Recent Posts
The Challenge of Barrel Awareness
The barrel is part of the picture, and you can’t “unsee” the barrel! Once a shooter accepts the muzzle as part of the picture and, through the mounting drills, gets their brain to deal with it and keep it in the periphery, life as a shotgun shooter gets really fun. However, until then, it is a battle to see the target at distance and be aware of barrel so much closer to you. In the beginning, shooting a shot... Read more…
Practicing Correctly
The reason shooters practice a lot and don’t get better is they are not practicing correctly. “Correctly” means something different depending on the level of their game. The shooters between levels C and E will need to train mostly on singles, mounting and moving the gun, and shooting the six basic trajectories: left-to-right, right-to-left, crossing, quartering, birds going up, and birds coming down. As ... Read more…
“Winners are Never Afraid to Lose”
I was watching a NASCAR event on TV the other day that had a lot of collisions. One occurred with 20 laps to go. As the pace car came out to restart the race, the announcers talked about the drivers weaving in and out, trying to heat up their tires. They went on and on about how reckless it was with only 20 laps left. “They should be more careful,” they said, “or they could lose the race here at the end!” The onl... Read more…
Prediction and Long-Term Memory
Regardless of outcome, any shot without a prediction and an execution based on the prediction will not make it to long-term memory. It will remain in your short-term memory, which is an expert at forgetting what it just did! Search for “building long-term memory” in the Knowledge Vault and see what you find. The more detailed and visual your prediction is, the easier it is for your brain to retrieve parts of d... Read more…
Constantly Honing Each Circuit: Deep Deliberate Practice
So, practice is not about breaking the targets. It is about preloading the shot and deliberately firing the chunks sequentially to make it easier and easier for the brain to anticipate ahead of the present and perform the skill without you thinking. We see the most important and most wasted part of improvement is what and how you practice. The overwhelming number of shooters who try to improve are calling "pull," ... Read more…
