Eye Hand Coordination

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.

He's Back ...It's like the first day of school all over again

 

He's Back ...It's like the first day of school all over again

The last 9 months have given me time to think about a lot of different ideas. How does a person get better playing darts? Sure you can practice 5 hours a day, that will get you so far, but what are you doing to improve the thing throwing the darts? The body and mind are easy to neglect in a sport like darts. After getting home late after drinking and eating bar food, who want s go beyond practice?

What are you going to do with your life? With the passing of Len Dawson at the age of 89 had me thinking. Sure that's 36 years older than me, but lets look at it the other way around. Lets go 36 years back. That's 1986, just 1 year before I graduated high school. That's not that long really. I mean I started throwing dart in 1992. That's all considering I live to the ripe old age of 89. I don't want to look back at my life thinking, I should have really applied myself. Lets see what happens in 2023.

Basically I'm going to explore some ideas and document it here. What do I have to work on. These are from an online doubles tournament last Sunday. If you notice the 501 is way off balance with my cricket. By looking at my cricket numbers, I should be averaging around 40 in 501, not 10 less hovering around 30. 

I don't know what it is with the bullseye of late, but some days, I just don't hit it. I don't know if it's because I practice on a steel tip board, and the larger soft tip bullseye creates the illusion I'm closer to the board. I mean the bullseye is a lot bigger than a triple. I hit more 9 marks than hat tricks. Who does that. ...I don't know, but lets figure it out.

Low Tech Practice Idea.

Why do we practice, to become better? How do we become even better, better; We practice better? You know the old cliché, “Don’t practice harder, practice smarter. You practice, write down the results of the practice. Take that data, and then establish benchmarks. Then raise those benchmarks over time. For example I have a routine to throw 100 darts at the 20, and count how many times I hit the triple.

 I used to get a piece of paper and write 3, 6, 9, …to 33 (3darts/1round x 33 =99. Yeah 99 isn’t 100 but close enough). I didn’t really like having to stop, pick up a pen, then write down the result of each round. Then one day I was going through an office supply store and found those tally counter things. It occurred to me I could buy 2. Mark one “Rounds” and the other “Hits”. This way I didn’t have to stop to pick up a pen between rounds, the tally counters would do the calculations for me. 

Then at the end of the practice drill write down the result. This is a lot easier.

The 2019 Missouri Open and From Here Knows Where.

The 2019 Missouri Open and From Here Knows Where.

The 2019 Missouri Open is in the books. The results should be posted here soon. http://www.cmdadarts.org/ 

So what were my results ...in order.

Saturday
Mixed Triples Cricket: Top 4 (Made a critical error that probably cost us going to finals),
Singles 501: Out First Round (I played well, maybe too welI, busted 98 in leg 3)
Doubles 501: Top 4 (Starting to get tired, missed a lot of darts at doubles)
Singles Cricket: Didn't play (like I said, I got tired. There is more to be gained tomorow with a big dinner and proper rest)

Sunday
Mixed Triples 601: 2nd Place (Like I said, with proper rest came the finals)
Doubles Cricket: Top 8 (We just got outplayed my Eric Gregory and his partner)

From here knows where? The thing about life is, it's equally unfair for everybody. Some people are born with more talent than others. That's no excuse to not work harder than others to achive the same end. Life deals some of us a longer road to hoe, so be it.

I learned a lot from bicycle racing. I'm going apply some of those training stratagies to darts. Periodization is a form of scheduling training in phases. These phases are based upon increasing and decreasing both volume and intensity. For example you want to focus on the Governor's Cup in August. You want to develop a plan to peak around that weekend.

For the most part: as you increase intensity, you must decrease volume; conversely as you increase volume, you must decrease intensity. To put it another way. You can't practice all the time, and never compete; And you can't compete all the time, and never practice. There has to be a ratio between the two.

Macrocycles: Year Long Plan
Mesocycles: Develop a plan to achieve a certain goal
Prep Period:
  Base Period:
Build Period:
Peak Period:
Recovery Period:
Microcycle: Training Week:

Also you are going to see, I'm going to employ an amount of physical fitness. Sure it's a game of eye-hand coordination, but when does it hurt to be stronger and faster with more endurance. My example is when the home run race was going on between Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGuire. What the record for home run each each is around 50, then all of a sudden 3 guys emerge hitting 60+ a year, then it was revealed they were taking steroids. AS far as baseball pitchers go, who are the best? Mostly Bigger heavier guys. Who are the best dart players? Bigger heavier guys.

YOU WILL NOT LAUGH! YOU WILL NOT CRY! YOU WILL LEARN BY THE NUMBERS! I WILL TEACH YOU! -Gunnery Sergeant Hartman

Now for some pictures I took along the way that have nothing to do with darts.