Tips to Practice Paintball

2. Practice Alone

The time to master your individual skills is when you are alone. Don't be afraid to spend time on the field or in the woods all by yourself and work on your shooting, movement and positions on the field. Just as basketball players spend hours shooting alone on the court, you should spend time working on your individual skills. As you improve what you can do alone, you'll be better prepared to play with others and improve your team skills.

3. Pracitce With Others

Paintball is a game of teams and you need to practice with other people. A key is to get to know the people on your team and to play with them outside of games. It's never much fun to spend a long time just playing against an invisible team, but you should walk through games, evaluate potential strategies and spend lots of time learning how your teammates play the game. If you know you can rely on one teammate to hold the middle but you know another one struggles on the outside, you'll know who to go help during an actual game.

5. Learn to Aim by Feel

Due to the inherent physics of paintballs, they are never going to be the most accurate shooting devices. While you may not be able to overcome these basic limitations, they can be reasonably accurate, especially at short distances. While many players want to look down the top of their barrel to fire, this is not a good approach as the view is obscured by the hopper and your head is out in the open. A better approach is to initially aim down the side of the barrel and then, with time, stop looking down the barrel at all. As you become familiar with your individual gun you will get a feel for where it is going to shoot no matter how you are holding it. Eventually, you will use the gun like an extension of your arm and simply shoot and the paintball will go where you want it to. Don't be discouraged if you aren't getting it at first as it will take lots of practice to improve your shot. I have found that I know shoot better when I just try to hit something than if I take time to aim and think about the shot.

6. Master the Quick Shot

Quickly shooting is necessary for any successful paintball player. A drill you can do is to place a target in the middle of the field and slowly circle it while maintaining as much cover as you can behind bunkers or trees. As you circle the field, a teammate will randomly call out "Fire!" and you will have to immediately shoot at the target from whichever position you are in. As you do this, practice diving behind bunkers, crawling on your knees and army crawling on your belly, so you never know what position you will be in when "Fire!" is called, so you'll learn to react.