What beginner pool tip do you wish you learned sooner?

WobblyStroke said:
You misunderstood my answer. By "vertabrate movement," i was referring to how movement works in all vertabrate animals, not the bones of the spine.
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Oops, sorry - but my opinion of how a pendulum stroke works best is unchanged.

WobblyStroke said:
...reducing a multi joint movement down to muscle A back, muscle B forward is laughably over simplifying it.
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Which are the "multi joints" that you think should be involved? Why?

pj
chgo
 
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Patrick Johnson said:
Oops, sorry - but my opinion of how a pendulum stroke works best is unchanged.


Which are the "multi joints" that you think should be involved? Why?

pj
chgo
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It's not a matter of 'shoulds'. For fhe all time greats I mentioned--Earl, SVB, Mika, Efren, Busty--and many other phenomenal cueists including Ronnie O'Sullivam, all joints of the arm ARE involved.

My contention is that these are not strokes that are full of flaws that have been overcome by countless hours of practice, like peddlers of "THE fundamentals" sometimes claim, but that they are in fact better. They are more in line with how we are designed to move and how we are wired to organize movement. They provide effortless power and a level of fine force control (speed control) that cannot be matched by primarily contraction driven movement. Not to mention the fact that they hold up incredibly well under pressure. They are in a word, better.

It is no surprise at all, then, that many of the greatest to ever swing a cue, play these types of strokes. What is somewhat shocking however, is how many instructors still go around calling them flawed simply because they don't fit into their neat models better suited to robots.

We are not robots, we're better. So are these strokes.
 
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WobblyStroke said:
("Multi-joint" strokes) are more in line with how we are designed to move and how we are wired to organize movement. They provide effortless power and a level of fine force control (speed control) that cannot be matched by primarily contraction driven movement. Not to mention the fact that they hold up incredibly well under pressure. They are in a word, better.
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How does moving the elbow do all that? "It's more natural" doesn't explain it for me.

pj
chgo
 
Patrick Johnson said:
How does moving the elbow do all that? "It's more natural" doesn't explain it for me.

pj
chgo
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As I said, you can take a full course or two on this and not fully get it. Movement is very complex. This is why it is relatively easy to program a computer to think like a human, but we are a long way off from programming a robot to move like a human.

The point isn't that the elbow moves. It's that multi joint movement is an immaculately coordinated blending of repeatable forces and contractions. This is how it works in all vertabrates and has done so for millions of years. Overriding that and instructing the body to fire this muscle and then that one will never be able to compete with how your body would figure out how to efficiently make a desired action.

The prefrontal cortex has veto power so if you say to yourself 'only use elbow flexors' your arm will listen to you. If you instead intend to move the tip of the cue at some desired speed without a care for how, the body (your subconscious) will use all the tools at it's desposal to make that happen. Without a shadow of a doubt, it will do a better job than you bossing the arm around.

So as I said, "stroking should be left to the subconscious" is currently the best advice we've got.
 
I've had some piano lessons and drum lessons and this whole idea of "correctly" pushing a stick along its length is kinda silly. To be fair, so is "correct" drum technique but that's another flame war.

Ingrained shit like how you regularly eat - pfft, if you can regularly eat, all affect how a pool stroke will act.

So there, push it along its length, is the idea. Have fun.
 
Patrick Johnson said:
But we can't effectively control single joint movement? Doesn't compute for me.

pj
chgo
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A primarily contraction driven flexion of the elbow can never approach the precision of a multi joint move of which a collapse of the elbow joint is a component.

You will be able to collapse the elbow joint and be accurate, sure. But to do so with touch and precice force control, you will need more than merely firing an elbow flexor.

Also, contractions fall pray to nervous tension. Repeatable forces don't. If you want access to those, multi joint movement is the way. The symphony beats a solo act every time.
 
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WobblyStroke said:
You will be able to collapse the elbow joint and be accurate, sure. But to do so with touch and precice force control, you will need more than merely firing an elbow flexor.
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Adding shoulder joint movement makes force control more precise? Sorry, but adding another joint/arm movement doesn't seem to me like a way to do that. Of course it can add force - like Shane's "rising up" break - but I don't see the added force control with more joints moving.

pj
chgo
 
Patrick Johnson said:
Adding shoulder joint movement makes force control more precise? Sorry, but adding another joint/arm movement doesn't seem to me like a way to do that. Of course it can add force - like Shane's "rising up" break - but I don't see the added force control with more joints moving.

pj
chgo
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Yes it does. Shoulder and wrist/fingers...let's not leave out the other joints of the arm now :p. I won't share the details of exactly how here.

All I can point to is the slew of all time greats who have some movement of the elbow. And it needn't be a large move. While the guys I listed have rather obvious bobbing up and down of their elbows, a quarter of an inch is plenty.
 
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Patrick Johnson said:
Of course not. That would be telling.

pj
chgo
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This post was telling enough...
WobblyStroke said:
A primarily contraction driven flexion of the elbow can never approach the precision of a multi joint move of which a collapse of the elbow joint is a component.

You will be able to collapse the elbow joint and be accurate, sure. But to do so with touch and precice force control, you will need more than merely firing an elbow flexor.

Also, contractions fall pray to nervous tension. Repeatable forces don't. If you want access to those, multi joint movement is the way. The symphony beats a solo act every time.
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Repeatable forces are obviously more reliable and consistent than contractions. The body integrates them seemlessly in natural motion. They are required for fine force control in vertabrates. Any single contraction of a muscle simply cannot offer anywhere near the same level of precision.

This is just how bodies work. You can take a few years and learn the details of exactly how.

Luckily, there is no need to learn the science of it in order to use it. Just get out of the way and stop giving the arm bad instructions on how to move. It will arrive at a far better solution than our feeble conscious minds could ever produce.

All the greats have great strokes. All of them. Some are just labeled as flawed by people who have spent more time studying machines than studying bodies.
 
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Patrick Johnson said:
Contractions aren’t repeatable?
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No. As a professor of mine liked to say, "contractions are slow and sloppy".

As for your question, it really depends on the stroke. There are many types, with their own particular blend of a wide series of contractions working in concert with any blend of the repeatable forces our bodies are wired to utilize for efficient movement .

I can tell you what a stroke isn't though. It definitely isn't one muscle contracting to make the whole thing go. That idea is based on a fifth grader level of understanding of how human movement works. Movement is incredibly complex. Just ask engineers trying to program robots.
 
WobblyStroke said:
I can tell you what a stroke isn't though. It definitely isn't one muscle contracting to make the whole thing go. That idea is based on a fifth grader level of understanding of how human movement works. Movement is incredibly complex. Just ask engineers trying to program robots.
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So if I hold everything still except my forearm, contracting my biceps doesn’t “make it go”? What else is needed?

pj <- fifth grader, apparently
chgo
 
Patrick Johnson said:
So if I hold everything still except my forearm, contracting my biceps doesn’t “make it go”? What else is needed?

pj <- fifth grader, apparently
chg
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No, you just seen to try to take one bit of a conversation and argue that as infinitum without acknowledging the rest of the information.

The quoted post says it best. You hold everything else stationary. Muscle groups work together, to isolate one muscle means that you concertedly control others to stop movement. This disrupt natural movement.

The whole 'perfect' pendulum stroke is a simplified technique. It shouldn't be about eliminating shoulder involvement, it is about reducing and controlling shoulder involvement.
 
Patrick Johnson said:
So if I hold everything still except my forearm, contracting my biceps doesn’t “make it go”? What else is needed?

pj <- fifth grader, apparently
chgo
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Nothing else is needed....for a mediocre, at best, stroke with low cue power and poor speed control.

Good news is, that even if you are working around an oversimplified model of your stroke, your subconscious mind will save you from yourself and you will still utilize more than just that one muscle...which isn't even the biceps as Bob pointed out earlier, it's the brachialis, unless you want to turn your wrist over, then it's the biceps.
 
WobblyStroke said:
Nothing else is needed....for a mediocre, at best, stroke with low cue power and poor speed control.

Good news is, that even if you are working around an oversimplified model of your stroke, your subconscious mind will save you from yourself and you will still utilize more than just that one muscle...which isn't even the biceps as Bob pointed out earlier, it's the brachialis, unless you want to turn your wrist over, then it's the biceps.
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Whatever the muscles involved are called, my point is that nothing needs to move except the forearm. I haven’t heard anything yet that argues against that.

Thanks for the info, though.

pj
chgo
 
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