Improve Consistency and Stop Rushing with This Tip - Stay Down

The Stay-Down-Stance weight shift regulates your pace of play, improving stillness and consistency. Read about my realization during a Livestream session.

https://youtu.be/qwLk9ppMXks?si=sMCa_F3yk-uBX8J9

This video covers every cause and solution to rising up on your pool shots.

How your good play can deteriorate to rushing and inconsistency.

Monday I ran 140 balls during the Livestream. Next day I ran 112 balls. Since then I have had three sessions and not one run over 50. You really have to had your head in this game! Couldn't figure it out though it should have been obvious. Did a Livestream this morning for something different. While I didn't play great I played better and had a few runs into the 3rd inning and figured it out. I was rushing the program. I'm quite susceptible to that, maybe most people are.

What that means is - you work on your game, start playing better, then grow overconfident which makes you neglect the things that you worked on. Confidence is a necessity. Overconfidence will kill your game. Once I started deliberatly executing the steps in my program, my game started to come back and feel better. For me, that mostly means staying down through the shot. I've talked in the past about settling my weight down into the stance. Or a weight shift back in the stance. What it actually amounts to is NOT standing on the balls of your feet, but rather putting your weight on the heels of your feet.

What is a Stay Down Stance "weight shift" and why it helps your game.

John Schmidt's "weight back" stance

Watch the pros and you will so often see the lower part of the forward leg angled back - like John Schmidt in this photo. This is an extreme example. What John is doing is a simplified version of his normal "9-ball" stance which he can settle into quickly, then pop back out of quickly, for Straight Pool. When I get my weight shifted back onto the heels of my feet, everything works better. I stay down throughout, I'm able to pause longer at the cue ball before stroking, my backstroke moves slower and my forward stroke moves smoother. All because my shooting platform is strong and stable. When your weight is on the balls of your feet, the momentum of the forward swing of the cue stick cannot be resisted, leading to body movement and head lifting. When your weight is back on the heels of your feet, that momentum is pushed off from your heels and your weight stays back, so you stay still.

My How to Shoot Straight video details all the components of a proper pool stance:

Learn How to Run 100 Balls in Straight Pool to improve your consistency in all pool games.

Text Transcript of Stay Down Video

All right, class, who here still has trouble rising up on your shots? I have been rising up on my shots for over 40 years. So don't feel bad because I'm the rising up master, which I believe makes me eminently qualified to cover the subject. First, let's look at what is rising up and why it's bad for your game.

Then I'll present the three primary causes, along with some symptoms for each and solutions for each. Rising up on your shot is really a subset of body movement. Here is a much younger me. Notice how my body is still during the warm-up strokes, but on the final cue stick delivery, my head moves up before the cue-tip strikes the cue ball, and then my head continues rising before the object ball even reaches the pocket.

Look again, and you'll notice it's not just my head, but my entire torso that moves up from the waist. Other types of body movement are lifting the head, twisting the head, falling down, or dipping. Pool is not an action sport, but a precision sport. It's a game of millimeters or even fractions of millimeters.

If anything other than your shooting arm moves during the shot, Precision goes out the window. But more than that, learning to play well with body movement, as I did so many years ago, complicates everything. And it takes more time and effort on every shot, and it falls apart easier under any kind of pressure. I mentioned that body movement issues fall in three general causes, and those are stance, shot routine, and mental aspects of the game.

I'm going to give you rapid fire symptoms that you can identify with each of those three causes, along with a solution and a way to train those solutions for each one. Now, there'll be some crossover because not every symptom falls neatly into one of those causes. But my hope is that you'll be able to identify with at least one or more of those symptoms and get some value from the solutions and training provided. The old time pool players typically stood with their head one to two feet above their cue stick.

The theory behind that is that they were almost always playing straight pool and there's an advantage in straight pool being able to see above the balls and look down on the balls. Now I don't know whether that's true or not, but I can tell you this. If your stance has your head one or two feet above the cue stick, you don't need to rise up on the shot because your head is already up. So That doesn't help us today, because almost everyone today shoots with their head very much closer to the cue stick, if not with their chin right on the cue stick.

Another advantage to that old-time stance, it's similar to the advantage that you get by standing higher on your break shots in nine ball, is that you have more leverage to generate more power coming from your shoulder through the ball. When we're much lower on the shot, there can be the tendency to want to really peeve at that shot when you need a lot of power. And when you do that, it can cause lifting and cause your body to move. The solution to that is to realize that power in your pool shots doesn't come by contracting your muscles harder.

It comes by giving your Q-tip more time to accelerate. So if I know I want to hit a shot harder, If my regular stance is here, what I want to do is move my grip farther back on my cue stick and then give myself a longer bridge. Now I've got more time from here until my cue tip hits the cue ball. And so the way to train this is by deliberately practicing to pull that cue stick back slowly and then just let it go smoothly through on the follow through and keep your head still.

You can film yourself doing this and then play it back and just see how still did my head remain. One of the most common symptoms related to stance has to do with the feet position. You want your stance to be comfortable. What does comfortable mean?

Comfortable means that once you get into your stance, you could stand there like that all day long, like you're waiting on a bus. Now, what does comfortable mean? Comfortable means that it's balanced front to back. When you're doing your warm-up strokes, and then when you're doing your final stroke, your cue stick is moving back and forth.

Now, it may not seem like it, but every time it moves back, that's making some momentum, some energy moving back, and your body has to resist that. And then especially when you shoot, that's energy or momentum going forward and your body has to resist that. Now, the typical pool player stance has the forward foot farther in front than the rear foot. Snooker players, or those with a more square stance, the feet are more even as far as the distance to the bridge.

And then those players are putting more weight on the bridge hand so that when their cue stick is thrown forward, they're able to resist that momentum. So a balanced stance is resisting the backward, any backward and forward momentum. The way to look at your stance is look at the angle of the forward leg. If it's perpendicular to the floor, or especially if it's angled forward, you don't have any means to resist the throwing of the cue forward.

And you're going to want to resist that momentum by lifting up. So when you develop your stance, we're not going deep into the stance mechanics, that's a topic for another video. But one thing you're looking for is when you get into your stance, the angle of the lower part of your forward leg should be angled backward. Then you can resist the forward motion of your cue stick without rising up.

If you're at all unsure about your feet position, I recommend working with a qualified instructor because there's a lot of elements to a good full stance. The next symptom is body movement at any point during your shot routine. This one could probably be classified under shot routine, but I'm talking about it along with stance issues because I think it's very much related to stance. We want to remember that shooting pool is not an action sport, it's a precision sport.

What happens to a pool player too often, and this is the symptom, is that they're getting ready to shoot, and they're moving, and then they get down on the shot, and they're moving as they get down, and they're moving here, and then they shoot the ball, and it's just a constant flow of motion. And the solution is to realize that they're Pool is a precision sport, and you need pauses in there. And I made a video just about this topic. I call it the four moments of stillness.

There are four times in your shot routine that you need to pause. The first is when you're standing behind the shot, just before you enter the shot, you want to stand there and pause. The second one is after you get down on your shot, you want to pause at the cue ball. before you begin any warm-up strokes.

This is a real common one among players of all skill levels, is they'll get down on the shot and they begin their warm-up strokes right away, even before they're fully down on the ball. The third moment of stillness is after your warm-up strokes and you're ready to shoot, you need to pause at the cue ball, then pull your cue back and shoot, and then the fourth Pause is right there. After shooting, you want to pause again. So there's a total of three pauses, three moments of stillness while you're down on the shot.

So those three pauses break up the motions, the action of your shot routine. It breaks up the shot entry from the warm-up, from the delivery, from the moving to the next shot. The way to train this, there's a couple of ways. When you're shooting a drill, maybe the Mighty X drill or something, set up a video camera and/or a stopwatch or count to yourself a minimum of two seconds.

So if you're training this, you would go 1,001, 1,002. Enter your shot. Notice I don't start counting until I'm all the way down in my shot. One thousand one, one thousand two.

Now my warm ups. When I'm ready to shoot. One thousand one, one thousand two. Slow backstroke, follow through.

One thousand one, one thousand two. Now I'm allowed to stand up from the shot. So that's one way to train. Another way to train, this is kind of an old-school method that a lot of people do, is chalk your cue, get down on your shot, put a piece of chalk on your head.

Now when you're ready to shoot, you have to shoot the ball and remain still, then take the chalk off your head and stand up. So if that chalk falls off your head or moves at all, you've moved during your shot, and that's not allowed. So it's a kind of a conscious, tactile thing that can remind you to stay still. Another issue with stance, which also has its origins in the middle game, but as far as the stance goes, what some players can do is when they're ready to deliver the cue stick, when they deliver the cue stick, Their head lifts up like that.

So we'll talk about that again in the mental section. But what can happen as far as your stance, the arm isn't the only thing that moves when you're down in the shot. The other thing that moves is your eyes. Moving my eyes from the cue ball to the object ball, cue ball to object ball, cue ball to object ball.

If your head is pointed down too much, then when you look at the object ball, you have to kind of move your head up. And then especially when you shoot, you're going to feel like you have an urge to raise your head so that you can look up. So the solution to that is to get your head into a position where it's already up, and your eyes simply shift down to the cue ball and then up to the object ball. So that when you shoot, your eyes are already up, your head is already up, and you won't feel the need to rise up on the shot.

Now I'll say once again that getting your head in this position is related to other elements of your stance, where your feet are, your hips, your shoulder rotation, your torso, all of those things factor into how you're able to hold your head. So don't be afraid to consult with a qualified instructor to help you get your head over the cue stick and upright so that your eyes can shift between cue ball and object ball. without ever moving your head. Another way to train when you're practicing your shots, pick a point on the wall beyond the pocket.

When you shoot, that point shouldn't move. If that point moves like this after you shoot or during your shot, then you've lifted your head. So it's a way to train Keep your head still. There's one more stance that you can be aware of, and that's clearance.

It's a little bit more rare, but it could be an issue. When we talk about clearance, we're talking about the amount of room between your grip and your hip or your leg. But if your grip on your cue is right next to your body like this, you don't have room to swing your cue stick, and it can lead to a desire to move your body out of the way or lift up to create room to swing your cue. So that's something that you want to be aware of.

Work with your instructor if you think it might be an issue. But proper clearance, you're going to have lots of room. Look how much room there is between my cube stick and my hip. So I don't have any issues.

I don't have to worry about that. And I can just go ahead and stroke smoothly without lifting my body. Let's skip ahead to mental causes for rising up because there are just two and they're related. First, a mental desire to see the result of the shot and cause us to rise up to look.

The solution is to make a complete decision while standing up. Visualize the entire shot. So here I want to come two rails out of the corner, but do I want to contact the first rail here? here or here.

Make that decision, see it happening, visualize it while standing up. The other mental cause is being unsure of where the cue ball or object ball will go. The solution is to connect the result of the shot to the q-tip contact. Now I can look at this shot and notice that I want to land in this window but not between the 15 and the 9.

The window is between the 15 and the 14. So halfway between those two balls is here, that's about straight into the pocket from the 8. So when I'm I can visualize that point. I know that if I land a little bit short or a little bit long, I'll still have a shot.

Now that I've made those decisions, the cue ball contact point is connected to the ball going in the pocket and the cue ball contacting the rail at the point you chose and traveling across the cloth at the distance that you visualized. When you're down on the shot, we stay down with the Q-tip and remain down to watch the object ball and cue ball from the down position. Here is an example of being unsure or wanting to see the result. Nervousness can cause head movement before shooting.

And the player rises while shooting. Where's the cue ball? But having visualized the shot and connected the results to the Q-tip contact, when this player shoots, their head stays down with the Q-tip and watches the balls move from the down position. They can even move out of the way without rising up.

There's another super important reason why you need to stay down on the shot, and this segues into the shot routine portion of this video. If your subconscious mind has to calculate for the change in the angle of the cue stick and where you might hit the cue ball, it's just so much more work. On top of that, When you're rising up on the shot, it's less efficient. So if I'm trying to slide my cue ball over here to get this eight ball through that window, you're going to find that if you rise up on your shot, you have to hit it much harder than if you stay down.

Why is that important? Because if you don't have to shoot as hard, then you have more precise control over a range of distance. Your stroke is going to become more efficient and you'll have more control over the cue ball than you ever thought possible. Okay, now what you've been waiting for, shot routine related causes to rising up or body movement.

I've got four of them. The first one is shooting too hard. A lot of players experience excessive movement because they just plain shoot too hard. Remember that the pool balls only weigh six ounces, and your cue stick weighs at least 18 ounces.

That's three times as much as a pool ball. It doesn't take a lot of energy to get that round object to travel to that pocket. And the cloth has a lot of friction. It doesn't take a lot of backspin to get the cue ball to stop, even on a long shot like this.

A common symptom of shooting too hard is excessive waggling or moving your warm-up strokes too fast. This also encourages flowing directly into a too-fast backstroke and body movement due to momentum from an entirely too-quick shot delivery. A slow backstroke is key to shooting efficiently, only as hard as is needed, calming body movement. The slow backstroke is reinforced by slow, accurate warm-ups and a pause at the cue ball before shooting.

The result is a smooth follow-through, which does not encourage body movement. One way to learn this stillness during the motion of shooting is to exaggerate slow warm-up strokes while you move your eyes from cue ball to object ball. Then when you pause at the cue ball, close your eyes and keep them closed until the sound has stopped. Only then may you open your eyes, your Q-tip followed through perfectly straight.

Training a slow backstroke in a smooth follow-through is not an overnight affair and there's more to it which I'll address in other videos. But plan on exercises of this sort on a regular basis for as long as you play pool. The second shot routine related cause of rising up on the shot is swinging from the shoulder. Now, that's similar to elbow drop, but I'll point out the difference.

Elbow drop is when a player gets down on the shot, and they'll keep their elbow up until they hit the cue ball, and then when they follow through after hitting the cue ball, the elbow drops so they can have a longer follow through. That's elbow drop. And it does involve the upper arm rotating around the shoulder. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about actually swinging your cue stick by rotating the shoulder, not the elbow. If you think about players, I mentioned players in the old days, they held their head way above the cue stick. It can be really enticing to simply rotate from your shoulder to swing like that. But for modern players who have their head down lower, They tend to want to swing from the shoulder, I think, because that makes it possible to keep the cue stick level all the way through the ball.

And that's an enticing thing. People are taught to keep the cue level all the way through, but that's not the correct way to shoot. When we think about the pendulum stroke, our cue stick is at an orientation to the table when we set up to the shot. But on the backstroke, your grip hand gets higher, and the cue stick changes angle, it's steeper now.

Then at address, it goes back to level. And then when you shoot, your hand comes higher again, and the angle of the cue stick changes, it's steeper, and the cue tip goes down. So that's how we want to train. We want to train to realize that the proper stroke with the elbow pinned The Q-tip will go down to the cloth.

So we want to remember also our head should stay down. So when you're practicing, that's what you want to think about. Head down, tip down. Follow through.

Tip down, head down. Well, that's kind of a mantra that you can think about to try and break out of that habit of of wanting to rise up to swing from the shoulder. We're only swinging from the elbow. Another way to train that is with, for example, is with my Ghost Align training tool.

Now, this has a lot of uses, and primarily it's a device to train a perfectly straight stroke. But you can put this in front of the cue ball, any ball, and it has a little aperture to stroke through. Well, if you're trying to stroke your Q-tip through that aperture to hit the cue ball, and you're rising up to swing from the shoulder and have any kind of movement at all, it is not going to work. You're going to knock that thing out of there.

So this is a great training tool. You get down on your shot with your Q-tip through the aperture, and you do your warm-up strokes. So this can really reinforce the idea that you need to remain still, your head should stay down, and the cues stick. Q-tip and stay down.

Follow through. That's gonna help you to stay still. Head down, tip down. Swinging, not from the shoulder, from the elbow.

The next shot routine related cause of body movement is a really easy one to talk about. It's harder to implement. And it has to do with shooting too fast. I already covered shooting too fast, and I talked about pauses in your shot routine to separate the different moments of action.

I want you to think about the fact that when you're down on the shot, there's actually not two, there's three things that move. Everything else is still. Your grip hand moves. Your eyes move from object ball to cue ball.

Your lungs move. That's the third thing. You have to breathe. Many people have a problem with holding their breath while they're shooting.

And that's going to create tension. It can create tension in the muscles, muscle tremors, palpitations. It can create clenching of the cue stick and just everything that makes you want to move. And if you're holding your breath, you can get in a hurry to hurry up and shoot so that you can breathe again.

Not just, it's just a recipe for disaster. It's going to create body movement. So if that is your symptom, you want to think about breathing. The natural rhythm of human breathing is an inhalation and then an exhalation.

And at the end of the exhalation, there's a pause, often one and a half to two seconds, before we breathe in again. Well, we know that target shooters are very aware of their breath. And they typically want to pull the trigger at the end of that exhalation because they have one and a half, two seconds where everything's calm. And as I mentioned, pool is not an action sport.

We want to remain calm. And also when you're playing in a tournament or whatever it is, and are under pressure, breathing helps you to remain calm, dissipate stress, helps you to not clench the cue, therefore, helps you to stay still and not move. So I don't want to go deep into this, but realize that when you're down on the shot, when you're doing your warm-up strokes, when you're practicing, pay attention to your breath and develop a breathing rhythm that works in concert with the rhythm of your eye movement and the rhythm of your warm-up strokes, whatever that is for you. If you have something that you think works really great, leave it in the comment section for others to read and check out.

But most people would suggest that you're breathing at a calm pace, at a normal rhythm. You want to practice so that at the end of your exhalation, that's when you bring your cue stick back slowly and go through. And so paying attention to your breath in this fashion is going to help you to stay down on the shot, And also keep everything still. Your cue stick goes straight and true.

And the last shot routine related cause of moving or rising up on the shot that I want to talk about is rushing the shot. This is a really easy one to talk about. Now, I already mentioned rushing the shot earlier in this video, but this has a different symptom. I'll tell you a quick anecdote.

There was a player once that I was watching and he was involved in a break and run contest. So he was chosen. He got the opportunity to break a rack of ten ball. They were laying pretty good and he made some great shots and he ran out and he got to the nine and the ten ball.

That was all that was left. And he was so excited that he was going to win the break and run contest. that when he got down on the nine ball, he was already shooting the ten ball. And he was in such a hurry to shoot the ten that he got down on the nine, swung the cue, missed the shot with perfect position on the ten.

And he lost the break and run contest because of that. And it's just an example of rushing to the next shot. And there can be other reasons behind rushing, but it has a different a different cure. And what I want to talk about is a set position.

You actually have three positions. So when you're practicing, you can think about this. You have a set and then a start and a finish, okay? When you think, when you rehearse those positions and make that part of your shot routine every single time, then you won't succumb to this desire to rush to the next shot.

You're always going to be patient to finish the shot that you're on. But set, what does set mean? Set means that that's the second moment of stillness. So you have your shot routine, whatever it is, and after you are down fully on the shot, this is, golfers would call this the address position.

This is your set position. So you get down on the shot and you set for the shot and you remain still at that position before you get your warm up strokes. That's what I talked about before. But I want you to incorporate set, start, finish.

In other words, you have your set position. That's where your feet are and that's where your torso and your head is and your arm at the address position. You do your warm ups and then when you do your final backstroke, the end of your backstroke is start That's your start position. And then you follow through when you shoot, and your Q-tip finishes down and your head's down, that's your finish position.

So you have set, start, finish. So if you're rehearsing that way, and think about maintaining those three positions, that reinforces the idea of everything to do with your shot routine and your stance, to stay still and complete the shot every single time. You'll never rush to the next shot. You won't rush your warm-ups either because you can take whatever time you need to get set.

Then you do your warm-ups. Then when you're ready to shoot, you bring your cue slowly to the start position, then the finish. That's how you're going to get over the desire to rush to the next shot. It also keeps everything at a calm, measured pace.

That's what you want when you're playing in a tournament and maybe you're under a little pressure. Just remember, set, start, finish. In conclusion, we learned the what and why of rising up as well as the three main causes, along with symptoms, solutions, and training for each. As I'm sure you noticed, there's overlap among the solutions and training as well as benefits far beyond just staying down on your shots.

So even if you don't rise up too often, everyone can benefit from the training exercises. What worked best for me was to realize that rising up on your shot isn't just one thing that needs to be fixed. Rather, it means changing your shot routine, to literally depend on staying down and stillness. Don't underestimate the time and effort required to advance beyond merely not rising up.

Whether you are a beginner wanting to learn good habits or you're a habitual offender like me, be patient with yourself. Don't expect an overnight cure. Rather than lots of examples of pros staying down on their shot, I want to leave you with just two examples of a pro who stays down, I think the best of all. And that's snooker pro, Sean Murphy.

If you like this video, you'll really appreciate the information in my four moments of stillness video. Good luck.