Shot Darts.

Darts Practice Routines (Dartsnutz University: All Levels)
THE 10 MINUTE A DAY ROUTINE

A lot of what is writ­ten is geared at the in­di­vid­ual who has an abun­dance of time to work through hours of prac­tice rou­tines.

Today there are plenty of play­ers who per­haps only have 5 or 10 min­utes free time to prac­tise. Ad­di­tion­ally, there may be play­ers who need a quick rou­tine to grab be­tween trav­el­ling, games or other pur­suits.

This then is re­ally about those play­ers who have a solid base and need to keep sharp. There may also be a slot for those who just do not like prac­tis­ing and need a quick and reg­u­lar fil­lip. Firstly you will need to warm up even though this is a ten minute ses­sion.

Stage one: To start with use the bull and throw about a minute’s worth of darts. Here just con­cen­trate on throw­ing a straight dart with very good form. To help achieve this once you have sighted the dart as you re­lease, change your sight to the ac­tual dart going through the air. The en­deav­our is to have a smooth flight, bal­anced and true all the way to the tar­get. This will en­sure in this quick ses­sion that straight away you are back in the groove and main­tain­ing good form.

Stage two: Use this same form and ap­proach and throw three darts in suc­ces­sion at tre­ble 6, tre­ble 3, tre­ble 11 and tre­ble 20. This should take about an ad­di­tional two min­utes with seven min­utes re­main­ing in the ses­sion.

Stage three: For the next six min­utes use the rou­tine as fol­lows: nine darts thrown at twen­ties fol­lowed by a dou­ble of your choice. The tar­get for the nine darts will be at least 180, 240 or 300 de­pend­ing on your cur­rent stan­dard of play. To note that suc­cess here is achieved when you hit your cho­sen dou­ble in ei­ther of the 10th, 11th or 12th dart.

Stage four: One more minute back throw­ing at the bull. Throw­ing re­laxed in form darts.

There you have it. Ten min­utes at the board fo­cused and tar­geted. This should suf­fice for those pe­ri­ods where a more for­mal struc­tured rou­tine is not achiev­able.


WARMING UP YOUR BRAIN

I think we all agree that to per­form at your best a thor­ough warm up is es­sen­tial. In a dif­fer­ent ar­ti­cle I talk about how you can de­velop a tech­nique to ac­cel­er­ate this warm up phase.

Now we are con­cen­trat­ing on the sec­ond area of warm up which is the mind.

Darts needs you to be re­laxed both phys­i­cally and men­tally. You look round a room and there are play­ers who are quite gifted at maths and fin­ish­ing com­bi­na­tions. Oth­ers who have spent time learn­ing and work­ing on their own rou­tines and oth­ers who seems to be peren­nial strug­glers.

All of the above would ben­e­fit from a ses­sion be­fore a match to warm up the men­tal as­pects of the game. Once you are at the venue your warm up phase may be lim­ited. You may have also started on the al­co­hol. This may seem to relax you but it may also dull the men­tal ca­pac­ity.

So the other op­tion is to ei­ther cre­ate this ses­sion at home be­fore you go out or if you are meet­ing at a home venue be­fore mov­ing off to the com­pet­i­tive venue.

There will be fin­ishes that need work­ing on but these are not for this ses­sion. This is about the men­tal warm up and fine tun­ing be­fore a match. I would sug­gest one of the fol­low­ing rou­tines.

First choice: Use a list of dou­bles that you may al­ready use as a prac­tice ses­sion. Be­tween 10 and 20 should suf­fice. (There is a list in the first book of this se­ries: “The De­fin­i­tive Darts Coach­ing Man­ual”). Now just run through these one after the other.

Do not worry if you do not hit the dou­ble and al­ways move on to the next. The im­por­tant as­pect here is to enjoy the essence of the throw whilst lightly con­cen­trat­ing on how the throw is de­vel­op­ing. By this I mean, for ex­am­ple, your next choice is 122. Your first dart is a sin­gle 18, so straight away you are now aware 104 is re­quired. Next dart is again an 18. So part of the men­tal warm up has made you aware that you need to aim for tre­ble 18 to leave 32. If you again hit 18 this leaves you 68.

Part of this men­tal warm up ex­tends to think­ing about that 68. As you note it is not all about hit­ting the ac­tual tar­get but being aware from a math­e­mat­i­cal stand point what you have at any point and what your op­tions are.

If you work on this 10 to 20 fin­ish ses­sion as part of a prac­tice ses­sion, when you come to use it be­fore a game it should be sec­ond na­ture.

To re­it­er­ate a key point. Do not fret over the ac­tual throw, enjoy and be re­laxed. Your mind will then nat­u­rally open and ad­just as part of the game prepa­ra­tion warm up.

I be­lieve the above use of around 15 dou­bles is most suit­able. An al­ter­na­tive though for a change is to choose 4 or 5 dif­fer­ent outs that you may have re­cently strug­gled on.

Your list may in­clude fin­ishes like 123, 129 and 135 etc. Work with say 6 darts at each of them in the sim­i­lar fash­ion to the pre­vi­ous ses­sion. Again the key is being re­laxed and al­low­ing the mind to adapt to the game ahead.

I think if you work with this you will find your com­bi­na­tion fin­ish­ing im­prov­ing when you come to the busi­ness end of your next match.

CONCENTRATION

I think we all agree at some stage dur­ing a match or a prac­tice rou­tine we lose focus and or con­cen­tra­tion. The abil­ity to in­crease the level of focus re­quired can be de­vel­oped.

Here we are going to ex­plore a sim­ple rou­tine, which is fun and will in­crease your lev­els of con­cen­tra­tion in a game or on the prac­tice board.

The idea of this ses­sion is to con­cen­trate on throw­ing nine darts and then fin­ish­ing on a dou­ble. To make this work all nine darts should, where pos­si­ble, land in the 20. You must also de­velop a tech­nique to repli­cate the time pe­riod when your op­po­nent is throw­ing.

The fol­low­ing scor­ing will be a tar­get with your nine darts:
180+ for the en­thu­si­ast
240+ for Su­per­league and County Play­ers
300+ for the Pro­fes­sion­als

The ses­sion will not be com­plete un­less, in the 10th, 11th or 12th dart you take out the cho­sen dou­ble.

So you can see at home on the prac­tice board, you can con­cen­trate on this small seg­ment of play. Then you re­peat again and again. Over a pe­riod the abil­ity to keep the con­cen­tra­tion lev­els high will man­i­fest in to your com­pet­i­tive play.

As well as being a use­ful de­vel­op­ment aid it should be fun and worth record­ing your weekly high­est re­sult. i.e. 260 and 32 out.

SWITCH ROUTINE

My rec­om­men­da­tion would be to build a switch rou­tine into your ses­sions. This is where you for ex­am­ple you score 100 plus with three darts and then take out the cho­sen dou­ble with the next three darts. This would count as one switch.

You then aim to hit an­other 100 plus and this would be your sec­ond switch, fol­lowed by the dou­ble again for the next switch. As you imag­ine this rou­tine en­sures you can main­tain high scor­ing fol­lowed by the clo­sure of the game with a dou­ble. Over time a switch score of 20 plus would be very ac­cept­able.

(Source: Books by DK Darts)

SABER'S BULLS PRACTICE ROUTINE

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Great post Edgar, very useful +1 Guests cannot see images in the messages. Please register at the forum by clicking here to see images.
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Thanks a lot, Darren! Guests cannot see images in the messages. Please register at the forum by clicking here to see images.
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Now thats what I'm talking about bro. Thanks. Plus 1 has been given.
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Lots to take control of but the mental part and concentration is where I fall short. I have the motivation and your post really are good tools. Another great post. Thanks Edgar
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I was just going over this practice routine again and it's really informative and well written. I'm wondering if it's part of a book that you wrote? If not then it should be. Good work Edgar
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(12-30-2014, 04:17 PM)SlingBlade Wrote: I was just going over this practice routine again and it's really informative and well written. I'm wondering if it's part of a book that you wrote? If not then it should be. Good work Edgar

It's from the Book of DK Darts.

Ebook Versions are available. All his books about darts are worth getting/;reading.
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some excellent advice there, thanks very much
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Thank you. Very good stuff.
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bump up
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Member previously known as Daveheald

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Excellent, cant wait to hit a atleast 180+ with my 9 darts as a begginer! huehue
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Thank you very much for sharing this 10 minutes day routine. url is the place where I found many interesting things upon how to increase motivation.
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Nice post
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Thanks its a good read
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