Eye Hand Coordination
How far will practice take you? I bet adding eye-hand coordination exercises to practice will help. If you can learn to juggle, while learning to hit the Triple 20 with more consistency, I bet you will bring them both up. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Hope so. How much of throwing darts is eye-hand condition vs. how much its an exercise of muscle memory?
What's on the table? I like variety. I'm not a master of any of these, but I've been getting better.
Paddle Ball: Is straight forward. I've gotten where I can paddle the ball go a couple minutes down. I'm working on hitting it up. The key is to pull the ball back into the paddle in a repeatable linear action. You don't have to worry about hitting the ball so much, because the ball will bounce off the paddle. It's pulling the ball back in that you really have to worry about.
Juggling: Juggling is juggling. Sometimes I'm good and go for a minute, and sometimes I'm bad. An exercise of fine motor skills. Toss the ball to x, y, z coordinates, catch the ball at x, y, z coordinates. Its an exercise, using your hands to do something over and over with precision.
Kendama: The ball in cup this is kind of exactly that, only with different size cups for different trick and moves. It's called a
Kendama. You can find them at
Target and I suspect other places. For the side cups, I found you want to pull the ball up in a linear motion, instead of swinging the ball up. Pull straight through the string. It takes a little while to master. If you pull it up at an angle, the ball will spin, and that make the ball harder to catch.
Tekxyz Reflex Ball: It's like juggling, but not. It seems like goof, but not. It might be a little harder. You can look on their
website to see videos of people proficient in the skill. The ball is on an elastic string. depending on the orientation of the string to the ball when you hit it, determines where it goes. So there is a bit of timing involved. It's challenging, plus when you miss, you don't have to pick up the ball.
How do these relate? Once up pick up on the key attributes to one exercise, you pick up on how it relates to another. For example when you have to pull or push straight through. I mean you have to keep it in the X, Y plane. If you go a bit in the Z plane, it doesn't go straight anymore. If you play darts, you grip the dart (Front, Center, or Rear), then push through the center of gravity of the dart in an X, Y, Plane. Moving the wrist from the shoulder, over the elbow.
While watching a movie, take 5 to 10 minutes each. When you become better at one, you get better at the others, I can only assume it lends itself to darts.
