Recent Posts
Visual Anomalies and Shooting Plateaus
We each do 8-10 scheduled consults each week, and without exception, 95 percent of the shooters tell us they have plateaued and don’t know how to get better. Our first question to them is “Do you feel hurried when you’re shooting? Or do you feel like you’re chasing the targets?” Almost all of them immediately say “Yes, how’d you know?” The next question we ask them is how long they’ve been shooting pull ... Read more…
What Good Shooters See and Why
Talk to a good shooter and they might say they see “the front” or “the rings.” Or they see “the target slow down” or “the target get really big or clear.” But that is a result of the thousands of successful shots they have taken with a prediction and the execution based on the prediction. Over time, this process becomes automatized. It requires little cognitive effort, and usually occurs because the brain is a... Read more…
Accepting the Muzzle in the Periphery
The overwhelming majority of what we perceive when shooting a moving target occurs in the periphery. And things we perceive in the periphery are really behind real time. Remember, it takes the periphery almost 1/3 of a second to process and understand what’s going on. By the time you’re aware of it, what you are aware of in the periphery is old data. Your periphery cannot see sharply, and your primary vision c... Read more…
The Problem with Well-Meaning Shooting Advice
When you’re shooting with someone better than you, quite often when you have trouble with a certain target, they might want to help you by telling you what they perceive when shooting the same target. And what they tell you is real to them based on the amount of shooting they have done. The problem with integrating their “perceptions” into your own shooting is that if you do not have the same or similar target... Read more…
The Anticipation Circuit
When we ask shooters to describe what they see that tells them to send the shot, they usually say “I see the front of the target” or “I see the target get really clear.” But they don’t describe any sequence of events leading up to sending the shot. Let’s inject a little phrase here that we will be revisiting later: if there is not a planned sequence of events leading up to sending the shot, the brain cannot an... Read more…
