speed.

So I think we need to use the text that we are not studying or that’s just a practice paper or a practice book and we just need to practice reading at 70 or 80% comprehension. So yes, I’m literally saying you want to read something while you’re only able to understand 70% of it. And when you’re at that stage, then you can start challenging yourself. Okay, how can I make myself understand this better? And this is where I’m going to get to my top tip to be a good speed reader, which is visualization.

This is so important. So no matter what the speed that you’re reading at, sometimes even when I’m reading very slowly and I’m just lying in bed, I’m sure we’ve all had this feeling where we just read a paragraph, it might happen very slowly and at the end of it someone asks us what we read and we’re just like, I have no clue. We just looked at the text, and we technically read it, but we don’t understand everything. And this happens at every single speed. It’s just so much easier to do at a faster speed.

So the key to this is to visualize what you are reading. So you’re not looking at the text, you’re not scanning the text. You’re properly interpreting this as a mental image in your mind and you’re constantly building this image as you are reading. Visualization for reading is absolutely so, so important. It helps me so much with my comprehension at any speed and it helps me so much with my speed reader learning.

Every time that I’m reading something, I’m drawing a mental image. And of course, if I’m doing this in science, it will mean that I have to read very, very slowly to kind of picture the molecules or what I imagine the molecules to be. But if I’m reading a literary book or if I’m reading a business book, it’s so much easier for me to visualize these things, which allows me to go at very fast speeds. So I would challenge you to learn to visualize what you are reading about. Anything can be visualized and will help you to improve your speed reader skills.

Like molecules, atoms can be visualized. Literally, anything that we are reading is very easy to draw a mental picture of. I honestly think this is why I love reading so much. It’s kind of like seeing a movie. But even better, if you visualize, then you’ll be able to comprehend so much more.

So again, you want to use a book that you haven’t read because you should not be cheating at this stage. But you want to try to build a picture of whatever is written in the text and then try to do this as fast as possible as you are reading. And you will realize that eventually, even though you are maintaining this really fast speed with peripheral vision, you are able to build this picture in your head and you might get up to 90 or more percent comprehension of what you are actually reading. In this speed reader training, your brain part involves firstly, visualizing everything that you are reading. Secondly, being comfortable with comprehension loss.

But challenging this very harshly at every single stage and always trying to train yourself to read at a level where you are at 70 or 80% comprehension because that is how you can get faster and faster at what you are doing. And lastly, it’s such a good train for your focus because when you’re doing this, you want to be in a very comfortable position.

You want to be in a space that is potentially quiet so you can focus 100% on what you are doing. And I found speed reader to be such a good way for me to train my focus, which is usually quite scattered. But through training myself to be a speed reader, I have gotten very good at being able to laser focus on something when I need to.

And you do need this laser focus because otherwise you’re just playing around with your eyes rather than actually involving your brain and comprehending what the hell is happening on paper.

Train Your Focus

And that’s where we get to our third point on our speed reader training, which is training our focus and maintaining this exercise without exhaustion. And I will say it is genuinely the most tiring thing in the world. If you are speed reader and reading really, really fast for kind of like an hour or a prolonged period of time, it genuinely feels like someone just took out your brain and beat it with a baseball bat because it is so tiring. It takes so much energy and so much focus, and it leaves you so drained in the end that sometimes I guess it’s kind of not worth it almost.

And it would be worth it to read a book slower. But for example, if I’m in an exam, I think it’s much more worth it for me to speed read through my exam paper because I know it’s only going to be two or 3 hours, and then after that, I can be as hard as I want. But I’ve been able to do this a lot more efficiently, or sometimes for a book, I’m like, oh, do I want to waste 5 hours on this horrible book, or do I want to speed read it in an hour and then kind of take the 4 hours to do something fun? But I have the same amount of information.

So these are the kinds of classics that I’m making when I’m a speed reader. But yes, it is extremely, extremely tiring, which means that the more that we can adjust our environment to make this more comfortable for us, the better. The first thing I will say is don’t try to do this with books that have really, really small writing.

If they’re physical books with really small text, that will be so much more exhausting. So I would recommend actually using a Kindle or an iPad to read or a computer to read this as much as possible because on all these devices you can very easily adjust the brightness and also adjust the size of the text. So the bigger the text, the easier it is to speed read and use our peripheral vision.

So I would say ideally if you want to speed read a book and you know in advance that this is going to be a bit of a crappy book that you want to be through, then I would prefer to buy that on a Kindle rather than buy the physical book version because then I know I can speed read it a lot faster. That’s the first thing to adjust the screen brightness.

So either when it’s very dark to have it to a dark screen so it doesn’t tear out my eyes or when it’s daylight to have it to quite a bright screen. So again, I can actually see what I’m reading is really helpful. And also lastly, this is a bit of a cheating thing, but it really helps with speed reading and that is to spread the attention across many of my senses.

So what this means is that sometimes if I want to speed read the book, I will also buy the audible version of the book or I will buy the audiobook too. So I will have the physical book in front of me and I will also be listening to the audiobook.

Because what that means is it really helps me maintain my focus because for example, if I’m speed reading and I just get tired, it’s very easy for me to just do this and leave. But if I have an audiobook, it’s so much fast to kind of pause the audiobook at the right spot and then take a tiny break and then start again.

So it kind of forces me to not stop, which I mean sounds a bit toxic, but it’s all self-interested, so it’s fine. So I will just play the audiobook while I’m reading and that will help me speed and breathe through the book as fast as possible. Also, things like using your finger to trace what you are reading might really help to be a speed reader.

But I think the main thing here to be a speed reader is using a large size text and that genuinely makes the biggest difference. And also using an audiobook at the same time also really helps kind of maintain that focus for prolonged periods of time. And that’s, of course, do take breaks because it’s really tiring. It’s genuinely almost like a physical sport and competitive activity. So it’s not just an easy casual thing that you’re doing at the side.

It’s actually quite hard to do. So breaks are really, really important. Don’t try to speed reader books back to back because you will literally Fry out your brain but do it at small periods at a time. I would recommend just trying to exercise for 15 minutes once or twice will genuinely really increase your reading speed and help to improve your speed reader skills. So in that case, if you’re actually into this for a competitive reason, then potentially measuring your speed right now and what it could become in the future will really help see that you’ve made a difference.