Techniques for helping a player stay down on the shot

Or you could try Earl's new technique. He straps a twenty pound weight to the back of his neck that holds his head down when he's shooting. Have you seen it yet? Strap-on to shoot, strap-off after the shot. It's got a quick release snap on it for easy usage. What will he think of next? I swear the man is a genius! ;) :rolleyes: :eek: :thumbup:
 
I prefer the "hitting the wallet" approach... Works great in league play...

If you come up on a shot and make it you pay $0.50, if you miss it you pay $1. Everyone in the team should participate and the money goes into a pot to buy pizza and beer at the end of the session. Also works great for doing on scratches/BIH/etc.

Brian
 
Put a small piece of tape on the cue shaft at the end of what would be a nice follow though length. Allow the cue tip to touch the table after the shot and your bridge hand to feel the tape.

I suggest practicing this on easier shots that don't require total focus simply to make the shot. Allow yourself and your muscle memory to get used to the feel of that follow through.
 
Bill Porter said, "... Of course, almost all methods work for a while. The worst part of this problem with me is that I am usually NOT CONSCIOUS that I am starting to come up on shots. Often, a railbird will tell me that I am coming up real bad on some shots and it will usually be a surprise."

Whenever I make a stupid mistake, you know the, "why did I miss that shot?" dialog, my first suspicion is that I am picking up my eyes or my head. Tends to be true far too often.
 
I trained myself to stay down at the same time I practiced shooting straight.

I placed the cue ball on the headstring and shot STRAIGHT down the table, past the footspot, into the rail and back up again (like a lag). I had to stay down to keep my cue in place so I could see if the cue ball would roll back and hit the tip of my cue again. This drill helps with 3 things actually...

Staying down, shooting straight, and follow through.
 
3andstop said:
Put a small piece of tape on the cue shaft at the end of what would be a nice follow though length. Allow the cue tip to touch the table after the shot and your bridge hand to feel the tape.

I suggest practicing this on easier shots that don't require total focus simply to make the shot. Allow yourself and your muscle memory to get used to the feel of that follow through.
Click to expand...

I'd like to add something to this good idea.....Use an open bridge. An open bridge tends to amplify any errors in the stroke. I also add a little extra speed to the easy shot to amplify any errors in my stroke that wouldn't show at slower speeds. (Thanks Scott Lee, et al.)

I do about 10 of these shots and by the end, I can feel my stroke relax to just the right amount where my cuetip effortlessly ends up on the cloth. It is almost like a switch turned off/on that allows this to suddenly become easy and obvious.

Then I carry that feeling to the game table.

Jeff Livingston
 
madfox said:
One very good exercise is to shoot with your eyes closed, in this way you will not be tempted to lift your head up to watch the results of the shot. Do everything normal way, and before the final stroke just close your eyes and shoot. Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

I used to shoot competitive archery and then later instructed....

One of the most frustrating problems while shooting is "trigger panic", you're afraid to pull the trigger and then punch at it and fail the shot miserably.

The best cure I ever found was to have the shooter get close to the target, settle in at full draw and then close their eyes and then concentrate only on the act of the release.

Fixed most problems within a few hours.........
 
Neil said:
I agree with btoneill. If you are serious about wanting to stay down, have someone watch you. Every time you jump up, you have to give them a dollar. Once you see hit hitting your pocketbook, you will learn quick not to do it.
Click to expand...

Greaaaaat. Anyone need money? lol. You'll earn a lot from me by doing this (even tho I really need to do it [see post 11 above])
 
akaTrigger said:
Greaaaaat. Anyone need money? lol. You'll earn a lot from me by doing this (even tho I really need to do it [see post 11 above])
Click to expand...

Stop on by the Greenroom in Pineville, NC tonight or Saturday night and I'll gladly let you buy my drinks for the evening $1 at a time :)

Brian
 
Johnnyz86 said:
every time i stand up after a shot i yell at myself. then everyone looks at me.
Click to expand...

it's only bad when they STOP looking at you. Or they look at you for NOT making noise. Then you know you have a habit that needs to be fixed.
 
A summary of the good ideas in this thread

Eventually, I'll try to cull through this thread and pick out what seem to be the most useful ideas. Then I'll post the summary in a separate thread.
 
Some people jump up on every shot and others in certain situations. The cure is different for each type. There have been many suggestions for the first type but for the second type this may help. Identify the shots you come up on: are they pressure shots or situational shots.
Many have a tendency to come up on difficult shots such as shooting over a ball, long draw shots, elevated cue shots, etc. After you jump up on a shot try to determine the situation and then practice that shot so the next time you are in that situation you may recognize it and be proactive.
 
I once read an observation that to me bordered on genius, because I read it and immediately sensed it was true and it was completely the opposite of what I'd heard for years.

People jump up and their ball misses a split second later. Commentators love to say "oh he jumped straight up on that shot, that's why he missed".

In reality the jump is the result of the miss, not the cause. Even though the ball failed to drop after the jump, the actual "miss" occurred before the jump. The player's instinct is to get up and immediately get a bird's eye view of the shot to see if he hit it as badly as he suspects he just did. He knows he stroked it funny, and wants to stand up and witness the resulting carnage (and maybe also to alleviate the discomfort caused by the player's funny stance and follow through... which may be the source of the miss).

....
We have a guy on the team who jumps on literally every single shot, and the harder the shot is the more violently and suddenly he will jump. Long shots especially he does a violent wrist twist in conjunction with his kangaroo hop. Somehow he makes a lot of shots this way. But he also misses plenty of balls and the miss is just one symptom of a larger problem (the urge to english the ball in and steer it with that wrist twist)

I think that kind of player doesn't need any sort of trick at all to stop jumping up. All they need is a sincere desire to stroke correctly and improve their shotmaking. With that desire comes a willingness to analyze every little mechanic in their stroke, and a willingness to research the issue on their own (without a teammate tying a 40 pound weight on their neck), and a willingness to apply plain common sense towards altering those mechanics to make them more 'textbook'.

If you want to help a buddy/teammate, First you have to convince them that yes, they really do jump up too much. And that any amount of jumping up is "too much". Then you need to convince them that they have a problem, that the jumping up is a symptom of this problem (or a cause of it, if you don't buy the aforementioned theory). Lastly, and most importantly, they have to want to stay down and improve. This is by far the hardest part. I know a million guys who claim they want to shoot better.. their mouth forms all the right sounds about "I know I should stay down, I totally dogged that shot"... but secretly they are content with their level of play and their stroke and don't really care to improve it. They say they want a better stroke the way you or I might say "yeah I'd love to be a millionaire". They wouldn't turn it down if a genie offered them a perfect stroke for free, but they are unwilling to invest any real time or effort into earning it the old-fashioned way.

If someone keeps jumping up even after having it repeatedly pointed out to them, I believe this is the problem. It isn't that they have some kind of uncontrollable reflex that completely bypasses conscious thought. They are unwilling to unlearn their awkward hopstroke in favor of a real stroke because they simply don't care enough to try, and they are scared to death of discarding years of experience englishing in every ball, when they know they have virtually 0 experience drilling the ball in straight without any spin and theatrics.
 
A re-post edited somewhat

Staying down is all in the stroke, think outside the box

THE DUST STROKE
Try this if you like. A straight shot is fine or any shot, it does not matter. Start with center ball, or high center, and then you can move to any number on the clock you like. With a smooth follow delivery, 1 or 2 click on the hit.
Once you have completed the stroke fully (AND NOT BEFORE) drop your cue ever so softly on the cloth like dust falling from the sky. What this does for you is.
1) Shows you the direction you have delivered the cue with the cloth becoming a reference object. It's easier to see if you delivered straight, offline, twisted, etc.etc. Also how far you have delivered thru.Keeps your eyes in the arena.
2) Relaxes the stroke, relieves any muscle tension, a true complete stroke.
3) By the time you have delivered, dropped the cue on the cloth softly and completed the dust stroke fully you will have been down on the shot long enough to have dinner.There is no jumping up with this technique unless they are brain dead.
4) It all happens naturally, no forced movements 5) Once you have completed you can now send the cue ball with your eyes for position.Not raising your head but only shifting the eyes. Thanks to Jack Colavita for teaching me that trick.
One player who uses this stroke quite often is Ginky. He has a beautiful dust stroke and fantastic mechanics. His stroke completes his mechanics
Try going away from text book (stroke and freeze) and see how it works for you. Most stroke and freeze learners look like robots, clones, and seem to force the issue. The dust stroke is as natural as can be and gives you more than just follow thru, it completes you and your mechanics. It”s very easy to learn, like anything else it takes practice. But you never have to remind yourself to stay down, less brain work.
I have been teaching it for 20 years, you can't tell that my players are lesson taught.
They are all different but have one thing the same, a very smooth delivery and quality mechanics with no forced issues. Good Luck


If this does not work go with the crack them over the head with a butt
 
workes!!!!!

BillPorter said:
Since many of us have a tendency to "come up" on some of our shots, usually the most important ones, how about compiling a list of techniques for helping a player stay down as they pull the trigger on a shot? I'll start off with a few I have run across.

1) Nick Varner said it helps you to stay down if you always try to watch the cue ball hit the object ball. A more extreme version is to try to stay down and still until you see the object ball go into the pocket. Just remind yourself, as part of your pre-shot routine, to watch the cue ball hit the object ball.

2) Incorporate into your pre-shot routine the thought, as you drop down on the shot, the sage advice of Jay Helfert, "Be still."

3) My friend Billy Carrelli offered two solutions. He said when he worked on this problem within himself, he would imagine that he was playing in a room with a very low ceiling, just a couple of inches above his head when he was down on a shot.

3a) Billy other suggestion was to have a friend with a ping pong paddle stand near you as you shoot and whack you on the head real hard if you raised up on the shot. He predicted it would take only a couple of whacks to cure the problem.

4) Put a 40 pound weight on the floor between your legs. Tie one end of a piece of twine to the weight and loop the other end around your scrotal sac. Just be sure there is no slack in the twine as you are down on the shot.

5) A poster here on AZ (Colin Colenso?) suggested that a player who raises up on his shot did really drop down on the shot with the INTENTION of staying down through the shot. I have noticed that when I am nervous about a shot, I can just feel, as I drop down to the table, that my body is preparing to "bail out" and come up rather than stay down. So it might help for you to think, as you move down to the table for the shot, "I am settling in and staying down on this one."

6) Add your suggestions here.
Click to expand...

#4 workes in golf also!!!!!!:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top