Each week in The Hoop Doctors “Skool for Ballers” we will bring you tips, analysis, or drills on various aspects of the game to help guide your training to be the best damn baller you can be! Don’t forget, being a GREAT baller takes as much work off the court as it does on!
By Brian McCormick – 180 Shooter
The December 2008 Men’s Health confirms what we already knew: “employing a rigid pre-shot routine will help you master your free throw, according to a study in the Journal of Sports Sciences.” The shooter does the same thing every time at the free throw line to get comfortable and develop confidence shooting free throws. Beyond a routine, how can we develop better free throw shooters?
The easy answer is practice. A high school coach asked me recently about improving his team’s free throw shooting because he lost two big games by a couple points and shot under 50% from the free throw line. I asked if he practiced free throw shooting and he shook his head. My advice was to practice free throws more often.
Gonzaga University Director of Basketball Jerry Krause believes that free throws should account for at least 10% of your practice time. Free throws account for about 20% of points scored per game. So, if you break up practice into half offense and half defense, free throws should account for 20% of your offensive practice, or 10% overall.
But, how should we practice free throws?
Dr. Richard Schmidt and Dr. Robert A Bjork wrote a paper titled “New Conceptualizations of Practice: Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Training Concepts,” about skill acquisition, and the efficacy of block practice versus random practice. Block practice is the traditional practice blocks used by most coaches and players; to practice free throw shooting, a player shoots a set of free throws. Many players shoot a set of ten free throws or shoot 100 consecutive free throws. Random training changes the practice. Rather than doing the same thing over and over (shooting free throws), the player practices the skill in different ways (change the tempo, distance, location, etc).
In their study, 8-year-olds tossed beanbags to targets. One group practiced tossing to targets 2-feet away and 4-feet away, while the other group tossed only to targets 3-feet away. When they tested the subjects at a later date, the subjects who tossed to variable targets performed better at a test at 3-feet than did those who practiced at 3-feet.
“This result suggests that learning how to modulate the relationships among the target distances was more important for a test at any one target than was specific experience, even at the particular target distance used at test.”
This study has implications for free throw shooting practice. Game shooting is always variable: you cannot practice the same exact shot over and over that you will get in a game, except with free throws. Typical free throw practice is to shoot free throws over and over to master the distance and the shot. However, this study suggests that players should practice their free throws from random distances, not just 15-feet.
When I coached a women’s professional team in Sweden, we spent 10 minutes of every practice on form shooting and free throws. We did a lot of mental shooting practice at the free throw line, and I attributed our improvement to the mental practice. However, the variable practice contributed to the improvement.
Rather than shoot free throws, we started in front of the rim. Players made three shots in a row to take a step back. If they missed, they started over again. I use this drill to start all my shooting sessions. Once players reached the free throw line, they did the mental shooting exercise with five free throws in a row. However, with players I train currently, the goal is to make 15 shots in a row with the last three being three-pointers. So, players shoot the shot at variable distances (closer and further) with only three makes from the free throw line rather than only shooting from one distance.
Next time my friend asks, I will change my answer from “practice more” to “practice more often using variable distances.” I wrote about Dwight Howard’s free throw shooting last week, and the article was posted on different sites and drew different responses. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea on why some players struggle from the free throw line. I went to a Sacramento Monarchs’ game several years ago and criticized the Monarchs’ players, especially Ticha Penicheiro because they did no productive shooting in their pre-game warm-ups. At the time, the Monarchs were a below average free throw shooting team and Penicheiro was especially bad, considering her other skills. Not one player warmed-up by shooting shots in the key; Giuliana Mendiola literally came out of the tunnel shooting half court shots and never took a shot inside the three-point line in warm-ups. At the time, without knowing the proper terms, I suggested that players like Penicheiro use the two hours before a game to work on their form shooting, starting close to the basket and progressing gradually to the free throw line.
The progressions in 180 Shooter: 5 Steps to Shooting 90% from the Free Throw Line, 50% from the Field and 40% from the 3-point Line start with this approach. Dr. Schmidt explains that “variable practice alters the practice context to force a change in behavior from trial to trial, encouraging additional information processing activities about the lawful relationships among the task variants. The result is learning that contributes to performance on the test of retention or generalizability, even though these activities detract from momentary performance during the acquisition phase.”
We typically perform shooting drills at the same distance, making five or ten shots from the same spot. Dr. Schmidt’s research suggests that changing the distance between repetitions would help players develop into better shooters. While shooting from variable distances might not help you make 15 shots in a row, it will help your subsequent performance when asked to make two free throws in a row in a game. The point of practice is to improve game performance, not to enhance practice performance. Transfer to the game is the determining factor of whether the practice was effective.
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