This may be of interest to some of you who are still trying to develop their stroke fundamentals (like me):
I've been trying to figure out how basic suggestions like "don't move your elbow" and "stay down" translate into a physical action. Those suggestions sound like simple things to realize… just keep your elbow steady and don’t move your body after you shoot… and usually the people giving the advice are so far past the muscle training stage that the second-nature-ness of the action makes it seem strange that someone else can’t perform identically. Further, second-nature-ness creeps back into motor reflexes as soon as the brain stops consciously commanding the muscles… so bad habits must be trained away and replaced by correct subconscious processes. No matter what new ideas I try, I’ll always find myself using old habits after I stop paying attention.
So what I’ve been doing for the past two years or so is slowly perform stroke adjustments using new ideas I have, then commit them to second-nature, and monitor and record my consistency. Perhaps someone watching me will give me a new suggestion, which leads to a new idea, and a new cycle of feedback. Improvement in stroke consistency has been slow, but my adaptation cycle time has increased slightly.
Recently, I’ve accomplished what I feel to be the root concepts of “don’t move your elbow” and “stay down”:
“Stay Down”
My stance was weak and unbalanced. This was due mostly to the fact that I have flat feet (fallen arches) and very tight hamstrings. Bending over with straight legs in any position was uncomfortable, and I would roll out my lower back to compensate. Though I have a strong back from bouldering, even-so, my lower back muscles would get tired within an hour and my core stabilization would decrease. I would confuse this with a stroke consistency problem, make more adjustments, create new ideas, and go through the cycle again.
After a visit to the foot doctor, I obtained orthotic inserts for my shoes. My feet and knees stopped hurting, and I felt better. I also stretched out my legs a bit more, and experimented with more square stances as well as the snooker stance. From this I eventually learned what a solid stance felt like with equally distributed weight. I had been leaning over with the weight on my toes, where as now the weight is down my heels equally. My back stopped hurting and I was able to stay bent over in the same position at the table for minutes. I feel comfortable in the bent position. This solved my “jumping up” problem because I no longer had a desire to “relieve” any uncomfortable muscular distress.
The second-nature-ness of jumping up is not yet dead, and it creeps back if I don’t pay attention. The only solution is to practice it away.
“Don’t Move Your Elbow”
This one was the most difficult to figure out. Firstly, and most importantly, “don’t move your elbow” means “don’t engage your rotator cuff”. The rotator cuff is a bundle of muscles connected to a ball joint that rotates the shoulder in both angular dimensions, so moving the shoulder introduces the probability of side-ways movement. This is bad. The affect upon the cue ball is lateral, and there is no joint on the human body that moves laterally. Theoretically, the only way to create lateral movement at an endpoint with hinged rigid objects is the superposition of two trigonometric functions, namely moving two joints. My brain originally liked the idea of trying to move the cue stick in the same nature that the cue ball moves – forward. Therefore, it would wire my rotator cuff to engage even if I concentrated really hard and tried to keep it still. It was a physiological paradigm.
The pendulum stroke helped with this thought problem. It let my brain know that moving only one joint will translate into lateral movement. This helped, but my elbow would still “drop” slightly, especially during second-nature time.
I remembered a video from gravity golf:
http://www.gravitygolf.com/pull-left-arm.asp
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? If you’re an astronaut in space, and you’re floating away from your ship, how to you get back to your ship? Throw your hammer as hard as you can in the direction pointing away from the ship.
When I tried to completely relax my rotator cuff, the movement of my forearm would pull on it, causing it to move down. What I learned to do was apply a small amount of counter-movement by trying to rotate my upper arm backwards as my forearm went forward. This balanced out both forces and my stroke consistency improved!
Over a small amount of time I refined this into something that I can no longer identify as an active counter-force action… its now just been absorbed as part of my stroke. You can see how easy small things like this are adapted.
I just wanted to log a few things I’ve learned because maybe they will help someone else.
I've been trying to figure out how basic suggestions like "don't move your elbow" and "stay down" translate into a physical action. Those suggestions sound like simple things to realize… just keep your elbow steady and don’t move your body after you shoot… and usually the people giving the advice are so far past the muscle training stage that the second-nature-ness of the action makes it seem strange that someone else can’t perform identically. Further, second-nature-ness creeps back into motor reflexes as soon as the brain stops consciously commanding the muscles… so bad habits must be trained away and replaced by correct subconscious processes. No matter what new ideas I try, I’ll always find myself using old habits after I stop paying attention.
So what I’ve been doing for the past two years or so is slowly perform stroke adjustments using new ideas I have, then commit them to second-nature, and monitor and record my consistency. Perhaps someone watching me will give me a new suggestion, which leads to a new idea, and a new cycle of feedback. Improvement in stroke consistency has been slow, but my adaptation cycle time has increased slightly.
Recently, I’ve accomplished what I feel to be the root concepts of “don’t move your elbow” and “stay down”:
“Stay Down”
My stance was weak and unbalanced. This was due mostly to the fact that I have flat feet (fallen arches) and very tight hamstrings. Bending over with straight legs in any position was uncomfortable, and I would roll out my lower back to compensate. Though I have a strong back from bouldering, even-so, my lower back muscles would get tired within an hour and my core stabilization would decrease. I would confuse this with a stroke consistency problem, make more adjustments, create new ideas, and go through the cycle again.
After a visit to the foot doctor, I obtained orthotic inserts for my shoes. My feet and knees stopped hurting, and I felt better. I also stretched out my legs a bit more, and experimented with more square stances as well as the snooker stance. From this I eventually learned what a solid stance felt like with equally distributed weight. I had been leaning over with the weight on my toes, where as now the weight is down my heels equally. My back stopped hurting and I was able to stay bent over in the same position at the table for minutes. I feel comfortable in the bent position. This solved my “jumping up” problem because I no longer had a desire to “relieve” any uncomfortable muscular distress.
The second-nature-ness of jumping up is not yet dead, and it creeps back if I don’t pay attention. The only solution is to practice it away.
“Don’t Move Your Elbow”
This one was the most difficult to figure out. Firstly, and most importantly, “don’t move your elbow” means “don’t engage your rotator cuff”. The rotator cuff is a bundle of muscles connected to a ball joint that rotates the shoulder in both angular dimensions, so moving the shoulder introduces the probability of side-ways movement. This is bad. The affect upon the cue ball is lateral, and there is no joint on the human body that moves laterally. Theoretically, the only way to create lateral movement at an endpoint with hinged rigid objects is the superposition of two trigonometric functions, namely moving two joints. My brain originally liked the idea of trying to move the cue stick in the same nature that the cue ball moves – forward. Therefore, it would wire my rotator cuff to engage even if I concentrated really hard and tried to keep it still. It was a physiological paradigm.
The pendulum stroke helped with this thought problem. It let my brain know that moving only one joint will translate into lateral movement. This helped, but my elbow would still “drop” slightly, especially during second-nature time.
I remembered a video from gravity golf:
http://www.gravitygolf.com/pull-left-arm.asp
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? If you’re an astronaut in space, and you’re floating away from your ship, how to you get back to your ship? Throw your hammer as hard as you can in the direction pointing away from the ship.
When I tried to completely relax my rotator cuff, the movement of my forearm would pull on it, causing it to move down. What I learned to do was apply a small amount of counter-movement by trying to rotate my upper arm backwards as my forearm went forward. This balanced out both forces and my stroke consistency improved!
Over a small amount of time I refined this into something that I can no longer identify as an active counter-force action… its now just been absorbed as part of my stroke. You can see how easy small things like this are adapted.
I just wanted to log a few things I’ve learned because maybe they will help someone else.