On this hour, after a little shameless promotion of our first book, “If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It!” we dig into visualization with one of our newest Coaching Hour participants, our friend and fellow coach, Steve “Stevie Ray” Brown. Stevie Ray is very familiar with the inner workings of the eyes and he talks about the visual circle and how it works. He talks specifically about the difference between focal vision and peripheral vision, and how they interact with each other, specifically in shooting sports.
Gil: Just to let you all know, our new book is out, we have copies of it and if you’re interested in it, we’d love to have you get a copy and let us know what you think about it. Stevie’s read it and he’s sold quite a few copies out of his gun club, and the early reviews are just incredible. I know many of you have said, “I want a copy! I want a copy!” Well, if you want the collector’s edition, we’ve reserved some numbers for the Coaching Hour participants, some good low numbers, and we’d love for you to have the collector’s edition, and if you don’t want to do that we have plenty of the hardback edition.
I’m really excited about the book; it’s better than I expected. The photography is incredible. It’s the first book in the shooting industry that I know of– Steve, correct me if I’m wrong, or any of you–that was written by a professional writer, designed by a professional designer, illustrated by a professional artist and all the photos and all the drawings are specific to the text. It’s a fun read and we hope you all get it and enjoy it. And we’d like very much if you all have any comments about it to please email and let us know about it, and tell your friends, obviously.
I had a long talk with Ron Schaffer who was on the Coaching Hour two or three months ago about making his goals, and he’s starting to make those goals now. I made sure that he went ahead and started writing down the things that he needed to improve on from last year. And that’s something that you guys may do, it may help you to get your goals straight and more importantly, once you set your goals, they will be achievable and it will help you map out your plan to achieve them. That’s even more critical than setting and committing to the goals.
And if Willy pops in tonight we’ll talk a little bit with him about his goals. He was having a little difficulty but he worked his way through it, and if we have some time I want to read a letter that Brad Alford wrote to us, echoing some of the things that he felt in retrospect influenced his ability to improve his performance at Nationals from the first day to the last day. There are a couple unique things in there. And if I don’t get to it today then we’ll get to it next month. And next month my goal is to talk about goals. I’d like for you, if you will, maybe Gary, I’m sure I can get Brian to do it, maybe Willy.
Think about your goals for next year and call me and talk to me about it. Gary, when you guys come down to the ranch maybe we can talk about it, because I can stand here and talk about what your goals should be, but until you start trying to make them, it’s really hard to understand how hard it is to make a good achievable goal that lets you bite off more than you can chew but not bite off too much. I think it’d be a good time for us to talk about goals in December, because the shooting year is just around the corner.
By the way, Steve Brown has agreed to join us this year at our advanced school at the 74 Ranch and it will be March 9 through 13. Arrive on Wednesday and we’re going to shoot Thursday, Friday, Saturday and half of Sunday then depart. We’re going to keep it limited to only four students per instructor. We’re excited about that. Last year everybody really liked it and wants to do it again, and each day we’re going to sit down and Steve and Vicki and I are going to put our heads together, talk about some topics and just kind of banter around between us what we’ve experienced in our careers in teaching shooting, about the mental game and some about mechanics. But it’ll be an opportunity for you to not only shoot but to talk about some of your own experiences and get some hands-on help with that. So if you’re interested in coming, we’ve already got seven slots filled, so we’ve got a few slots left over.
Gil: Anyway, moving right along. Steve, I think vision was one of the things that really brought us together back there years ago when you started taking your first level one, and I started talking to you about really focusing on the target and focusing on the front. It’s something that I think really lit a fire under you. The fire was already burning in my pants. But you came along and you kind of kindled it both in your own mind and helped push us on, and helped encourage us to keep doing what we were doing in spite of the ridicule. And I thank you for that. But I’d like for you to talk just a little bit about it. And any of you guys with questions, feel free to say your name and pop in there. Specific questions or general questions, it doesn’t really matter. So tell me a little bit about the difference between peripheral vision and focal vision.
Steve: Okay Gil. Well, I gave this quite a bit of thought the last few days and you know it’s a little difficult to try to put all this into one hour, and that may give us something to look forward to in the months to come, to get some things in detail. But I guess an overview, at least something I’d like to say before I begin, I need everybody to know some facts and I’ve been digging around into some human laboratory research that has been done by the Air Force and also some collaborated efforts by Harvard and MIT and I did get a chance to visit with one of the doctors involved.
One thing we need to keep in mind is that vision provides 80 to 90 percent of the vital information and is critical to the response process in shooting. If the data is unclear, incomplete or distorted in any manner, and you and I have both been saying that for a while, but if it’s incomplete, distorted or unclear in any fashion then the result is going to be less than desirable. In wing shooting you can just sum it up as: it generates a timing problem. It’s pretty simple; it’s a timing problem. So having said that, I hope everybody is clear on that. It’s just the way your body works.
Gil: And when you say timing, Steve, we all develop a certain sense of rhythm and timing in our move. It’s unique to each one of us I would think, and when the visual information is not complete or clear, our timing mechanism is not getting the right information to pull the right timing for the shot from out database. Is that what you’re saying?
Steve: Yeah. Now, in the past, it was assumed that an athlete either had good visual skills or not. Other than corrective lenses, nothing could be improved on that natural ability, if you want to call it that. However, I’ve been looking around and digging and it looks like in the last decade some studies have shown that there is a correlation between superior visual skills with superior performance. They go hand and hand. Then the poor visual skills appear to hinder performance. They’re proven to hinder performance.
Bob: Do you mean, people with poor vision? Or people with poor visual skills use?
Steve: Visual skills use was what I was referring to, but in some cases, and we’re going to get into that, in some instance, there is no substitute for visual acuity in a dynamic sense. In a moving object, in other words. In other words, those young boys out there have an advantage over an older person, say in their late sixties nearing seventies where what we call dynamic visual acuity is waning. The brain’s ability to process that dynamic visual information in a clear way in referring to a moving object.
And I’m going to get into that but I just want everybody to know that there have been studies, some older than ten years, but a lot of studies recently that you can get on the Internet and just start a search with Sports Vision and you can spend hours on there reading about a lot of companies out there that tout their ability to retrain and help athletes.
What I hope to do along with Vicki and Gil this year is to put our heads together and come up with some exercises to help you guys and the wing shooters, because there’s not much of that out there. To move on, I guess you could say that 20/20 for years is what we’ve referred to as visual acuity, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can tell how fast something is traveling, or how well you can tell whether something is changing direction. That is called dynamic visual acuity. And there are devices out there for testing that. Visual processing gives that information. How fast is it going? At what angle? Is it changing direction? The eyes send that information to the brain and it’s integrated with all that other data that you’ve got floating in there. Your sensory perception, and your memory, from practice, and your conditioning, whether it be mental or your diet. It’s all integrated with that hopefully, to a positive output.
And we all know that when you miss it may have been that you were distracted by things around you.
Gil: Are you saying distracted physically or mentally or both?
Steve: I’m going to say visually. Obviously we know about the mental distractions, the voice, and we’ve been talking about that for months, but what we need to remember, and you’ve said it for years Gil: your eyes will go first to a moving object. The technical word for that is visual concentration. Our eyes, physiologically will normally react to anything that happens in our field of vision–you know, if we have spectators or a clays car goes by or a bird is going through your field of vision. How many times has a bird come through your field of vision? That kind of stuff.
So visual concentration is a measurable thing. It’s the ability to stay focused on the target. I tried to write down what I have listed here and I’m just going to read these. The “visual needs of wing shooting” I’ve called it. Like I said: to the layperson, it’s obvious that a wing shooter would need good eyesight, but upon digging around and my analysis end of these visual demands, the commonly accepted 20/20 vision is not enough. I think it’s not enough for elite-level performance. There are some necessary visual components. You can’t leave out just your basic visual skills; I think you referred to those as being able to read the leader board and find a clays car, Gil, stuff like that.
Gil: Yeah.
Steve: Basic visual skills. You’re going to have to be able to perform just day-to-day basic skills. The dynamic visual skills, are your ability to focus on a moving target. Your peripheral vision is a necessary component. It’s your ability to see the barrel and the lead and the timing sequence of the shot. Peripheral vision is involved in moving objects and depth perception. Your dynamic depth perception, in other words is that ability to perceive and judge the distance of a moving target. People can have depth perception and not have good dynamic depth perception. It’s visual tracking: how well you allow your eyes to move with the speed of the target. How well you’ve trained yourself to do that. There’s a contrast sensitivity that you can be tested for. You’d need contrast sensitivity in order to see a target when it was placed against various backgrounds like the sky or terrain.
Gil: Would that have something to do also with color blindness?
Steve: Color blindness as we refer to it is located in the center vision, where the cones are in the phobia surrounded by the macular — it’s right around the tiny center. But yes, that would have something to do with that perception or contrast perception, that sensitivity. Really, we’ve controlled that as shooters or we’ve had some control over it with tinted lenses. And depth perception itself, just plain depth perception, the ability to judge the height and depth of a target. It allows your swing, insertion and your mount to be executed in a timely manner. That is part of that peripheral vision.
Gil: The peripheral vision actually inserts the gun, is that correct?
Steve: They do together. And that’s what we call stereoptic. You’ve heard about binocular vision? Stereoptic is the process that the brain performs in making you see one field of vision. You don’t see two fields of vision when you’re looking at something, and stereoptic is brought in. I saw it called the “Cyclops phenomenon” several times.
The brain is in two halves, and in the visual cortex, it is processing one picture. And you and I have talked about your right field of vision and your left field of vision, and what is on the right is hitting the left hand side of the eyes and vice-versa. But that kind of stuff is all boiled down to pretty simple facts, our rods, which we have a lot of, I think it’s 120 million, compared to like six and a half million cones, but the cones are really concentrated. Just super saturated around that center of the eye, that phobia, which I think I read was about a tenth of a millimeter.
But I do remember that he said it was about the size of the head of a pin. Now, the information, your acuity, your visual acuity comes from that center vision. And the brain is processing two separate center visions into one. That’s where you get stereoptic vision. Any skew, or any occlusion, anything even on your glasses that might have blurred it, you’d smudged your glasses on your hand, recoil had smudged your right lens, so anything like that which skews the visual input — the light, the refraction on the retina — anything that skews that, changes the mind’s ability to perform viseo-motor functions. In other words, the muscles don’t have the timing that they would have had if the vision was clear and not occluded or skewed.
We get nothing but black and white from the rods, which is predominant, the huge part of our vision. Periphery is all rods. Each one of those rods is connected to very few nerve receptors.
Bob: You have to remember one thing about black and white, though. It’s the best contrast developer you’ve got.
Steve: Yes, and especially in low-light conditions. It’s true. We can’t do without them. We’ve put a lot of emphasis on focusing with our center vision, or focal vision, our primary vision–it has several names–but we’ve put a lot of emphasis on focusing acutely on a small part of the target, the leading edge of the target. But we need to understand that when we get to know our bodies that we don’t need to be occluding that peripheral vision either.
What it tells me is: if that center vision is so responsible, so predominantly responsible for acuity, it overwhelmingly bears the onus of acuity in your vision. And it doesn’t do well with low-light either. The cones are not good light receptors. The rods are what you’d use to see in low light levels or at night.
Gil: Is that why when you’re looking at night, and you’re trying to see something straight ahead, you can’t see it, but when you look off to the left or right of it you can see it?
Steve: Exactly Gil. It would be like a star in the sky that you caught out of the corner of your vision and when you went to look right at it, it was no longer there. That’s what it is. Those cones don’t pick up light as low as the rods do.
Gil: I had that experience this morning when I was watching the deer feeder go off. I couldn’t look at the feeder and see those deer under that feeder, but I could look ten yards to the right or ten yards to the left and I could see them.
Steve: Exactly. For years, we hunters have always experienced that. And that is what’s going on. We’re made to sleep at night. We’ve evolved into animals where we function in the daytime and we sleep at night. But according to what I read, thousands of years ago, we could see pretty well in the dark too. But we might not have known a redhead from a brunette. (laughter)
You know the depth perception, we talk about is the ability to quickly and accurately judge the distance and speed of objects. And where does it come from? It comes from the peripheral for the most part. For instance, people talk about closing an eye. They lose about 25 percent of their field of vision. And it varies, the reason I say “about” is, if you’ve got a Carl Mauldin nose you might lose 50 percent of your field of view, I don’t know. But your temporal area and your nose have a lot to do with field of vision. But you lose a large amount of your ability to detect depth. Your depth perception. You don’t lose all of it, but the less familiar you are with your surroundings, the greater the loss percentage-wise of depth perception. If you’re in familiar surroundings, and a good example, is skeet, we see a lot of one-eyed skeet shooters, right? Well, it’s pretty easy to be familiar with those surroundings, they’re all the same. Yet they don’t understand when they walk onto a sporting clays range why they don’t do real well with one eye closed.
Gil: And it’s sometimes hard to get people to trust that.
Steve: Yes. Does anyone have any questions? I’d like to talk about fusion, the flexibility and stamina, the ability to keep both eyes working under visually demanding situations.
Gil: When you say visually demanding, does that mean hard to see? Or in a performance situation?
Steve: Both. Stress induced and hard to see. Environment induced. Could have been drinking induced. Might not be stressed, might be a hangover, but your ability to perform from a tracking and fusion standpoint. Let me read something I wrote down here and maybe it will make more sense.
The central nervous system uses many different processes, which allow the eyes to observe targets of varying size, trajectory and different rates of speed. Your casual observation just scans and allows the eyes to move through the visual field. Now the visual field is everything we see. Casual observation, we see everything but we see nothing in fine detail. And when something is seen in selective detail, both eyes track the object. And when the visual information is sent to the brain, it’s sent as a three-dimensional image because we’ve looked at it with both eyes. Each eye will send data and the brain must process that and develop it into one image: fusion. It fuses the two inputs, that binocular input into one image. The integration process that I’m talking about, that is what is known as fusion. That is why, eye teaming is what it’s called in sports vision, eye teaming or the coordination of both eyes is a critical skill to what we’re doing.
Gil: Is that something that we’re born with or can we train it?
Steve: We’re born with it but, it matures at varying degrees. That is why some people have a better vision or an ability to detect depth perception. They have matured through their environment. Like a good golfer, they can say, “That’s about 95 yards. That’s a 3/4 sand wedge.” Or the places that, from here to the green in some familiar environment, like from his house to the lake. He’ll say, “From the house to the lake is 130 yards and that will fit right in there.” So what we do in our life, our vision matures and our ability to process that will mature. And it may be different from the person who grew up in New York.
Bob: Steve, if I read you right, if we were to project this and say we want to make the best shooters in the world, we would start with three-year-old kids and concentrate on putting objects in the air with their eye-hand coordination or in some other way and get them to do that right from the beginning when the brain is really malleable.
Steve: Exactly. You know, they’re doing that now. I read about where they’re taking young children by the dozens and dozens in Europe and they are giving them practice skills. They are doing test criteria on these kids as they develop and mature. They want to know, will they be good rugby players or soccer players? They’ve already determined that they’re better by a certain percentage than the kid that was not exposed to those exercises. There’s that data out there.
I haven’t heard anybody crying and whining for their pacifier out there; we’re a bunch of guys here that are long past three years old, and do we have any hope? And from the results I’ve been reading, the answer is yes. We’ve got all sorts of exercises we can do. I have a couple of friends who are ophthalmologists who are searching for me to find a good sports vision testing facility in our neck of the woods. I told Gil I’d be looking for that and they will test us on these skills that I talked about earlier.
Both eyes and their ability to track objects, the ability to shift from seeing everything to seeing something specific, that is called fixation. And your fixation range, or the area that it covers, is about three degrees of that visual field. So as soon as you become fixated on that object, then other objects exist, but they’re out of focus in your peripheral field.
Gil: So really, what I’ve said in the past and that is that the ratio of 200ths of one percent to 99.98 percent is a fixed ratio but when you focus or fixate as you call it, when you focus really hard on the front edge, your primary circle has shrunk, therefore your peripheral circle has shrunk.
Steve: Well, its focus has certainly waned and gone away.
Gil: Right, you’re less aware of the periphery and you’re more acutely aware of what you’re fixated on.
Steve: And I would like to say that that’s being consciously aware. Because your subconscious is still very much in control of that peripheral vision. It still needs that.
Bob: To reinforce the importance of that … the way I would read this is, this says that it’s really, really important that you know where that second bird is after you’ve killed the first bird within three degrees of your visual field.
Steve: Well, not within three degrees, well yeah, yeah, wherever you move your eyes to, you would hope that they landed in that fixation spot within that three degrees. That would be immediate acquisition of the target … wouldn’t it?
Bob: Right.
Gil: And it would also aid in your performance if you had the ability to break the first target where the eye had to travel the least amount to get to the second target.
Bob: Absolutely.
Steve: There’s a whole ‘nother can of worms when you start moving your eyes fast across a visual field. And then you combine the moving head with it, it’s almost the kiss of death in what we do. I hope to be able to elaborate more on that but I was reading about some studies on pole-vaulters, and their heads moving as they’re running and approaching that hole they stick the pole in. And how much it affects their performance, not only their ability to see, but none of their muscles work together in a coordinated, timed sequence that there’s a lot of muscles involved in that and they just go haywire. There again … poor input, poor output.
Gil: And that would be why it would be so crucial for you to fixate on the second target prior to moving the gun.
Steve: I have translated this into a shooting terminology but I’ve writ- ten a little paragraph here: the shooter focuses on a fixed point prior to calling for the target but the peripheral vision must pick up move- ment and direction. And this movement provides visual information for swing dynamics. Your tempo and your timing. Frequently these are sub- conscious images as a shooter executes a timing — you know it’s based on visualization or a predication of feel. And when the barrel is too high or too low or behind or too far ahead, the shooter must compen- sate. And strong peripheral vision must compensate the ability to allow mid-course corrections and to salvage the shot. That’s how all that works. Now if your head’s moving around like the bobbing doll in the back of a car, you lose this ability to function.
Gil: The same thing would happen if your eyes move when you call pull. You see, but you don’t see.
Steve: Right. I don’t know how to pronounce it, but it’s saccadic movement. Jerky eyes.
Gil: Saccadic movement.
Bob: It just struck me that probably the people who have done the most research in this is the Air Force.
Steve: That’s true.
Bob: Because you’ve got a moving platform trying to focus on a target you’re after.
Steve: Yeah, including landing that jet. Yes. As a matter of fact, I went to the Air Force human performance laboratory. I went to a written paper on the results of their studies on dynamic acuity. And that was quite interesting. It took me a while to get there through searching, but I came across it and I got in there and you’re correct, we as Americans pay a lot for that kind of research.
The more stress you’re under, the more you blink. It’s a fact. This was an interesting thing I ran across there. Blinking produces that sac- cadic suppression. It lasts about 1/10 of a second but it says on average people blink about 25 times a minute and this number increases with tension and stress and during the elite high level competition, tension is high and you have the increasing saccadic suppression and as a result you have poor performance. Skills of relaxation are valuable. They’re paramount to maintaining optimal visual skills.
Bob: Do you know how far a target moving thirty mph travels in one tenth of a second?
Gil: How far?
Bob: Four point four feet.
Gil: No kidding? That’s a long way.
Bob: It is.
Gil: Regardless of how fast the shoot column is moving.
Steve: It’s pretty interesting. I’m looking through some things I’ve compiled over a period of 12 years here and I keep winding up going down the same path, Gil.
Gil: Well, yeah that is just something that Stevie Ray and I keep talking about. Every time I discover something or he discovers something we get together and talk about it and the other day I was talking to him on the phone and I think I said this last month: it doesn’t matter what path we go down, we keep ending up on the same road. It’s an exciting thing to us, to share our pathways on vision. From what I’m gleaning from some of the things you’ve said, Steve, and I think we’ve talked about this a lot, it’s more an inability to have good timing than just about anything else. Because timing is so critical in what we do with lack of really good visual input. Regardless of what the problem is, it interrupts the flow to the brain of what’s happening and it manifests itself in a loss of timing, would that be a correct statement?
Steve: Sure. And what could you describe any better than somebody did here a while back about how they knew that something didn’t feel right but they just didn’t know what was happening.
Gil: Right. It’s supposed to break but it doesn’t.
Steve: Yeah, it’s one of the hardest things to get through your head. There are a lot of symptoms. You know it just felt bad. We’ve all turned around and said, “God, it just felt awful.” Well, that is a symptom. The disease, the root cause was that there was a skewed input through the eyes. A visual input to the brain was skewed. And its ability to perform in a tempo, timing, rhythm kind of way was greatly reduced.
Bob: Just went through that this weekend.
Gil: You did?
Bob: Shot the wrong side of the course early in the morning in flat light. Sunlight was reflecting off the targets; you couldn’t make anything out and it just screwed my timing up so completely it was unbelievable.
Gil: It’s amazing what a little thing like that will do to you, isn’t it Bob?
Bob: Yep.
Gil: Where did you shoot?
Bob: It was up in Espanola, New Mexico. It was a local shoot and I let a friend talk me into shooting a side of the course I knew I shouldn’t shoot at that time of day.
Gil: Monkey see, monkey do.
Bob: (laughs) Well, it’s your whole thing about how I called pull and I should have known better.
Gil: It was an anyway.
Steve: At least the second pair.
Bob: No, it was on every pair in that light, and let me tell you, it just kept getting worse. I had no contrast on the targets. All I had was reflection.
Steve: That is exactly what we’re talking about. Your inability to acutely focus on a moving object, it hampers the output so much. It’s like carrying around a ton of lead. It feels like, your timing, your swing, it feels like you’re having an off day. How’s that?
Bob: That’s a good description. No rhythm.
Steve: But it’s really not. You’re not having an off-feely day, you’re having an off-seeing day.
Gil: And would it be fair to say that this is going to happen to all of us?
Steve: Sure, but with an increased knowledge or awareness of how our body works, just think of the potential we might have to avoid those situations he just described. If you know it’s a bad hole to go in, don’t go in it. If you know how your body works, you’ve got to get better at using it.
We’ve done that with our stance, with our mounts, with our approach to targets … our analyzation of presentations. We’ve done it with everything, but here is this wonderful barely exposed and explored field that is practically, it’s at least 80 percent of what you’re doing in performance. So I’m excited to have the time — I spent about four hours on this today and I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting one institute’s opinion. I probably looked through eight universities of ophthalmology. I’ve done some digging today and it’s just exciting. It’s exciting to talk to some of these people and to find out that what’s going on in the sports vision field is phenomenal.
Gil: Something that I jotted down here 15 minutes ago when you were talking about timing. Vicki and I have quite often talked amongst our- selves about why it’s so hard for women to learn to shoot. And a few years ago it occurred to me that it seems to be easier for men to learn to shoot a shotgun than it is women, based on our experience. It occurred to me that most men, due to having played some athletics in their life, already have some sort of a timing database in their brain. And all you’ve got to do is work with them enough to where they can feel it and under- stand it enough and then they tap into that timing database. Which goes back to the research they’re doing with the kids, putting them through these different exercises to train these skills like you said.
And I think Vicki still agrees with me, I know she’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think she still agrees with me that the reason women have such a hard time with this game is they’re having to learn to shoot a shotgun and learn timing at the same time. Does that make sense?
Steve: Yes.
Gil: And most guys are playing football, baseball, basketball, chunking rocks at ducks and running and playing and their whole visual field is based on what’s happening way out there in front of them.
And most ladies don’t have that ability to understand depth and distance and relationships because they never did much of that in their life. I remember giving a lesson to a lady who was a fast-pitch softball pitcher. She obviously had timing. She obviously had a timing database. And I asked her, “When you’re pitching, what do you look at?” And she said, “I focus on a tiny part of that glove and let it rip.” And when we got through to her that she needed to focus on the front of the target and let it rip, obviously she didn’t have as good a gun mount as she needed to develop, but she was able to pick it up really quickly. I think Vicki will support me when I say this: the women we have taught, and we’ve taught quite a few, the ones who play tennis and golf and have some sort of timing, rhythm database, pick this game up quickly provided they practice their gun mount because none of them have enough strength in their upper shoulders to really move and mount the gun really well. But if they’ll practice their gun mount … they’ll come along very quickly. Would you agree with that Vicki?
Vicki: Yes I would.
Brian: I would say ditto on that too. I’m teaching a 13-year-old girl who has never touched a gun; I’m teaching her how to mount the gun with the flashlight drill and she’s amazing. She’s only shot four times and the last time out she never missed a target, so it works.
Gil: I’m almost tempted to say, and I’d love to try this if I could find somebody who was patient enough to do this with me, but I’d love to give someone who doesn’t have timing, doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman, but I’d love to give them a tennis ball and have them stand in front of a wall and bounce it on the ground off the wall and catch it with their left hand, bounce it off the wall and catch it with their right hand, just to get them to develop some sort of a timing database.
I’m convinced that would help develop timing. You know we’ve talked frequently about what we could do to help people develop better timing and become better shooters and obviously getting them to improve their visual skills is one thing, but you can have the greatest visual skills in the world and if you don’t have some sort of a timing database that has been built in … maybe in another arena, then you’ve gotta learn how to shoot and develop timing and rhythm at the same time. That to me, goes back to when we really beat you guys up the last couple years to improve the quality of your practice sessions. And there is just nothing that replaces doing it correctly over and over and over again. Because it begins to happen with a higher quality and less conscious thought. It goes back to the quality of your practice session, which will always determine the quality of your performance.
Now, let me ask you a question Steve. Have you come across any studies that have to do with eye exercises and stuff like that?
Steve: Oh yeah.
Gil: We’ve got about nine minutes left, let’s talk about that a little more.
Steve: Gil, I’m trying to put together something that will make sense where we can give it to our students. Some practice criteria with moving objects, with timing and tempo, some of the things that you just got through mentioning. I have suspected that someone who lacks the ability to keep rhythm … you see people patting their foot and they’re out of rhythm and it kind of bothers me as an old guitar picker to see somebody who is behind or ahead or something.
So I began to, on my own, just correlate between these tempo-chal- lenged people and their ability to shoot. And you know, your good shooters just came right up with it and did it real fast and went from C to AA so fast. I can’t think of one guitar picker or drummer or some- body like that who hasn’t had an easy path of it. So I have been doing a little correlation on my own there, and I do believe that some of these exercises that I’ve been reading about, for instance, taking an old 33 and a third record and putting some little sticky letters on it, decal let- ters that might be around three eighths of an inch tall. And to be able to discern and differentiate between what letter is what as it’s going on 78 and then 33 and a third and then put it on 45 and move it around and get your ability to stay on the K or stay on the letters going around and the acuity that you experience: the fine edges, the clear edges.
Bob: You guys don’t know about this down in Houston but something I’ve been using for years is sitting in my office and tracking snowflakes.
Steve: (laughs) Woah.
Bob: One at a time, as many as I can.
Gil: I was in Somerset, Kentucky doing a clinic there with Brian Priddle, he’s on the Coaching Hour and it started raining. And we were watching targets through the rain, we were shooting crossing targets but they wanted to shoot a dropping shot. I said, “Okay, throw that teal and let me watch it.” And I was dumbfounded as I watched that bird fall. Because as I was watching the bird fall, because my eyes were moving downward with the raindrops, I could actually see each individual raindrop. If I tried to look through it, I couldn’t see them. The darndest thing I’ve ever seen.
Anyway, well I think we ought to talk a little bit more about this when you do some more research. Or, we may get together this winter about some eye exercises. I feel like, based on some discussions that we’ve had previous to this Steve, that the eye exercises would probably improve your ability to gain better visual information. But I think we looked at a study that said it doesn’t improve the brain’s ability to interpret it. Is that correct?
Steve: There is a study done in the UK that says just that. But that’s the only one I can find that states that, so I’m going to hold off on that. I don’t know about that. But there are so many out there that claim to have improved, and then there’s statistics on professional baseball players and hockey players, goalies and such, and they actually saw the change in their ability to perform.
Steve: One thing Gil, before we run out of time,
the visual system,
for simplicity, can be divided into three parts.
One is sensory. That would
be your input. Number two: mental processing or visual concentration.
We’ve been talking a lot about that for a long time. Number three would be the
motor output: your timing, your swing, and the mount. So all three must be
highly in tune for good sporting performance. If not, there can be a domino
effect where by one failing it leads to another. Too often
it is the mental section of the triad, that mental concentration that lets down the performance. I came across that and that’s what it’s all about:
sensory, mental and motor output.
Gil: And what is sensory again?
Steve: Sensory is the input. It’s the input and then you have the mental processing of that, or the visual concentration, and then you have the motor, the output. It says all three have to be highly tuned, and there can be a knockdown effect where by one failing it leads to another.
Gil: Right. They have to be in concert with each other.
Steve: Exactly. And too often it’s the middle section of that triad, the mental concentration that lets down the whole performance.
Gil: That is why you gotta focus on the front.
Steve: Amen.
Bob: Stevie, look at the Russian literature, see what you can find.
Steve: Hey yeah. I did some translations. I got a translation download and those guys have been doing some of this. It’s very interesting.
Gil: Well, it’s exciting. I thank you for doing the research you did and preparing this for us Steve. I have a feeling that we’re going to go back to this over and over again. I don’t feel like any of us can learn too much about visual input and mechanical output. It’s something that we just kind of stumbled onto. It kinda lit our fire and I’m glad it lit your fire. It is a visual game. I would like to see if we can find somebody that can talk to us about glasses versus contacts. I’ll start talking to some people, I’d like to see about the differences in that. Some people’s glasses are thicker than others, the refraction rate has got to be greater and I’d be curious to know if that is an impairment. If it’s an impairment, that can be gotten around by pointing your nose in different directions, I just don’t know enough about that. But we’re all getting older and we all need glasses.
Steve: I ran across a study in the UK about three years ago. And it ran across a broad field of sports and they determined that in all cases but one, contacts were better than glasses. The only exception was shooting where they determined that the glasses were better than the contacts.
Gil: Really!
Steve: Yeah.
Bob: Well there’s another version of that, there’s some people in the US–and I have yet to find a lot of information on it–that are laminating the refraction of their lens over the curved lens of the curved shooting glasses.
Gil: Say that one again.
Bob: Well, you know you’ve got wraparound shooting glasses?
Gil: Yep.
Bob: They have refraction that laminates over the entire outside of it.
Gil: Yes. I have a student named Tim Mercer who has some Oakleys that were done that way.
Bob: I’d sure like to know who’s doing it, because that one I think really helps your peripheral vision.
Gil: I’ll be in touch with him the latter part of this week and I’ll give you a call. We’ll see if we can get you in touch with the people and talk to us a little about it.
Bob: Sounds good.
Gil: Well guys, it’s gone again. Don’t
forget about calling
us and letting us know if you want to get a copy of our book. I’ll
give you a money back guarantee on it. It’s
not only chock full of good information, but it is an easy, humorous read. Look forward to
talking to you next month. I have a feeling we’re going to talk about goals,
but I’m sure that when Stevie and I get together at the treatment center we
might come up with something different, but I just can’t tell you how grateful
I am to Steve for sharing some of the things that he’s researched and I’m looking to forward to sitting
down with him in the next month or so and just chewing the fat, having a
little gab session and see what he’s discovered this year and share some of the things we’ve
discovered. So until December, y’all have a good Turkey Day. And put
your gun down. Gary, you don’t have to put your gun down, because you’ve got
a new gun. But you all put your gun down and get away from it, go hunting or
fishing or something else and think about your goals because I feel that we’re
going to talk about goals next month. Do something nice for your family because
they’ve got to give up time with you so that you can pursue your dream. We’ll
see you all in December.
