Improve Your Darts - A Guide To Darts Practice

If there is one thing for sure it's that everyone who plays darts, without exception, would like to play better! It is also true that if you ask any darts player how to get better the answer will be practice, practice and then practice some more.

Now at this point the topic gets a little tricky because, although we all agree that practice is essential, there are as many approaches to practice as there are dart players.

But, over the years I have chatted with many players about this, and some common themes arise; consistency, variety, focus and fun are the key elements of successful practice.

Consistency

The exact methods of practice you choose are less important than the fact that you do practice regularly. As with many sports, a short practice session every day is much better than a marathon session once a week.

Variety

Nothing is guaranteed to turn you off practicing than doing exactly the same thing day after day. You must introduce some variety to your practice if it is not to become stale.

The easiest way to achieve this is to have a large repertoire of practice techniques to draw on.

Focus

When you do practice you need to concentrate on what you are trying to achieve; casually lobbing darts at the board whilst watching TV will not improve your dart playing as effectively as a session with clear objectives and no distraction.

Fun

If you are not enjoying your practice you are unlikely to keep it up. Practice does not have to be boring, try to introduce some challenging exercises to keep you on your toes.

Ok - so how do you actually go about practicing? There are, as I mentioned earlier, many forms of practice but it is important that each practice session contains the three elements of match preparation; warm-up, accuracy training and game training.

I'll cover them each in turn and give a few examples of each.

Warm-Up

At the start of any practice session you really need to loosen up and establish your line - often called 'getting your eye in'. What you are trying to do here is to re-establish the natural rhythm that any long term dart player will be familiar with.

By the time you have warmed up you will not need to think about your grip on the darts or the pace at which you throw. you will also be able to confidently and reasonably accurately throw at any region of the board.

Your warm up should take no more than 10 - 15 minutes. An approach that I have found useful is to throw 30 darts (10 throws) at the 20 region; followed by 30 darts at random doubles and bullseyes, then go round the board in singles throwing one dart at each number. You are not really concerned too much with your accuracy here you are simply re-gaining your 'eye' and your rhythm.

Another approach is to throw 12 darts at 20, then the same at 19's, 18's and so on down to 15's

Accuracy Training

During this phase of training your objective is to increase your focus and concentration to enable you to consistently hit the targets you are aiming for.

There are many methods of achieving this and you should be looking for improvement over time:

a) Go round the board in doubles ensuring that you treat each throw as if it was an out shot in a match. Introduce variety into this by throwing 1 dart at each double and recording the number you hit, throwing at each double until you hit it and recording how many darts it takes you to complete the circuit. as you get better you may wish to throw until you hit 3 of each - again record the number of darts it takes.

b) Do the same thing but with trebles

c) If you are really good you might want to try hitting a combination of singles, doubles and trebles.

d) Another variation is to have a friend call out singles, doubles or trebles and hit them on demand recording your hit rate.

Game Practice

Here you are trying to improve the skills you need to win a game. It is not enough to simply throw high scores (although it certainly helps!); you must always know what you have left, what you need to hit to leave a finish and how to close out a game. The key skills here are mental arithmetic and accurate finishing.

a)Start from 51 and attempt to finish on a double within 3 darts. Once you hit it move on to 52, 53 and so on - do this for a fixed time - how long depends on the total amount of time you are spending on practicing. When you get better start off on a higher number.

b)Play as many games of 101 straight in and double out as you can in a fixed time. If you are really good you might want to make this 201.

Other factors

As anyone who has played competitive darts (whatever the level) can tell you; it is one thing to throw well in practice and an entirely different matter when you are playing in a match.

Your hands may shake and all of a sudden the trebles and doubles seem to shrink to a third of their normal size.

One way of addressing this is to ensure that your practice is not too relaxed. During your accuracy training and game practice it is a great idea to add some pressure by competing against an imaginary opponent. The easiest way of doing this (without risking a visit from the men in white coats) is to set targets;

for example if you are throwing around the clock in doubles assume that you are playing someone just a little better than you are and, if you know you can go around the board in 60 darts
set a target of 58 - if you take more than this your imaginary opponent has won.

Gerald Peters

http://www.thedartsshop.co.uk

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