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Isolating Habits

Isolating Habits

We seem to understand building habits in other settings so much better than we understand how to change habits in shooting.  There are a couple of analogies I use all the time when it comes to building and changing habits.

I’ll talk about taking a snowboarding or skiing lesson.  Living in Canada, most kids seem to understand at least what those look like.  I’ll ask players if at their first snowboarding lesson they were handed a snowboard and taken to the top of the mountain, and pushed down a run with trees, moguls, cliffs and rocks?  Of course they weren’t.  In fact, for the first 10 minutes they spend just standing on flat ground, and probably fell over a couple of times when they were just STANDING there.

In your first driving lesson, the instructor probably didn’t take you out into rush-hour traffic.  You probably spent it in an empty parking lot, country road, or residential neighbourhood with no other cars around.  And even then, you probably spent the first 10 minutes just sitting in the car without moving.

When you were learning to play piano, the teacher didn’t pull out sheet music for Mozart and demand that you play to at the correct tempo.  You probably sat at the keys and learned their names, and learned how to just use 3 fingers to play “Mary had a little lamb”, and even then you probably made mistakes.

These are the settings we learn other skills in.  As our skills improve, the setting becomes more challenging.  We go to more challenging runs on the ski hill, into more traffic at higher speeds in the car, and play more elaborate songs on the piano.

But in basketball we often get taught that if we aren’t practicing at game speed then we are wasting our time.  That is false.

There isn’t only flat ground and cliffs in skiing, there isn’t only empty parking lots and rush hour traffic when driving, and there isn’t only “Mary had a little lamb” and Mozart on the piano.

There are thousands of speeds and levels in between.  We need to find the level that is appropriate for the player and their habit, and slowly increase the difficulty as their skills improve.\

And we don’t always have to take steps forward.

What would you do if you became a pretty good piano player, but there was this one part of one song that you kept making mistakes on.  You’d probably isolate that part, slow down, and practice it over and over, getting a little faster.  As you learn to do that part right, you’d probably start to incorporate more lead in to that part, and more of the rest of the song after, until you were able to play the whole song with that part correctly.

Thats how we break habits.  We shouldn’t practice the one place we make mistakes in the song by just playing the whole song over and over again at the same speed (and probably keep making the same mistake).  So don’t keep shooting the same shot at the same speed and expecting yourself to build a new habit.

Isolate the bad habit, slow way down, learn to do it differently, then start to apply that new way into increasingly more difficult situations.

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