Five Ways to Liven Up Your Practice Drills
One of the main reasons that most pool players don’t practice much is that they claim it’s boring. They say they just can’t keep their head in the game running drills of any kind. Consequently, they go back to just banging balls, or worse, just playing.
What follows are some of the ways you can adjust your practice sessions to try to give you an edge; something that will help you enough so that you’ll stay at it. I’m not trying to kid anyone here, practice is still not going to be as much fun as playing, but if you try these tips you will find that you can stick with it much longer, and with every minute you practice you advance your game much faster than you would with the same amount of play. Success will eventually become its own reward, but only after prolonged effort. These tips might get you over the hump.
Keep Records
By keeping records of your performance you do several things that can keep your interest higher. First, you give yourself a target every time you begin, to beat your best, to beat yesterday’s score, or to beat your average are several approaches.
Success will eventually become its own reward, but only after prolonged effort. These tips might get you over the hump.
Another thing you do is give yourself an opportunity to see your improvement over time in a clear and undeniable way. Seeing your success in black and white can provide the incentive to stick with it, just like continuing weight loss makes it easier to stick to your diet.
Third, by giving yourself specific targets, known to be attainable, you help put pressure on yourself. Pressure you simply must learn to cope with if you are to win anything but the friendliest of games.
Last, by keeping track of your workouts you bring objectivity to your game. We have a tendency to see our own games through rose colored glasses, and hard facts help keep us from glossing over weaknesses. Though a topic for another post, I believe you should keep track of all your playing performances too.
Practice More Often, but for Shorter Periods
Don’t try to get your practice done in one marathon multi-hour session. Try to break it into smaller pieces, but do some every time you go to the table. Sure some guys will tease you when you first start to practice instead of play, but that will stop fairly quickly. In a little time you’ll hear people say things like “man, I wish I had his discipline” or “I should be doing that, or I’ll never make APA 6.” Over time people will come to know you as a serious student of the game. Better players will be more willing to play against you because they can see you’re working to get better. More of them will be willing to pass on good information because they know you’ll both appreciate it, and actually benefit from it.
Reward Yourself for Achieving Goals
Say you’ve got your eye on a new cue. Don’t just buy it, give yourself a target, and buy it only after achieving the goal. Maybe you’re working on straightening out your stroke with Stroke Builder 1 and Stroke Builder 2. You might tell yourself that you can have the cue when you’ve run 50 out of 50 in each of the two drills. This is tough but doable, but not without working it pretty hard. And when you finally accomplish the goal, you’ll not only have a new stick, you’ll have a grooved stroke to go with it.
Think both long term and short term here. A long term goal might be to run 30 balls in straight pool or to break and run twice in one league night. The bigger the milestone, the more likely you are to remember it, but you want to make sure that you associate the achievement with the effort you put in to get there. That will make it sweeter, since you’ll know you’ve earned it rather than lucked into it, and it will provide a constant reminder to you that practice works.
Short term goals are more to keep you interested a little longer and a little more focused in any one session. For example, if you beat one of your records in a drill you’ve done for more than 5 sessions, buy yourself that treat on the way home. Just don’t make every small reward food or you’ll plump up as your skills increase; not what we’re going for here.
You want to make sure that you associate the achievement with the effort you put in to get there.
Keep the size of the reward appropriate to the size of the achievement, and keep them pool related. A particularly good one is to reward yourself with another lesson from your favorite instructor only when you’ve reached a certain level of proficiency on the homework drills she gave you. A hidden benefit here is that this behavior (the improvement not the goal/reward process) will make you one of the teacher best students and increase their personal interest in you since all teachers are rewarded by seeing progress in their students.
Give Your Practice Sessions Some Variety
There are innumerable ways to practice. For any given weakness there are at least several ways to work on it. And sadly, most of us have more than one weakness. Change up your routine by not only changing which drills you do for the weakness you’re working on, but spend some time working another part of your game, too. If you’re working line up drills to hone your draw and follow distance control, allot some of your training time to a position drill or a pattern play exercise. The change of pace will do you a world of good. You’ll be able to approach the second exercise with much more enthusiasm and focus than if you were moving to another type of drill that also focused on follow and draw distance control.
You’ve got to give each exercise time to work, though, so stick with each one at least 15 minutes, with 20 or 30 being better. And come back to the drills every session for awhile, to maximize your improvement and your retention of that improvement. You don’t want to do all this work only to see it disappear in a week or two because you hadn’t really cemented the knowledge into your brain.
Compete with a Friend / Training Partner
Try a session with a friend where you compete to see who can do the drills the best, or who has improved the most since the last time you did this. Maybe you meet up once a week or once a month to compare training notes, swap stories, etc. and then you have a drill based competition. You can provide tips and feedback to each other, suggest new routines for working on trouble spots, provide encouragement when needed and help each other to progress. Knowing you’ll have to face your training partner will help you stick to your program, since you know he’s sticking to his.
So let’s hear it from you out there. What do you do to keep your mind in the game and keep up the discipline to practice regularly?
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5 Responses to “Five Ways to Liven Up Your Practice Drills”
9Baller
- December 5th, 2008
Cool site. I think boredom is a big problem, I know it is with me. I try limiting each drill to 15 minutes and the whole routine to one hour. It won’t make me a pro, but it’s something I can do every day.
Argent
- December 30th, 2008
You have the best pool blog I’ve ever seen. I will be back to read more.
Thanks.
John Biddle
- December 30th, 2008
Thanks, guys, it’s great to be appreciated. How about letting me know what you particularly like and don’t like and maybe I can do more/less of it.
Psychology Essay
- January 4th, 2010
Actually, I am not keeping records.
Pool Tables
- August 31st, 2010
Yeah, the first one, keeping records, is probably the most important. It’s so much easier to track your own personal statistics if you’re really paying attention to them by writing them down. And you’re totally right, spreading your practices out instead of making them denser is so much better for your game.
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