.....your mind instructs your body to loosen up, but it’s not quite responding?!? As you get set to release; you wonder what has happened to your feel for the darts?????  

When the pressure is turned up high, it’s not unusual for your muscles to respond by tightening up and for your breathing to get progressively, shallower. In addition, your thoughts tend to speed up, only to your detriment. Concentration becomes difficult.

For a competitive darter, this combination of physical and mental changes can be challenging.  Muscle tension in your neck, shoulder, and throwing arm interferes with a smooth fluid release, shortens your follow-thru, and disrupts your throwing rhythm. With tight muscles, there is a tendency to grip the dart too tightly and to use too much force, with the resulting price to be paid in accuracy and control.  

When one is under conditions of stress (competition or otherwise), blood flow is diverted away from the body extremities and their muscle groups to the core of the exoskeletal system. An instinctive, protective, biological response related to survival. This phenomenon may explain why your hands get cold and clammy under pressure, and why you can lose that “important” feel for the dart. 

Under extreme competitive stress, the dart player will have more difficulty focusing on the board and on the appropriate shot combinations needed for victory. Distractions seem more powerful, and they can more easily catch your attention. Your strategy will suffer, you start to criticize yourself, and then lose what self-confidence you have left. When your game tends to abandon you just when you need that crucial double, don’t despair. There are things you can do to change, allowing the Ice water to flow in your veins.

First, however, you must understand that opponents, bad breaks, miss throws, or pressure situations don’t make you tense. You make yourself tense. It is not what is happening to you, or around you, that tightens you up. Instead, it is your response to these external events that is the real culprit in determining how up tight you get.  If you cause your own tension, it follows that you can also cause yourself to relax. No doubt!

 How’s that, you might ask? Since many times that you try to make yourself relax, you fail for whatever reason.  Relaxation, like any other learned athletic skill, is something you allow to happen. Once you have sufficiently practiced the skill of relaxation, you should be able to keep yourself loose when the pressure gets turned up. 

Breathing is one of the first places that tension affects darters. (And one of the easiest to control)  By learning to control the depth of your breathing, you will be able to maintain a relaxed state regardless of what is going on around you.

Here’s a simple but effective at home exercise that will teach you the athletic skill of relaxation.  Sit comfortably with your back straight and feet uncrossed in a place where you will be undisturbed. Close your eyes. Inhale through your nose to a slow count of 4, filling your entire abdominal area, pause, and then exhale through your mouth to a slow count of 10. Pause; then continue to repeat the whole sequence for 5-10 minutes.

As unrelated thoughts intrude, gently bring yourself to a focus on your breathing and counting. Once you have mastered this technique at home, try it while practicing, in-between turns. Soon you will quickly be able to calm yourself both physically and mentally in competition, with just one or two of these deep breaths.

1) When you’re throwing arm or shoulders feel tense, or you’re losing your feel of the dart because of cold hands, try deliberately tightening these muscles more (to about 90 percent tension). Hold them for 5-10 seconds; then release the tension. Repeat as necessary. 

2) Stay in the present. Darters focusing on the past (a miss or a bad break) or worrying about the future (winning or losing, meeting a tough opponent) make themselves tense. Championship darts is played by throwing one dart at a time, in the present. You only get 3 darts per turn! 

3) Slow yourself down between turns! Walk slower; take more time to get yourself set at the line before throwing. Keep steady rhythms of release going in-between throws, if your style is more ‘English’. If you like to take more time in between throws, make sure you slow yourself down at that point in each turn. 

4) Check for iron grip. Under pressure, some darters will over-grip their dart. Make sure your grip is loose, comfortable, and right for you. 

5) Check for iron jaw. Another area where darters put their tension is in the jaw muscles. In between turns, check to make sure this area is loose.  Remember, in any match some nervousness is both natural and helpful to your performance.

Learn to use your butterflies as a signal that you are ready and as a reminder to stay loose!

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