If you play a lot, eventually you’ll probably start thinking about what you could do to improve your game. The standard options are practice and taking lessons. But there aren’t any petanque schools or coaches in the USA, which leaves American players with only one option… practice.
You set up a practice area in your back yard, and you get out there and start throwing boules. You see improvement, but you also wonder “Am I doing it right? Am I practicing effectively? How do players of other sports practice? Baseball players, for example. How do they practice? Is there anything that they know about practicing that I could use in practicing petanque?” So you go onto the Web and start googling around, looking for help and insights on ways to practice effectively.
That’s what I did. Here is the best of what I found.
There is a really good article that sums up a lot of the other articles on this list. It is “The Relevance of Practice in Pétanque Performance and Competition” by Philippe Geraud. It is available online in the early fall 2016 FPUSA newsletter, or our archived copy is HERE.
The articles that I found when I first wrote this post in July 2015 are-
- A Better Way to Practice
- The wrong way to practice golf – Why Much of the Work Golfers Do to Improve Their Games Isn’t Helping Them Get Better
- The Science of How To Practice a Skill Effectively
- The Psychology of Getting Unstuck: How to Overcome the “OK Plateau” of Performance & Personal Growth
- Why “Deliberate Practice” Is The Only Way To Keep Getting Better and
Deliberate Practice: What It Is and Why You Need It
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