I don’t know if everyone has such a problem when playing basketball: a straight ball that feels very simple, as long as the distance is far away, it is easy to deviate from the direction and bounce out after shaking at the bag mouth?
Can I close one eye and aim like shooting a gun or an arrow when shooting? Can this hit the ball straight more accurately? If it’s a long angle, the goal scoring rate is pitifully low?
Today we will mainly analyze the combination of aiming and exerting force, which is crucial for improving your ball skills. Let’s start with practical knowledge!
1. Aiming must be done with two eyes, not with one closed
The reason is simple: playing billiards is a three-dimensional sport, not a simple shooting. The ball has volume, which can block part of your line of sight. The trajectory of the ball will test your sense of space. So it must be one eye leading and the other eye assisting.
In fact, the primary eye is responsible for aiming, while the secondary eye is responsible for sensing spatial distance and positioning. So the main eye should be directly above the cue stick. We can observe the aiming movements of top players. Most players have the same main eye, but there are a few who have dual main eyes, such as Ding Junhui, with the club in between. However, this also requires long-term and extensive practice to ensure that muscle memory matches their binocular positioning.
So, our first step is not to correct the problem with the pole, but to find our main eye, otherwise we will take a wrong path. How to find the main eye? Actually, we can feel it ourselves because the visual nerve of the main eye is more developed. For example, if you were to shoot, which eye would you use to aim? That eye is your primary visual eye. Another method is to first point your finger towards a distant object, then hold it still and close your left or right eye one by one to see which eye’s visual communication is correct. This eye is the primary eye.
2. The combination of the main eye and the grip hand
This is also very important. When you reach a certain level of accuracy and need to break through the bottleneck, you may want to study whether you have not understood this aspect clearly. Most of us use our right hand to grip the club while playing. Here, we will take the right hand as an example. If both the grip and the main eye are on the right side, then the position and direction of our club should run through your right foot stance, rear handle positioning, and head right eye. Refer to Sean Murphy. When the main eye is not aligned with the grip, such as the left eye being the main eye and the grip being the right hand, the head needs to be adjusted to conform to the through line we mentioned above, that is, the head needs to be turned to your left eye above the club. This posture may be a bit awkward, and the head needs to be moved to the right or rotated to the right.
Some players have a more obvious sense of their dominant eye, such as in the case of the left eye dominant eye. When holding the club with their right hand, they will naturally move their back elbow to the left (i.e. the inner side of their body), which is commonly known as the back elbow inward turn. In fact, many professional players have experienced back elbow crutches, including Higgins, O’Sullivan, and Trump. However, if we understand the reasons behind this, we can analyze and target players who match our physical characteristics to imitate and learn from.
3. Step by step and enter the position
We observe the movements of professional players, and positioning is crucial. Everyone has different forms of positioning. Usually, before hitting the ball, we observe the ball shape for a while, and then use small steps to adjust the positioning before lying down to move the rod. Therefore, positioning is actually finding the correct position for our right foot (left hand selecting hand as left foot). This point is not necessarily on the goal line as some people say, because the foot also has an area. Is it the toe, sole, or heel that steps on this point? Stamping is actually closely related to the main eye, because assuming that our right eye is the main eye, our right foot itself is about the same vertical position as our right eye, so we don’t need to make more adjustments. Just step on the goal line naturally, which means that almost the heel to toe are on the goal line.
If the left eye is the main visual eye and the vertical position difference between the right foot and the left eye is relatively large, our head needs to move to the left when we lie down, and our body will also rotate clockwise accordingly. At this time, our toes should lean towards our right front for comfort, and the stomping should be appropriate at the heel, because we need to make the goal line as close to the left side of the entire body as possible.
These few details are relatively obscure and rarely mentioned, but if you study them carefully, you will find that they are crucial for our pole straightness.
Some enthusiasts did not pay attention to these details during the early stages of practice, and over time, they developed some incorrect muscle memory. Their vision could not match the movements well, resulting in various types of elbow inward turns, outward turns, unstable shots, unsmooth force, and even blurred RBIs. This is very important for cultivating ball sense.
If some friends have been playing for a long time and want to adjust these details now, they should pay attention to their positioning and shooting habits. With a certain muscle memory, it will be very difficult to adjust, and they may play more crooked or feel uncomfortable when shooting. But pain is temporary, and only by persisting and adjusting can we have future improvement. Otherwise, when we reach a bottleneck, we won’t be able to climb up.https://www.tiktok.com/@spk.billiard?_t=8qRRRnXP4N8&_r=1
