Does anyone ever keep a diary to keep track of thier training progress? Just something to keep a record of the different types of slings they have tried or different ammo etc. etc. If so please scan and post on the forum, some times we can learn from others successes or mistakes.

Loki

I am taking a journey diary for my travels to Newfoundland and that will be including my sling progress, how I can make it fair on the different, more open terrain.

When I first started getting back into slinging I decided to keep track of results as I worked purely on short range accuracy. My setup was a short (26 inch folded) yurek tennis ball style tape pouch sling, figure 8 cast, tennis ball ammo, 50cm x 50cm square target sitting at ground level, 12 metre distance.

Each practice day I would shoot several sets of 30 tennis balls at the target and track the number of hits.

For the first three months I kept records and you can see them in the crude excel output below:

http://www.coinmanipulation.com/misc/Sling/SlingAccuracy.htm

The main thing I found from the results was that it didnt take me that long to get a decent level of accuracy as I already had good familiarity with the sling, and experience in other throwing related sports. My original goal was to get to consistent 75% accuracy which I was getting close to after 20 practice sessions. But its fairly clear that going beyond that will require a much larger amount of practice. I guessed that to get to 85/90% would probably take another 40 practice sessions (or more).

Keeping track of the results definately helped me keep focus on the goal and keep my training methods consistent. It also let me see that I was getting solid improvements each time and notice certain trends such as the first 1-2 sets usually being bad as I warmed up (I later did 15 or so warmup throws with increasing power and some stretching before starting properly) and the last few sets generally getting worse as I got tired/sore. You can also see periods where I had 1-2 weeks off and that was enough to drop my accuracy levels noticably.

Since then I took a few months off on holidays and daylight savings/winter kicked in so I've mainly been doing distance stuff and chucking rocks in the bush instead of serious accuracy practice.

I thought about using the same approach with distance throwing but I havent found a decent location where I can do that properly and I have only been mucking around so far, trying to construct the perfect cricket ball sling Plus its harder to keep track of the distance of lots of throws, takes more time, or you have to guess a lot more so it might not be very useful.

When I get time to get back into it I'll get back to the 75% level then experiment with a smaller target, as well a larger distance (20m) to the same target.