How to Make More Free Throws
How to Make More Free Throws
“Imagine your vision being like a GPS system,” says Joan N. Vickers, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Calgary. The human brain needs time to process visual input and grasp complex spatial information. To improve your free-throw shooting, ignore the biomechanics of your shot for a while and concentrate just on your gaze. “Fixate your eyes on a single spot on the hoop,” Vickers says. She suggests the very front and center, but if you’ve been trained to look at the back of the hoop, continue to do so. You need to look at this spot for at least one full second before beginning your shot. Try not to shift your eyes for even a millisecond. As you bring the ball up past your heart, it should pass, eclipse-like, between your eyes and the basket. “Shoot in a quick, fluid motion,” Vickers says.
In the mid-1990s, Vickers pioneered eye-tracking research on what she called “quiet eye,” essentially the duration of the gaze on a target before (and sometimes during) a precise motor task like putting, skeet shooting or tying a surgical knot. Since her first quiet-eye study on free throws, hundreds of similar studies have been published showing that on average, experts at a given motor skill maintain quiet eye some 62 percent longer than nonexperts. Quiet-eye instruction can significantly increase precision; in one of Vickers’s studies, a basketball team’s free-throw accuracy increased by 22 percent after training. Researchers found that even children coached in quiet eye vastly improved their ability to throw a ball against a wall and catch it. “Quiet eye should be taught from Day 1,” Vickers says.
Scientists are not entirely certain of the underlying neuroscience of quiet eye, but it seems to work by activating those parts of the brain focused on immediate visual goals while suppressing the parts of the brain responsible for memories and emotion. This can be especially important when performing under intense pressure — the final minutes of a playoff game, say — when stress tends to divert neural processing efforts toward things like the opposing team’s screaming fans or the niggling fear that you’ll miss. “Keep your quiet eye on that hoop,” Vickers says. “Trust that it’s going to work, and know that it does.”
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