fundamentel tchnique advice needed

[chefjeff]

A technique to get and keep your feet in the same position:

Set up a consistent, repeatable shot where you can have a normal stance and bridge. (I do this with the cueball on the center spot and the object ball halfway to the side pocket.) Line-up as you would in play and when you think you've got your stance as you want it, take some masking tape and put one short piece on the floor directly behind each heel perpendicular to your foot alignment. Those will mark the spot and the angle of your feet.

Now, when you set up that shot and are ready to shoot it, stop, and look at your feet. Do they match the marks? If not, are the feet wrong or is your preferred stance wrong? Play around with this for a few months/weeks/whatever and you'll be able to "fix" your stance much more easily. (I also make a pencil mark there as some of my friends try to "help" me by cleaning up the tape on the floor.)

If you don't have your own pool table, you can still do this at the kitchen table and transfer that ingrained training to the pool hall.

That's really helped me when I'm out of stroke to get back into a proper stance, thus eliminating that particular problem.

fwiw,

Jeff Livingston

 

[Runner]

Fundamental feet

I'll chip in one more time with something Buddy Hall was talking about, (can't remember where, but it stuck with me)...

As chefjeff said above,
when your shots aren't going where you think they should, CHECK YOUR STANCE.
I know it sounds simplistic, but when your feet are aligned towards your shot, your hips are sideways, the mechanics are in line. When my shots are a little off line, I look down, and sure enough, my stance is too 'open'.

My .2 cents... good luck

 

[z0nt0n3r]

i haven't tried that last piece of advice , but it could be part of the solution. i have a very loose and bend bridge arm where most top players seem to have it fully stretched.


To give some update: i'm incorporating several of the advices (don't go so low, turn my hips, left foot more forward, move elbow higher, turn right shoulder etc) that have been given and i'm slowly getting there. there isn't one single quick solution. So i'm going forward and improving, but the downside is, that it's almost impossible to have it all ligned up perfectly every time, because one feet just 1 cm more to the left of forward, your hip 2° more twisted, etc and you are offline again. the rail a bit in the way and you can't place your feet the same way, etc.. I can't believe a human can align up 100% perfect every single time, but i guess that isn't needed as we don't play on russian piramid pockets.

Now i'm noticing my body automatically subconsciously adapts to imperfections over time (i'm always a diesel in tournaments. i need 4-5 matches before i get any decent playing level). by that i mean, where in the first half hour i need to turn my back arm a little inwards after an hour it autocorrects and if i do the same pre-shot routine, i'm over -inward-ing (lol at that word) my arm.

i think there is no need to be 100% every time and as i can not see my backarm when i'm down , i needed to find a way to feel ! if i need to do any correction.



I tried several things, i found one routine that seems to help me to very quicly see if i'm off: and that's doing some quick , loose , with long backwards movement warming up strokes (like if i would smash the sh*t out of the rack and break at 50pmh) . the further and quicker i do it, the bigger imperfections in the alignment get visible. thats when i make my slight changes in every stroke (as i don't know if my arm is outwards, or inwards, or crooked ) it can take 1 warmup or 10 warmup strokes, but if the stroke is straight at that speed, you know its 100% spot on, and you can slow the speed and distance down and concentrate on the focusing of the aiming spot. I can't do long training sessions yet because of health, but after an hour i see my ligning-up warmup strokes are go from 10 in the first balls to maybe one or two.

One sidenote i made myself. if i see that i need to correct A LOT during the warmup, it's best to stand up again and redo it all. Too big corrections make for unnatural stances, that will induce errors. so you can only adapt "so much"

I play on 3.5" pockets (with reducers), so that helps me a lot with the feedback i need for a perfect stroke and shot making. it's hard to see on 5" pockets how much off center you are

That's my experience at the moment. i will update if i have news, and i hope other who have the same problem will be helped by it too, as i know every big player has this problem. (i recently checked 3 big players , and each had a different solution. one spreads his leg as much as possible and bend his kneeds at 90° angle, in an almost karate stand (looks like a crab and that's how he got his nickname), another one bends his knees as much as possible and the other one rotates his full backarm/head, everything 30° outwards, like if he would be perfectly straight but standing on an angled flore 30° to the right. they all play very good pool, but i call it "tricks" and i know from experience "tricks" will hold you back at a certain level.

if you try the last piece of advice be careful not to force your shoulder down & put a ton of pressure on the left elbow(i'm assuming you're right-handed),just do it naturally & comfortably because if you force it you might experience some shoulder pain.yeah it takes a bit of time to get used to all the new changes but after a while it will become subconscious and you won't be thinking about it.if one change in the technique works,keep it if it doesn't,dump it but make sure you're doing the technique correctly.one other thing that helps me (but doesn't solve my problem) is simply slowing down my final backswing.it doesn't fix the cue from going offline but at least it gives me the chance to control my stroke and that increases my potting percentage.yes,temporary solutions or "tricks" as you call it will hold you back at a certain level and they will let you down under pressure situations in tournaments.the best thing to do is to find a coach who is able to find the root of the problem.i will be taking lessons from an A player in a few days.if that doesn't help,i will find a coach.keep me updated on how it goes & when you find the solution share it here.we might have the same issue & it will probably help me too.good luck.

 

[Solartje]

Well.. All work and none work at the same time. What hrlps one day is not helping the other day. The tumb over the cue and the fast long warmups work best, but it's temporary.

I'm thinking of breaking it down and see what part is having the biggest trouble.
A/ my stance
B/ my bending down
C/ the hip rotation
D/ the center ball aiming
E/ the backswing
F/ the delivery

I've taped down the floor to check my feet placement. I seem prity spot on with the angle and distance but the front knee being bent i notice just a bit more weight on one leg and you line changes completly. Any help on this? Both streched seems to be the only option to have a fixed waist position, but i'll need to do a lot of strectching to make that possible.

Seeing the tumb on the cue trick helps the most but is phisically impossible on certain shots make me think the problem is on one of the last 2 parts and not so much the stance. I'm going to put a camera on the floor shooting up straight to where my grip should be and check if it's the backswing or the front stroke or the final stroke with follow true.

Ps bending the legs the last down movement helps to get the arm aligned straight but i'm still not shooting straight... There is more..

 

[Solartje]

had a day off, so spend my whole day, filming from different angles a straight in long stop shot. I taped the ground last night, and checked the different parts of a shot.

And i found this:

Don't use the red curtain shadows as reference as it was moving , but use the small dots above (the rings that are used to hang the curtain ) as reference. During bending down, warmup strokes (usually short), lose grip, hand under shoulder (my camera was not perfect underneath it) it is all fine. during my backswing till around 2-3 inches bach from starting point (pic 2 ) all is fine and in line, but during the last 2-3 inches of my backswing my elbow/grip goes outwards a bit (1/2 inch or so) and on the delivery i'm always using unwanted english and a predator shaft ain't gonna correct that.

the "trick" of sticking my tumb over the cue, prevents me from having a long backswing, and my warmup strokes are usually short, so i could never identify this during the warmup and might explain why very short backswings or the tumb trick worked.

it also may explain when im doing long warmup strokes my arm bends outwards a little on every stroke, untill delivery (wich can explain why when i shoot speedpool my potting is way better, but then my concentration and focus is off, so that "trick" doesn't work eather, but it agrees with the findings i did.

i don't think this is an angle problem or stance problem. if my body would be in a bad angle (hips/torso), the first inches of the backstroke would be offline too. correct? any idea's on how to solve this that is better then just train my muscle memory ?

I could just shoot with a short backswing, but i like to do long warmup strokes (like earl) and would rather fix that end-movement , then avoid it.

it just sickening how that half tip of unwanted english means the difference between 2/10 or 9/10 potsucces on 9ft long stopshots on my 3" pockets i'm using to test it all out. i'll be concentrating on this problem for the next couple of days and i'll update if i have new findings.

i still have a lot of work to do on the cueaction itself. it's ok, but it could be a little bit smoother, slower backswing, better acceleration and better transition etc, but thats "aestetics" or at least, that something you have to improve all the time.


EDIT: my elbow is not above my grip like i thought when i bend down. Maybe this deviation only give problems on long strokes explaining what the graph shows. I now bend down till the part that is oj at normal speed and concentrate on the last bending down on where my elbow is , blocking it in place. It seems the end deviation is less severe when i do this. Also corrected my bridge hand positioning more carefully to center ball hit instead of just slamming it on the table and closing my bridge before it touches the table to prvent any cue movement if i would close my bridge after my bridgehand is in place.

The 3" pockets are starting to feel like 5" but not consistent yet. I need to bend down with this slowed technique a couple of 10k times for it to become 2th nature.