Darts Practice Drills: A Training Routine for Home

The short answer

A good darts practice session has four blocks: warm up, technique, scoring and doubles. Each block ends with a number you write down. 45 to 60 minutes is enough, and three to four sessions a week is a realistic frame for most amateur players.

The drills in this article are deliberately simple. Their value is not in the drill itself but in repeating it the same way for weeks. Only then can you see whether anything improves.

Why drills with a score beat free throwing

Most players practise by playing 501 against themselves or simply throwing at the 20 until they lose interest. That is better than nothing, but it has a catch: at the end you do not know whether the session was good. A leg finished in 18 darts and one finished in 27 feel different, but they say little about your development.

A drill with a fixed rule and a fixed number of darts gives you a comparable value every time. If the same drill shows a higher number on your sheet after four weeks, you have improved, no matter how the evening felt. That comparability is the whole trick.

Block 1: warm up with Around the Clock

Around the Clock is a good warm up. You throw at the numbers 1 to 20 in order and finish on the bull. You only move to the next number once the current one is hit. What you count is how many darts the whole round takes.

The drill takes you to every part of the board and warms up the arm without locking you onto a single target straight away. Allow ten minutes. If the round gets too easy, count only doubles or only trebles.

Block 2: technique with exactly one focus

In the technique block you work on a single thing. If you adjust elbow, grip and rhythm at the same time, you cannot tell afterwards what made the difference. Pick one focus for the whole week and stick with it.

30 throws at a single target with full attention on that focus work well. The grouping is secondary here. What counts is whether the movement stays the same. Suitable approaches are in the articles on the elbow angle in darts, the follow-through and how to aim a dart.

Whether the movement really stays the same is hard to judge yourself. That is exactly what a camera next to the board is useful for. A throw analysis shows you after 30 throws how much your focus area varied, and next time whether the variation has become smaller.

Block 3: scoring with 99 darts at one target

For scoring you throw 33 visits, that is 99 darts, at the treble 20 and write down the score of each visit. The total divided by 33 is your average for this drill. That is a number you can compare week by week.

If your darts regularly land in the 1 and the 5, try the same block on the treble 19. Why that can score more with a wider spread is explained in the article on how to aim a dart. What matters is that you choose one target and keep it for several weeks, otherwise the values are not comparable.

Block 4: doubles with Bob's 27

The best known doubles drill goes back to former world champion Bob Anderson. In Bob's 27 you start on 27 points and throw three darts each at doubles 1 to 20, finishing on the bull.

Every hit adds the value of the double. A hit on double 1 adds 2 points, a hit on double 20 adds 40.
If none of the three darts hits, the value of the double is subtracted.
If your score drops to zero or below, the round is over.
The maximum is 1437 points, when every dart hits its double.

The appeal of the drill is the pressure it creates by itself. The early doubles are worth little, yet a poor start can still end the round early. Write down your score or, if the round ends early, which double you reached.

Bringing pressure into practice

Practice almost always lacks what makes the difference in a match: a throw that counts. Two simple rules bring some of it back.

The first dart counts. In a drill you only score the first dart of each visit. It comes without any correction from earlier throws and is therefore the most honest test of your routine.
Against your own record. Write down your best value for every drill and try to beat it in each session. A target that is only just reachable creates more tension than any repetition without a target.

An example practice week

A weekly plan does not have to be complicated. For someone who can play three to four times a week it could look like this:

Session 1: warm up, a long technique block on the focus of the week, short scoring.
Session 2: warm up, scoring with 99 darts, Bob's 27.
Session 3: all four blocks at normal length.
Session 4: free play, 501 or a club night, no score sheet.

Only change the focus of the technique block once its value has settled over two to three weeks. If you switch too early, you never see whether working on one thing paid off.

Tracking your progress

A notebook is enough for the results: date, drill, value. After four weeks you see trends you would have missed in your head. Keep the conditions similar, so the same time of day, the same darts and always warmed up. How to compare sessions sensibly is covered in comparing sessions.

The scores tell you whether you are getting better. They do not tell you why you are getting better or worse. For that you need the movement itself, and that is what mydart measures: the app captures every throw through the camera, shows the spread of your movement and puts sessions side by side. You keep counting the points on the board yourself. How both come together in one session is shown on the page about dart training with mydart.

Common mistakes in darts practice

Sessions that are too long. As concentration fades the movement gets less steady, and you practise fatigue rather than technique. Two short sessions beat one long one.
A new drill every day. Without repetition there is no comparison. Stay with the same drills for at least four weeks.
Only playing 501. A leg mixes scoring, checkout and chance. To improve something specific you need drills that isolate one thing.
Starting without a warm up. The first throws of a cold arm are not representative. Starting straight with the scoring drill distorts your own values.