nrhoades...What is that caused you to realize that you weren't "following through", and what are you doing now, that's different?
Scott Lee
http://poolknowledge.com
It started with realizing that, when playing pool with other people, my performance would deteriorate after 30-45 minutes of playing.
I would also notice that even playing by myself, my performance would fluctuate every couple hours or so. First few hours things go well, then I start missing all my shots, then it comes back.
So before this realization, there were two instances where other players decided to give me advice. They both said on separate occasions that my shooting elbow wasn’t still… it was dipping.
That stuck in my mind. The only thing I could think to do was to assume my inconsistency problem was due to my elbow moving. It also made some sense to me that the forearm should act EXACTLY like a pendulum.
So for a few years, I tried all different variations of shooting with actively concentrating on making sure my elbow floated in space without moving. I did this while thinking about eye dominance, standing up, leg position, head tilt, whatever. Every time I tried something new, I would have success for a few days… then I’d lose it again.
After years of this I started to believe that pool was simply a hard game and requires constant calibration to play properly.
Later on, I watched a few snooker videos, and saw how still their bodies were AFTER the shot was over. I tried it, and by looking in a mirror saw that my body was moving after the stroke was complete. I remember trying so hard for the next 5 minutes to keep my body perfectly still after the stroke, and I just couldn’t do it. I had some sort of bad habit built in there.
I figured out that my body developed a reflex to hitting myself in the chin with the cue, because I forced my elbow to never move. The reflex automatically tensed up my chest and my arm right before I hit the ball.
By realizing that my elbow HAD to drop, and by making sure that the cue slid along my chin instead of slamming into it, I started to feel more like I was shoving the cue forward like in shuffleboard rather than swinging it into the ball like a pendulum. The fluctuations in my performance had to do with the reflex, which was very sensitive to pressure.
I think the pendulum metaphor messed me up for a long time. Now I maintain four points of contact throughout the entire stroke (bridge,chin,chest,hand) like a snooker player, and it provides feedback that the cue is infact moving LINEARLY, not a swing.
