Not sure if someone found that before: if you pause before getting hit and use the medical kit, after unpausing you get damage but your keep your full life.

Here is an example of doing it to damage through the 2nd tornado in round 1. I don't know why the quality is bad but you get the idea

This is a nice find! This probably saves about 4 seconds.

honestly it's not difficult to get and it's at the beginning of the run. I would say it's not fair for runs done on the console since the pause button is kind of far away from the controller

I've done it with my last run and it's ok to do it on the real console, as long as the console is near by ahah