Get a stopwatch or a clock and freestyle while watching the clock. Pass the mic when your time is up.
Make it quick: If you’ve got a lot of people in your session you need to keep the mic moving, so pick a short time frame. Some freestylers need a certain amount of time to really get their groove, so it’s good to practice short time limits and finish your bit in five, 10 or 20 seconds. Sometimes you only get one brief shot at the mic. No warmup, no second chance. So make it count.
Marathon: Look at a clock and pick an amount of time: five minutes, 30 minutes, one, two or eight hours. Don’t stop freestyling until your time limit is up. Then keep going!
Tag team: With two or more people you can take breaks while the others are freestyling, so as a group you can keep freestyling for a long time, passing off the mic. Try targets like two, four, eight or 12 hours.
Of course, it’s not necessarily how much you say, but how you say it. Nevertheless, pushing your freestyle limit is a good skill to have if you’re on the mic and your partner falls of the stage, or if you’re on the stage with a lot of MCs.
One world record freestyle was over nine hours, held by MC Chiddy Bang who beat out former title champ M-Eighty. Everybody should try to go nonstop for at least 30 minutes. You can break for as long as it takes to take a drink of water, about three seconds. One of the amazing things about this practice is that after a while you get too tired or too bored to think about how you are freestyling, and another part of your brain takes over and just keeps going. At this point you start to attain a kind of freestyle nirvana. Amazing words just flow out of you when while your fatigued mind becomes relaxed and peaceful. You’ll wish you could always be like this. If you start to falter, just relax, and keep it flowing!