Hello and welcome to my column. Over my short time playing and studying darts, I’ve learned some principles and lessons that are worth sharing with my fellow darters. Part of my education, reading many darting books and articles, has had mixed results. There have been some excellent articles and insights, but far more of them were not helpful at all. I think many of these dart-darting authors spent too much time on personal stories or praising this darter or that one. These articles are the result of my desire to put forth well written information so that you, the darter, might put these principles to work and see their worth for yourself. For the most part my wish is to share proven practices and methods that I have experienced, limiting my opinions. Please forgive me if I slip up now and then and state my personal opinion; take it with a grain of salt.

My first series of articles will be on the subject of personal practice. This is an area of darting that doesn’t get a lot of coverage, and I believe is quite important if you want to improve your game. Whether you want to become an ADO ranked player or wish to win more matches on your league night, personal practice is your greatest ally. Think about it. Without practicing on your own you cannot hope to improve any faster than the people you play with, unless you play for many many years. There aren’t many prodigies that just pick up darts and throw like a pro from the beginning. If you only practice when you play on your league team, you are likely to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, since nothing is really changing. When you play games against an opponent, your number one objective is to be fully focused on the game. The time to be thinking about problems you’ve encountered in throwing or trying out new ideas is in personal practice, when nothing’s at stake. Also, personal practice time gives you experience to try a great many variations on any technique to see what works best for you. We all want to know what works, don’t we?

So lets talk about some of the dimensions of personal practice. First of all, it is probably much better if you can practice on a regular schedule, say every day for one hour. The more frequently you practice during the week, the better. If you have less practice time, it is still better to practice on multiple occasions rather than once a week for a lengthy duration. I say this because practice helps your body to go through the same routine frequently so that it remembers the motions. It also helps you by giving your mind some time to absorb the learnings and incorporate them into your unconscious mind. In this way you don’t have to think about how you’re shooting unless your shot is not working as planned.

Secondly, practice should always be more than just "pounding darts" at the board. Your goal in practice must be to elevate your skill to the point that you always hit what you are aiming for. This effort should be true for all three darts, every trip to the line. With this in mind, personal practice provides the perfect opportunity to try a variety of different techniques, minor adjustments and accidental motions, which sometimes prove to be improvement insights. Let me take this thought one step further. When you are practicing, if all three darts don’t go where you are aiming, there are adjustments that you can make that will correct this situation. You must discover them, practice using them, and commit to higher goals. I am so sure of this fact that if you will follow some of the simple suggestions that I make in future articles, your game will improve. A great deal of performing and winning in darts is the belief in your skills. Skills are simply the technical and mental discoveries you make and practice, which make your game consistent, solid and highly repeatable.

Let’s talk a bit more about gaining skills. Many dart players I know, including myself at one time, have the belief that winning dart games and matches is about beating opponents. The difficulty becomes how do I beat an opponent that seems invincible? This is the wrong approach to take for a winning game. What wins matches are skills, both physical, strategic and mental. By gaining and performing the correct skills at the right time, you enable yourself to win games. When you don’t win, your best response is to assess what went wrong and which skills you need to improve to win. All personal practice depends on developing, maintaining and improving skills.

Also, I would include the following process for developing and improving skills. First, recognize when some aspect of your game or technique is not working. This is very important because I see darters all the time that continue to do the same things over and over with the same poor results. How can they expect their game to get better by repeating actions that have proven to be mostly unsuccessful? Second, identify what is causing the problem or what prevents better performance. This step is the tough one, which often takes me many practice sessions to realize. It is often helpful to ask other darters what they observe about your performance in the problem area. Sometimes others can easily see what we overlook. Third, experiment with different techniques to find out what you could do to move closer to your desired performance. I will provide a number of examples of this in my future article on improving weaknesses. Fourth, develop some simple practice routines to help you work on developing and including your new found technical discoveries into your regular darting skills tool kit. After practicing these new found skills, they will become automatic and unconscious.

There are five areas of personal practice that I have identified for discussion: Stroke, Physical Techniques/Setting Up, Improving Weaknesses, Math and Counting, and Sports Psychological Methods. Each one of these areas will be a future article. It is my sincere hope that these articles benefit you and help your game.

All the best,

Charles Bradish