Getting Better

[imalaxer11230]

Hey I was wondering what I could do to get better at lacrosse besides throwing at a wall. If you no write me something.

[red9535]

Wall is the most important, but you can find a buddy and play with him. Get some game expereince, this is one of the most important things. Practice dodging, shooting, shooting on the run, passing catching, fakes, cradling, anything. Just get a stick in your hands and you'll constantly be getting better

[BigKLaxer]

^^ good advice.
Also try to work on your endurance, speed, and conditioning by running distance, sprinting, and running fartleks.

[Pitibear]

the answer to the question, "what do I need to work on?" is always..."Everything." Do some work on each part of your game...

a couple of "training tricks:"

1. Take the weakest part of your game, and spend a 'good deal of time' on it (a week, a month?)...you will amaze your friends, teammates, coach, if all of a sudden, the thing you were the worst at, now you're the best at. Take the thing that you are the worst at, and work it until it is the strongest part of your game.

2. a side benefit of number 1 above, is that you will find that every other aspect of your game will get better as you work on that one thing...don't ask me why, you will simply find that your other skills come along for the ride when you dedicatedly work hard on a single thing.

3. find a set of skills exercises, somewhere between six and ten in number, and do them every day...all throughout sports history, the superstars of various sports all have this trait in common. You would think that athletes like Pele, Yvan Cornyier(SP), Larry Bird, etc wouldn't need to work at the basics any more. But each one of them, at the height of their careers, did their "personal ten" set of practice drills every day. Nobody taught them to do it, it just happens that they all did it.

4. always train in cycles, rotating hard, intense, long workouts with light, easy, short ones...do 2-a-days, do 3-a-days, do zero-a-days once in a while...

5. If you didn't know, there's this thing called "muscle memory." it's where your muscles work together with the lower function centers of the brain to do something automatically. All rote learned behavior movements are governed by this brain function. Walking, talking, handwriting; all these are a part of the body moving in a specific way...once the brain learns the repetitive movement, the body can then do it "without thinking." and this descriptive phrase is actually what does occur, more or less. The trick with sports movements (like, anything you can do with a lax stick), is to do them enough times, repetitively in practice, so that the lower-function part of the brain takes over the performance guiding of the muscles...in order for this to happen, you have to have done the skill enough times in repitition...science has determined that the number of times is more or less 10,000...do something ten thousand times, and you can do it without thinking...

got any skill you'd like to be able to do like that?


good luck, work hard, work a lot, and have fun...