quiet eye

Linking to a "Pocket" article here, hopefully not an issue. I have never understood just what Pocket is.

Anyway, we talk about quiet eye now and then. Here is an article on it and I see some familiar names from other discussions. I don't know if this article is recycled or not.

I do find it interesting that "quiet eye" is equally needed for things like golf where your target is holding still, and some of the sports where your target is coming at you at around a hundred miles an hour.

Hu

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-athletes-need-a-quiet-eye?utm_source=pocket-newtab

two parter

LakeMan linked the first of a two part video although the video's didn't make that plain. The second part is on the driving range, where SofaKing got ratted out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGjwkJwXCGc

It is interesting to take what we can learn from one sport and use it for something else. Nobody is spending a bunch of time and money for research towards pool. I think there is a little spent on snooker. Anyway, we can borrow from things that seem pretty far distant sometimes. Golf and bowling seem closest to pool of the sports likely to be studied, or so it seems to me offhand.

Years ago I was training horses for the track. Horses are very big and very delicate, makes them lousy laboratory animals and comparatively little research was done on them even when horse racing was much more thriving. My solution was to study human sports medicine where there were millions or billions spent and lots of research. One of the main things I hit on was interval training. I kept my own council and my primary pony went nine for nine that season!

My best horse was a sprinter, and from my pool days I was a bit of a hustler. I put barrel plates on the horses for a number of reasons, the biggest being they looked like working shoes and performed almost like the cleated aluminum racing plates.

Horse racing on the brush tracks was fun, no holds barred. Open doping, batteries, anything somebody could think of to make a horse go faster. I limited myself to training, good feed and supplements, a little B-12 at the right time.

Hu

can't remember but it has been a long time

Sofaking said:

I think the shooting sports are the most applicable to this type of training. In fact, I would be shocked if top level shooters in every discipline from Palma to Trap to IPSC have not already explored this.

Click to expand...

A friend shoots trap pretty seriously and I think it put his son through college. Asking him about quiet eye might be an excuse to say hello. I have never shot trap, don't remember if I tried it or not, certainly didn't pursue it at all. Shot a little skeet. I was trying to stand and get my gun up quick enough to shoot the pigeons on the center stage, the one stage I missed consistently. A range bum showed me to fold my knees as I swung the gun up and I don't think I missed those pigeons ever again. I didn't really see the pigeon after it was flung, at least not consciously. The pigeon was flung, it was powdered. I wasn't aware of much happening in between.

I used to talk to the Palma guys every night, another group I lost track of. I was having an ongoing gentlemanly discussion with one of the guys when he mentioned he would be gone ten days or so. When he got back he had won a match at the world championships. Still thought I was right about the technical discussion but I let it drop! :thumbup:

I don't know about the IPSC guys, I don't think they did a couple decades ago but it has been a while. I used to compete with and talk to Jerry Miculek's brother Donny. Aside from his IPSC championships Jerry was the best in the world with a revolver for decades and quicker than a snake. Donny said that when he talked to Jerry about picking up targets and such, particularly moving targets, Jerry couldn't explain it, he just did it. Would have to hook him up to machinery to see how he did it.

I used to short track a bit, mostly late models on dirt. Before I started driving myself I asked maybe a dozen good drivers how they managed to run inches off of each other's bumpers lap after lap. None of them could give me an answer. After I had a little experience I did the same thing, far too close together for reaction times to explain things yet a pack of cars became like one organism flowing around the track. Was something like quiet eye involved? I remembered the question well when others asked me about it. "You just do it" is a terribly poor answer but all I had.


I appreciate all who have posted in this thread and hope it isn't done yet. I doubt we get definitive answers about exactly how to apply quiet eye to pool other than not jittering back and forth as I have seen recommended and tried. "Look at the cue ball on the back stroke, the object ball on the forward stroke!" One of the many bits of advice I have tried that didn't work at all for me!

Hu