The break is the most important shot in a game of pool...If you pot a ball from your break it determines whether you get the first go at clearing the table and it also gives you the first shout at bossing the table in any tactical frame by choosing the balls that are in the best positions.
So the general aim of any break is to pot a few balls and not to foul the white by sending it in-off or flying it off the table. It is a shot that requires power and control and, for such an important shot, it's often criminally under-practised by many players, including myself...
Until last year when I decided to put some time into working on it and I adopted some hapkido thinking that I borrowed from breaking wood at gradings.
It goes like this... when you break boards at any martial art there are generally two ways of doing it. One is to punch right through the board and rely on pure muscle power, but this can only be done when the board is held firmly and doesn't move when you hit it.
The much harder way to break a board is when it is suspended by two fingers at the top so it has no support. Consequently it's really hard to power through it so you need to snap punch or snap kick it. This technique relies on speed rather than muscle and is entirely about timing because it relies on a transfer of force which is why you withdraw the striking part as soon as contact is made.
Similarly if you power through the white at pool it's about muscle but if you speed through it and forget about power and just concentrate on the white hitting the pack asap it becomes about speed.
Obviously both techniques rely on a combination of muscle and speed to some extent but the focus on the speed means you forget about trying to lump loads of muscle into it and consequently your muscles work more effectively.
So I tried this theory out and it work fabulously. I'm regularly potting more balls and I'm not losing the white as much.
I may have found something that works really well for me...
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