Essay On Free Throw Shot Shooting

If you’re like most basketball players, you’ve taken thousands of free throw shots since junior high. How many of those free throw shots were performed under the trained eye of a coach that you believed in, and who insisted on correct form with every shot?Is it any wonder that your free throw percentage has barely improved over your lifetime of play?

It should be easy, right? One task: put the ball through the hoop. It’s just you on the line. You’re stationary. The hoop is stationary. One game-winning point with every shot. If it were easy, free throw shot percentages would have increased over the last 50 years, but they haven’t! We need to make a permanent shift in our training.

Understand this: “Practice Makes Permanent, NOT Perfect.”
If you repeat the same physical movement thousands of times, then you pre-dispose your neuromuscular pathways to fire the same way every time, and if your practice is sloppy and inconsistent, then your shot percentage will be sloppy and inconsistent. Look at your own percentages and you can tell.
I’ve taught a Human Anatomy and Physiology course for
Frequent, repeated firing of neural pathways predisposes that pathway to repeated firing. Remember: "practice makes permanent, not perfect." If you inconsistently practice a movement with the wrong neurological pattern (that is, repeated firing of the neurons, triggering incorrect muscle groups) then you will groove an incorrect neuromuscular pattern that will be hard to "unlearn" at some later point in time. Thus we have coaches, who help us train with technical precision, and also tell us when to stop training. We should stop performance training when fatigue interferes with grooving the correct neuromuscular pattern. This is most important when precise movements are called for; less important when the movements are gross motor movements and involve a higher percentage of strength