Pool (6 blogmarks)

“Usually the boring stuff is the most helpful.”

In response to a question asking essentially, “are there any core/fundamental drills for pool players to get better, akin to deadlifts and squats in lifting?”

Yes there are. For the most part single shot drills where you focus on fundamentals. Mighty X is one of them. Usually boring stuff is the most helpful.

This is a challenging drill for practicing moving the ball across the width of the table using the long rails with small adjustments in english on somewhat steep cut shots.

This is a level-based system from Novice to Pro that allows you to evaluate where you are currently at in your ability to run out a table. You can use it to check your ability now and then later to measure progress over time.

A couple different methods, drills, and tools for working on sinking a ball and moving the cue to a specific target on the table.

Here is what on redditor suggests as a better alternative to Target Pool.

a good drill for practicing frozen on the rails shots and good position / speed control

Tor Lowry’s stroke drill is to stop playing pool. No shooting balls or playing games until you finish the drill. It may take a week.

The idea being that you need to force yourself to completely overhaul your stroke by fully focussing on consistency that gets baked into your muscle memory.

You [put] a ball on the headstring at the top of the table. And you shoot it like a direct scratch straight into a corner pocket on the other side of the table. You do that 1,000+ times. You can use object balls as cueballs for this and go through 16 at a time. But the important thing is that each one is treated like a real shot in terms of fundamentals.

Nothing fancy. 1000+ center ball shots right into the heart of the pocket. Nothing else to distract your focus from applying all the fundamentals to each of those 1000+ shots.

Set up the ball. Stand behind the shot (scratch direct to the pocket). Plant your back foot on the shooting line. Step your front foot forward as you get down and place your stick on the shooting line. Dress the tip up to the cueball for a center ball strike. Couple practice strokes. Pause. Few more micro strokes within an inch of the call. Pause. Easy pull back. Smooth transition. Controlled and assertive delivery. And you must follow through at least 6” past the cueball resting the tip on the table at the finish. That last sentence is the most important. Put a sticker on the table of where the tip must finish if you need to.

This is why we're just hitting scratch shots. There are a dozen aspects of the pre-shot and shot routine that we instead need to be focused on.

It does not feel intuitive to me that a center-ball shot is going to result in follow-through that leaves the cue tip resting on the table. That feels like a big adjustment. It probably helps to cement a full, smooth follow-through.

Here’s what you’re doing. You’re committing good fundamentals to muscle memory. And you’re doing it through repetition. And you can’t skip it. You can’t say you’re already good on it. You can’t know this, you have to earn it. Just like my stroke is garbage left handed. I can’t “know” my stroke to be better left handed. It takes repetition just like a pianist practicing scales slowly so that later on they can play fast and intuitively. You need to grind at repetition to make the mind-body connection of intention to brain to nerves to muscles to be well worn in to muscle memory that you can’t do it wrong.

Repetition of intentional, deliberate practice to unlearn bad practices and solidify good ones. This way you can eventually shoot well with muscle memory rather than thinking through every granular piece of a good stroke.