How to Smooth Out Your Stroke | Train with Me Episode 17

okay, hey, that was kind of gentle,

train

with me by softening

your

stroke

. I was trying to start something. I didn't really know what to do with the soft

stroke

, but I thought, well, maybe I'll do a draw. shot CU I'll take it off the table because, uh, classic, usually I'll take it off the table or Miss Q or something, so I wanted to start with something, you know, a little difficult, so maybe I could have that in game, so but I

smooth

ed it out, I actually hit it well, that was the first shot I hit.

I really like going in cold with these since the first one I made. I come in cold and the reason I come in cold is because I want to have a little fight if I can so I deliberately come in cold for you so it's not cured it's nothing I'm not warmed up we just all fight when we play , we all struggle when we

train

and I. I want to go through that fight live for you and so you can watch it and see, hey, this guy fights too and this is how he gets over his fight, so I'm not fighting, yeah, but let's talk about

smooth

ing out.

Your stroke, so I've been training a lot here. I had my Chinese members, they are all national, they are students and they like doctors and amazing guys. There are about half a dozen and we made a special class for them and one. of them, uh, shout out, Dr. Tong is amazing, he was very fast, so when he was down on the ball, he was going down, you know, like this and and and I thought we just have to soften them up, okay and I played that way . For many years I had a lot of energy, like tension and energy, tense and everything, and I got depressed and I wasn't even thinking about it.

It was like I was getting down and bracing myself. to film and that can work, if you start when you're 13 and you play, you know, 10 hours a day it can work, it can scale up for you, but really who am I working with and what are we working with at the club and what am I working with? Right now in my game is that I am 51 years old. I don't have time to hit. I've hit my 10,000 20,000 50,000 100,000 shots, but I don't really have time to continue with that. So if I want to get from where I am to where I want to be, I need to start getting better and smarter and more efficient with my game and part of that improvement is in the mechanics, the biomechanics, all that, but it's also in being smoother. , right, and part of the reason you want to be softer and part of the benefit of being soft is that it can calm you down, so when I train to be softer with my stroke there is also an overall meta strategy. of trying to calm down when I'm playing well and be more relaxed, so smoothing is very important, okay, let's talk about that and I want to talk very quickly about tension, okay, very quickly before we talk about smoothness.

In order to be smooth with our stroke we have to understand where we are from a tension point of view. Well, I talk a lot about being soft and loose in the stroke. We did the two fingers thing to really loosen up the tension. Basically. Simply put, the conclusion I want you to walk away with is that this is

your

tension. Target your bridge. Okay, you can have some tension on your bridge because you don't want your bridge to be super loose like that for your tail. You want some tension in there, so when I teach beginners, I teach intermediate people and they're trying to improve their game, we talk a lot about the bridge and how to get some tension in your bridge. and get comfortable with it and maybe you need to use a glove to make it work smoothly.

I don't wear gloves. I have carbon fiber. I know a lot of people find it sticky. I do not do it. maybe if I'm into it, I might have a glove or something or it's hot in the room or something, but overall, I want that nice tight bridge most of the time and the right stability and that tension here is fine now your tense tension here everything in the back is like jelly, loose man, you want stability in your base, you want everything at the right angle of the arm, all those, all those, like biomechanics, right, hey, you're 90, you want this, no like this, you want it up and down.

I want 90 on the hit point, all those things we talked about before, but they have to be in those loose hitting positions, okay, and when they're loose it's going to help us achieve that with the Mouse Strength in the QQ. Things like that with the ball, we can really load the ball, the looser we are, the more power we can generate at a much slower rate, but it will also allow us to be smooth, well, smooth is about moving back and forward, so when you're crouching on the ball and you're throwing your shot the way to practice smoothly is there are a couple of things that I do.

Come on down, I have my pre-shot routine. I have everything we are going to skip. I walk up to the ball and stop like this when I'm practicing. Well, I haven't made any moves yet. I am doing my goal and now if I am practicing, I will go back and go back and go back and go through. back up and speed up okay so that's just one way to practice slowing down because I look when I see people and they don't really know what I just did and they just come and try to hit the balls and I.

I'm teaching them, I'll say, "Okay, go to the Q ball" and they'll go down and they'll be like this and kind of fidgety and like trying to get their thing and they'll go down and then they'll be like this, right? Like you can't turn this into just a gentle pause through you, so what I'm saying is we want to think about going down and it's all about being calm. Calm leads to soft and loose. those pieces within our game and within our thought process when CM down we're down we're calm we're on the ball and we're delivering through smooth and through and smooth and through and smooth and we accelerate Okay, so I've I've done that enough times , we don't need to do that anymore, okay, so we talk about soft, we talk about smooth, we talk about loose, we talk about a little tight.

Now what I want to talk about is a little bit about stroke length, sorry. So the length of the shot, here we go when we're on the ball. One way to understand how to soften your swing is to understand how the length of your swing affects your swing and the power you have in the swing, so if I'm going to pull this ball back, like a good foot, if I lower my bridge to this length and pull completely back. I really have to calculate my speed, like the rhythm of my punch, to just hit it back.

This point right here, so if I pull it all the way back it's like it's very difficult to control my speed. I have to control the speed of my power that I hit him with, okay, so I have to hit like this almost. a deceleration stroke when I go back that far and then I have to hit the ball very precisely and put everything together, but in a way, and that can be very abrupt, so if I'm here and I'm down and I have this choppy Herky stroke and it's very long and I throw it back, look how I'm doing this and I'm just coming in here like this and I'm going to hit it with my foot, it's like it's very hard to take. that and then turn it into a shot, you know, so it's like, I can hit it like that and that's what people will do with that shot, they'll have that result, hit it exactly where I said I wanted to hit it, but there's a lot going on, It's not very repeatable, there's a lot of movement, there's a lot of eye movement, there's a lot of qtip tip moving, it's not about hitting it accurately or smoothly, it's just a matter of timing and when we have to calculate the time on all those elements of where it is the tip and the speed at which we're going through all those things, it's a very different time than trying to calculate the time for the only moment which is the moment of when your hand is at its maximum point for for for uh Power, so I'm trying to keep my timing issues down so I like one thing versus all those things have to come together and finish time, so if you're distracted and you're in League or you're playing a tournament and you're nervous about all those things timing when your brain is flooded with other information it's very difficult to get repeatable results and when I talk to people like I had no idea I was just spraying the ball on the spot I was playing very poorly and one of the reasons is because the repeatability of your swing involves too many timing things and OB is hitting the ball too hard and all that stuff, but it's trying to get all those timing things to come together correctly, so what I'm saying is that you have less timing problems. timing, you have a calmer, smoother shot that hits everything if you can use the length of your stroke to determine the distance it will return and the power you are going to deliver, so if I make the same shot compared to where I was and I calm down, calm down, calm down, yeah, exactly C down and then I just shoot instead of coming back here and having to change my you know.

I slow down and slow my hand down a little bit on my downstroke if I just throw it back a little bit and hit it good. I get a lot of power. I barely touched her. I accelerated with a shorter, shorter, as if it were not a stab. stroke is not a shorter stroke but a more compressed stroke in terms of distance because we don't want to pull it back and stab it we don't want this you know like that we want to understand when we're training because that's where we're there to train with me, we want to train this and we want to train by making the punch shorter and then speeding up like this, which is different than pulling it in and hitting it forward, so I'm just trying to give you some of the things that I work on and some of the ways where I see this and some of the ways I develop to get more consistency in these shots, okay my friend Johnson, the cameraman here, add a question to me, so I was talking about Pulling the bridge back so that the length of the stroke is different and what I was explaining is that it is not the bridge that can remain in the same position, you are just the tip, the length of the stroke is less, so I am not pulling. back here and shooting I'm backing up here and shooting to the right so it's a little bit shorter shot without um poking it so it makes sense he's nodding yeah okay okay so one way to do it is I do this with I do this in training okay , I do this here, it's okay because, like let's say I'm in a training session, this happened last week and the guys are just ripping and hitting it soft and ripping and trying to hit it soft and I'm like no, we need it.

We need to compress that punch so we can control this pace more and we control the speed of this, not the speed but the power of the punch, going harder or softer or shorter, okay or longer, so if a person has this punch here and they're backing up here past that chalk and they're going through this is too big of a blow to throw it back up here you don't have to you don't need all that power so what I'm What I see is people throw it here and see that they're already over it because they just want to get over it, so I'm training people and I'm like, okay, stop and it's like okay, I didn't stop at that, so I go here, stop here, stop, go here , stop here, stop here, stop here, stop, stop, stop, and I take it back, I missed the shot, it doesn't matter, but how does this work on that and that thing?

So, that's what I'm talking about. as far as how to shorten your stroke to control the distance and that's something that will help you smooth it out because if you have your stroke up to here, it's harder to smooth out a stroke like this when I'm trying to hit it soft to just pull it back 6 in, you know, that's harder to smooth out, it's easier to smooth out the blow that I just hit by just pulling it back a shorter distance boom boom boom so that's a way more repeatable, predictable, smooth stroke, so these are like the ones.

Concepts or ideas are things that I will practice if I am here, so if I want to soften my stroke, I will work on the length of my stroke. Being still in my body folding into the shot having my Q still like that in the shot, okay, not a lot of movement, slow back, slow back, back, accelerate, okay, and that's where the softness comes in and I notice that it was not so. find your place find your place okay now move your head now come back now do this now find your look all those hits and things that are not smooth and it's like I'm repeating myself but it's like just practicing with the ball pulling back gently in the The ball goes back smoothly, so when I'm playing, I'm in the middle of a game, okay, and I'm throwing a nine ball for the cheddar and I'm trying to stay smooth and I'm trying to stay calm and I'm trying to do the right thing I have a little tension in my hand I'm calm here I'm smooth I do my whole pre-shot routine I get there I go in This is smooth and smooth like this the way I'm not pumping like this that's not what I'm doing.

I'm trying to repeat my process and visualize my process beforehand. There is no great pump. Hits. I'm not big. Back and forth. Small quick strokes. I'm trying. keep calm, try to stay calm, try to stay light and send it, that's it, when I get off and I'm training and I'm practicing, train with me and one of the things I want to address is and I probably said it, but I'm going to say one more time. Isvery important that when we carry out our routine like this, we must move forward at a very similar pace to the one we have. we're going to stroke the ball we develop the habit of going down so I'm doing this I'm not doing this you know I used to do this I used to do this and I'd walk around the table and I'd just get excited and I'd be like you know how to do this and it's like no. , not that you can't climb, that can work, but you have to play a lot of pool to time all that stuff and deal with all that stuff really when you're playing, you know, I'm breathing now.

In fact, I let my stomach hang out a little. I'm like instead of being all tense and then I go down and do my process, but what is my process, one of my processes is. be soft like this and be calm and when I go down like this I'm going to repeat the same hit on the ball so just like before I'm down like this send it now I'll show you what I don't want you to do because I don't think it's necessary I think there should be some flow, then what I don't think is potentially good, if this is your personality type, then do this, by all means.

So when I play a match that is important to you, I make these changes. I try not to be mechanical at all, so when I see people walking by and they're like this and they're like this and that. they're like this and they're like this this doesn't look relaxed this doesn't look you know smooth and then I come back like this and then I hit it like this and then I pause and then I hit it it's like yeah, see you I missed the ball every time you do that. I just don't think that's optimal. I think it needs a little more flow than that and it's okay to be a little mechanical when you practice and I'm more mechanical now than I was before.

I have been once, but when I have to leave and pressure and money are on the line, I have to be in my secondary mind, I have to be in my subconscious, if I am too much in my consciousness, which I have. It's been because I'm making these changes, okay, it's just hard, so I want to show you or talk to you about that too, in the end, the smoothness that you're going to have to get a little bit. more mechanical to smooth out but then you'll have to more find your way back to the state of flow and that's your journey and maybe we'll do another video on that one day but that's my journey that I'm on right now because I'm a 714 and I don't want to be a 714 the rest of my life I'm 51 I've been there I've done that I want to go further I want to go I want to be better you I know my game and therefore I'm willing to break my flow to make these improvements and get better .

I need to get some Herky Jerky for a while and when the Herky Jerky is ready, hopefully the mild kind will be there and when. the soft guys there more fluidly, so you better be careful because I'm going to hurt feelings and I'm going to be a hand to people, so let's do it and let you do that and we'll do it together. We're going to be doing this together and that's what's important, so of course I love you guys, I love that you see these things. I love that they support the channel, they support the club.

They have great feedback for me and I am absolutely grateful and it means the world to me and a lot of people tell me how wonderful everything we are doing is and all I can say is that I am doing it for you and it means the world to me personally that that people enjoy this and so thanks for watching and ask me any questions so thanks for watching we'll talk to you next time bye.