Shoot 10,000 Times
in Practice
Your basketball team shooting drills have a purpose.
Improve your youth basketball coaching.
Enhance your basketball coaching clinic.
Practicing over and over will improve your basketball shooting. Here is why. Learn and coach intelligently.
www.FreeThrowTrainer.com
By Andy Atwood
Heystek & Atwood, LLC
Inventors of the Nothin' But Net-
FREE THROW TRAINER™
You can immediately capture an advantage as an Elite Free Throw Shooter by targeting the number of practice shots you take. The goal is 10,000 free throws.
You can look around and find a lot of advice, such as “25 shots a day for middle school players,” but the truth is, the sooner you can get to 10,000 shots without hurting yourself, the more likely it is that you will become an elite free throw shooter.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2008 best selling book Outliers: The Story of Success, makes the point crystal clear. Yes, there are free throw shooters who have more natural talent to begin with, however, the fact is that the really great elite free throw shooters work much, much harder than all the others.
The idea, that excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum level of practice, surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.” (Gladwell, p. 39f.)
Not only does it take 10,000 hours of practice to get the brain to assimilate all the information it needs to shoot free throws with a high percentage of success, it takes that long for “muscle memory,” the vitally important subject of another one of our articles, to reach its peak.
Gladwell goes on to tell stories of outliers such as Bill Gates and the Beatles, among others. One of his main points is that lucky breaks, or chosen circumstances, seem to make the 10,000 hours possible. Gates had a handful of breaks that gave him the opportunity to get 10,000 hours of programming in before graduating from high school. While still a struggling high school band in 1960, the Beatles went to Hamburg, Germany, and played 270 long nights in little more than 18 months.
We are recommending 10,000 practice shots with the “Nothin’ but Net" FREE THROW TRAINER™.
With a friend or family member under the net to retrieve the ball, you can stand at the line and shoot 400 to 500 shots in one hour. That would be 20 to 25 hours of practice shooting free throws to get to 10,000 shots.
The “Nothin’ but Net" FREE THROW TRAINER™ has been uniquely designed to give you a marked advantage when it comes to making use of your practice time. No longer do you have to “get it in the basket.”
All you have to do is hit the TRAINER with any part of the ball and the probability of getting “Nothin’ but Net” will increase - and so will your stats.ACCURACY + CONSISTENCY = CONFIDENCE
Al Heystek and Andy Atwood
Heystek & Atwood, LLC
Inventors of the Patent Pending "Nothin' But Net" FREE THROW TRAINER™
www.FREETHROWTRAINER.com