Muscle memory for basketball shooting??????!

Muscle memory for basketball shooting??????

Can anyone tell me ways to improve muscle memory. like some kind of excercises i can do and things i can eat. i need it specifically for basketball because lately my jumpshot has completely left me and i need to kno how to get it back. ive tried for years for repition to improve it but its always the same result. my jumpshot stays good and consistent for a while and then leaves me for even longer. what do i do???

and by the way, i do practice all the time every day for years, but nothing helps

1 month ago
wow, thank u david. u seriously helped a lot

Do you start to think about it too much? Muscle memory is nothing like our memory for events. It's in a different part of the brain. Our event-based memories from the hippocampus seem to come back more if we mentally try hard to remember something. Associations help that sort of memory. Muscle memory seems to work just the opposite. If you try to guide your shot into the basket it's like when a baseball pitcher tries to groove his pitches into the strike zone. It doesn't work.

What works is repetition with a variety of conditions so that your brain is used to orchestrating your shot without your mind participating any more than when a doctor elicits your knee reflex. The worst thing you can do when your shot is off is decide to push a little more with this arm or tighten up that muscle a little more. That overrides your muscle memory (which is in fact in the unconscious motor parts of your brain, not your muscles).

Practice is like I'm sure you've done before. Take short shots. Then stretch out your success at those to longer shots. If you lose your aim, the thing to do is move in closer again, then stretch your distance again, not to try to think your way through. If you're missing right, you want to think more left, but not tell your muscles that directly. Let your muscle memory do it.

There's no diet that will help apart from a healthy diet and a moderate lifestyle. Make sure you're stretched out well and don't ignore little injuries, as those can get you out of your zone. It's not just practice that you need, but successful practice, free of your conscious mind's interference. Occupy your mind in some broad way. Be one with the ball. Be one with the hoop. Whatever works for you to take your mind away from the mechanics of shooting, unless you're specifically working on that in practice, is what you want to do when you're just shooting. The best way to ruin someone's golf swing for a moment is to ask him or her whether they are exhaling or inhaling at some particular point in the swing. Once someone is focused on some mechanical aspect of what they're doing, their motor memory is not going to work well.

Of course we all have limits to our talent.