HOW TO GET BETTER AT FLAIR

HOW TO GET BETTER AT FLAIR
(how practice makes perfect)
by Rick Barcode

About three years ago Alan Mayes, Mindaugas Gradeckas, Erin Connelly and myself went to a park to flip bottles. On the way to the park Alan explained to Erin and myself the psychology of why practice makes perfect. It was so insightful and brilliant that it felt like Yoda was speaking himself. I hope I do his explanation justice, here goes…

There is a ladder or pyramid of all the tricks that you know. At the bottom of this pyramid are tricks that you can do 100 out of 100 times. For example, for me (Rick Barcode) this would be pulling a bottle out of the well vertically and catching it with a forehand grip, simple! In the middle of my pyramid would be something I hit half of the time such as a single bottle over my shoulder, double rotation to a stall. The top of the pyramid is reserved for something that you have thought of doing but have never accomplished. For me that could be a store & pour thrown behind my back and onto my forehead for the stall (ala Alan Mayes or Rodrigo Delpech).

So now you have this personal pyramid of moves that vary in difficulty from extremely easy at the bottom to something ridiculous that you can’t yet do at the top. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, then how can practice make perfect? If you start your practice session by warming up and then progressively trying harder and harder tricks until finally wrapping it up by trying those moves that are at the top of your pyramid something cool will happen. The day that you hit that impossible move it will no longer be the move that you can not do. It will have moved down a layer in your pyramid and psychologically now be the move that you hit one out of 100 times. As your mind subconsciously deals with this it now also re-files all the layers in your pyramid and moves everything else down a level. The move that you only hit five out of ten times, you will now probably hit six out of ten. In short, you improve.

Keep pushing yourself and thinking up those impossible moves, keep them at the end of your practice session and remember to always exercise those base skills and tricks as your warm up.

Now, stop reading this, get out there and flip some bottles! Practice does makes perfect.