Practicing straight shots

Practicing easy, straight shots is not only about learning to shoot straight, which is important also, but to refine the motor image that is involved in a billiard stroke. By motor image I mean the learned patterns in your head that turn into a pool stroke on the table. It's an image in the sense that the components of the stroke are stored and described in your head, similar to other information stored in your head, like for example visual images. The difference is that there is no easy way to describe the image, other than playing it out on the table.

This in turn means that it's practically impossible to describe how a good stroke feels. The hand that executes the stroke should for sure be relaxed and loose, but there is no way to accurately describe just how relaxed or loose the hand should be. Everyone has to find out this for themselves. Sure, if someone has an incredibly tense arm, you can notice that as an observer and suggest that he has to loosen up. But to find the exact looseness is up to oneself.

The idea is then that on a practice table, hitting straight shots gives you the freedom of examining your own body during the shot. You can observe how different parts of your body feel during the execution. If some part feels tight, you can try loosening it up and see it changes the overall feeling. By carefully observing different parts of your body during this type of practice, you might find out that you been overly tight in some surprising part of the shot and might notice that you can loosen it up.

Further, it is only during practice sessions that make this refined motor image stay in your brain. When you repeat the slightly improved shot (or just your plain old shot), your motor image gets re-wired in your brain. This image is what your actual stroke in say competition is based on. It's not an exact instruction, but rather a series of patterns that your brain tries to follow when you actually execute the shot. But it does contain attributes like the looseness of your shoulders, for example, and the only reliable way to refine those attributes is on a practice table.

So when some pro says that he used to practice straight shots, it was not only about the straightness of the shot, but to observe and refine his body during the execution of his stroke.