2008-01 – January 2008 Coaching Hour – Maintenance Practice

…….January – Maintenance Practice…….

 – Warming Up Before a Tournament

 – Maintenance Practice

His comment to me was: No, I don’t. I pretty much get my head right, and if my head is right, my ass is going to follow; and he pretty much goes at it from that standpoint. And I have to tell you that I’m pretty much the same way.

Vicki, are you the same way; or would you rather, if you had time, would you like to go out and just shoot a little bit? What do you  think?

 Vicki: I used to have to go shoot a little bit, but I think I’ve gotten past that. I usually do a rotation on my way out there. I imagine that going on. I visualize that so that I’ve already warmed up by the time I  get there.

 Gil: What about you Driscoll? Do you like to warm up a little bit before you go shoot a  round?

 Driscoll: No, I don’t think so. I’ve tried both ways. I’d rather physically get loose and warmed up, and in Texas usually that’s not too hard.

 Gil:  I was going to say it wouldn’t be too hard for you at all.

 Driscoll: I like visualization because I just think there’s so many targets you can shoot and especially if you’re in a bigger shoot. I just don’t want to waste the mental capacity and energy to shoot warm-up targets.

 Gil: Okay. I know that Dean Olson eventually found that he liked to go shoot just a little bit if he had the opportunity. He didn’t tie his ability to shoot that way by being able to warm up.

I know that Craig likes to go and shoot just a little bit. I saw him    out at American Shooting Center about a month ago. I was giving some skeet lessons. And he came out and he had his clays car in tow, and he had stopped to shoot the Five Stand there at American. He came over  and said hello, and I hadn’t seen him for two or three months and we exchanged  pleasantries.

I said: What are you doing over here?

And he said: Oh, I’m just getting in a couple of rounds of Five Stand. I’ve been goose hunting and I hadn’t touched the gun in a while, and I just felt like I needed to warm up a little bit before I went and shot the tournament over at Rio Brazos.

So, some people are going to like to warm up and some of them aren’t; but I think it’s important that we look at it from a  standpoint that commitment and focus are really important, whether you’re warming up or whether you’re actually playing the game.

And I do know that in coaching an increasingly large number of skeet shooters now, they do feel the need to warm up. And we try   to get them to where they just warm their mind up and trust their mechanics; but there’s a little crutch there. Some of them have gotten past it, but they want to warm up.

A lot of times people that feel like they have to warm up think that there’s going to have to be some kind of a breakthrough that happens. They’re going to have to shoot really well in the warm up. They feel like everything they do in their warm up has to be perfect, and that’s just too general of a way to look at a warm up session.

 Brian Brewton: One of the things about going out there and doing a warm up is that you can get involved in some peripheral junk that will suck you away from your intended purpose.

 Gil: Boy, you ain’t kidding. Your expectation for your practice round must be very modest and they must be very specific. If you’re going to do a practice round, if you’re going to do a practice Five Stand, don’t go to that practice field expecting magic. Just don’t even think about it. Don’t think that you’re going to have a superhuman experience on the practice field. The practice field is just simply there for you to warm up a little bit, feel the gun go off.

Sometimes, if I’m a little jittery on a FITASC, I’ll ask them if I can go up and shoot the gun a couple of times or even on a sporting clays course just to feel the gun go off in my hands. But you just got to keep your emotions in check just like you say,  Brian.

Most people that we see, and this is an understatement, but most of the people out there that feel like they have to have a practice round make things much more complicated than they really are.

I think that’s probably what you’re referring to, isn’t it, Brian?

 Brian: What I’m really saying is that you went out there to kind of knock out some kinks and stuff. And you get there and all of a sudden you have a trap break down or something not being pulled right, and all of a sudden you get emotionally involved because the targets are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, or the trapper is not doing something, what-have-you.

So automatically you’ve just allowed yourself to get yanked away from what you intended to do.

Gil: Right.

 Brian: And that’s what I was talking about, the peripheral junk and the unintended things that happened that you weren’t expecting to happen; and here all of a sudden you’re getting involved in something that you really didn’t intend to get involved in.

 Gil: Right. You end up worrying too much about the results of what’s going on around you as opposed to why you went there in the first place, which was just to warm up, feel the gun go off. Don’t grade the breaks but feel good about your mechanics.

Vicki and I have done this. We never get to practice, and if we know that we’re going to have to go shoot a tournament, then we will always go out to our practice field and shoot, try to shoot a flat of ammo two or three days before the shoot just to get back into that rhythm. But when we do that, we know ourselves well enough such that we’re not going to get caught up in, “well, hell, I didn’t break those teal very hard or I missed some quartering birds over there.”

We’re not looking at the result of the shot. What we’re looking at is how it feels. We’re looking for that rhythm, that getting back to the trinity that you call it, Brian. And because we are not on the fine-tuned edge of our game, we feel like we need to train a little. Would you not agree with that, Vicki?

 Vicki: By all means. We’re just trying to get the gun in our hands and get the feel back. When I used to have to warm up when we were competing a lot, sometimes if I didn’t shoot really well in the warm up, that tended to create a little doubt in my mind as to how good my round was going to be. So that’s why I think I prefer to visualize a little bit just so you don’t carry all of that peripheral junk with you, as Brian says.

But, yeah, our warm up is probably a lot different from everybody else just because we don’t get the opportunity to shoot very often.

 Gil: And just like everything else that we find in coaching people now from all over the world: different people are going to feel different about different things.

 Bob Palmer: I don’t differentiate between warming up either physically or warming up the mind. To me, they’re both warm ups.

 Gil:  Agreed.

Bob P: In golf I do like to get to the golf course a little bit early to clean up the clubs and just get the feel of swinging. But I don’t always allow myself that extra time, and I’ll find myself rushing there. On the way there, when   I get to traffic lights or just driving, if I can just visualize the motion of me swinging, that can be as good as actually warming up and hitting a few balls. So warming up doesn’t necessarily mean a physical warm    up.

 Gil:  You’re reading my mind.

 Bob P: Although I would be careful. Your experience is in Texas where most of your shoots are probably blistering hot.

 Gil: Right.

 Bob P: But if you’re in climates where you might have a really cool  spring or even cool summer, if you go out there cold, you know, a little stiff, your mechanics are going to be affected.

 Gil: Yep.

 Bob P: So it might be well worth your while to warm up, take a walk and get the body heat going and that kind of  thing.

 Gil: I do know that I have found myself, and this parallels a lot of what you just said, I find myself whenever we have to do an 8 o’clock flight, which is always at the National Championship and sometimes at the Open if we get to shoot the Open, I find that getting up in the morning and not trying to get out there to shoot a practice round but getting up in the morning and getting in the clays car and going to the station and being there early but just leaving the gun, leaving everything, and walking the course just with a brisk walk just to get my blood going, just to get myself kind of alert, and stretched out, it gets my system going.

And while I’m doing that little walk or while I’m doing those stretches, like Vicki says, it’s a good time to visualize and get your mind in the mind- set that you need it to be for you to perform well.

And, we’ve seen just about both ends of the spectrum as far as what people feel like they actually do need to perform well. It’s just amazing, like Brian says, if you don’t have the right attitude going into your little warm up routine, whatever it entails, you can certainly set yourself up to lose whatever confidence or edge you might have had going into the competition.

But I want to stress again, like Bob said, you know, practice doesn’t necessarily mean going out and shooting the Five Stand. It could be practicing, getting your mind made up, which is what you were talk- ing about with me earlier today, Brian, and, I think, what Driscoll was talking about. It’s just some visualization and some things that you’re doing with your mind getting your mind ready because you feel very confident that your stroke is there because you’ve been working on your stroke. But it’s going to be different for everybody.

 Bob P: Gil? Can I make a suggestion?

 Gil: I want you to.

 Bob P: This is on an individual basis, but everyone should have an amount of time before they compete where they isolate themselves from other people and use that as part of their warm up. I mean, go for a walk, but just remove yourself from the distraction of other people who might in   a friendly way be psyching you out or talking about their problems or bitching about the course. Just take yourself away from  that.

Some people need half an hour, an hour, maybe even five minutes; but everyone needs to just distance themselves, disassociate from the rabble in a sense and start  focusing  on their  game.  And try to bring  that in as part of their warm  up.

 Gil: The things that we’re talking about, as I said before, are going to be different for everybody. And all I’m trying to do is throw some things out there so that you might want to try them during the beginning of the year just to kind of see, maybe look back at your logs and see what you did last year, the year before, what kind of pretournament ritual did you go through? Which one did you feel helped better prepare you for the first station? Because some days when you get there, you’re going to feel on top of the world. I mean, you’re going to be there. You’re going to know it’s there. Some days you’re going to be a little stiff. Just try as you may. Be congruent. And you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’re not going to have a peak performance that’s going to be the best of the best that you can do every time you go out there. You’re going to have to learn to score with the stroke that you came to the course with today, and that could be something that you discover in your pretournament ritual, if you want to call it pretournament ritual instead of warm up.

Bob P: That’s a very good point. I like to treat it as a ritual. And I like to treat it as a ritual from the moment you get up in the morning.

 Gil: Yeah, that way you can anchor it to your congruency.

 Brian: A lot of books that I’ve read, mention a lot of athletes, especially your NFL players, all have a ritual that they do before they even get to the field and as they get into the locker room and such stuff as that, to get themselves ready for the   game.

 Gil: Yeah. And maybe I kind of misled things in the beginning of this little segment. I just feel like that at the beginning of the year it’s a great time to look back through your log, look at your last year, look at your last two or three years, look at how your game has evolved.

But just be aware that there are going to be certain things that you’re going to do that are good for you to have or that improve the probability that you’re going to have that kind of performance that you’re looking for today, and they’re not all the same. I guess that’s the toughest part about coaching. They’re not all the same, and different things work in different ways for different people.

When we practiced or when we shot tournaments years ago when we first began traveling in ‘83 and ‘84, man, we’d shoot right up to the day we left. We’d try to get there Thursday and practice a little Thursday afternoon and practice on the course on Friday.

There was no warm up. I mean, they barely had enough machines to throw ten stations, five pair each in a hundred bird shoot for two days. So there was just no warm up. But if you got there early, you could at least shoot a little bit.

And then what we found is that because we had shot so much that come the end of the first day or the beginning or middle of the second day, we were completely out of gas, and it didn’t take long for us to put two and two together and realize that we didn’t need to do all of that shooting.

Of course, we were young in the game. The game was young.    We were infatuated with it and couldn’t get enough of it, but still it certainly didn’t help us in our performance.

And then finally we got to the point in our game and our confidence to where we would shoot a little bit Wednesday afternoon, clean the gun, put it up, pack your gun, pack your stuff, get ready to go to the shoot. Travel on Friday, get there Friday afternoon, go to the range, find the range, find the hotel, find the eating places, buy your ammo, do your registration, go back to the hotel, go to bed. Saturday morning get up, have breakfast, go to the range, shoot your birds, go back to the hotel. Get up Sunday morning, go to the range, shoot your birds, wait until the tournament was over, collect the trophies, go back to the hotel, go back home on Monday morning. And that began to be our ritual.

And because we had no place to shoot practice birds, we just had to, as Brian says, just get our head right and go out there and do it. There was no place to practice. And we came from skeet where practice is something I think it’s a necessity that you have at least one practice field for every six or seven skeet fields that you’re throwing registered targets on.

So practice is a part of their thing, but I’m talking mechanical practice, going out and shooting. Like you said, Brian, that’s a great opportunity for starting to miss a target and letting your brain focus on result as opposed to the process and how it feels. What you’re really there for is to get your mind alert and to feel the gun go off and don’t worry as much about whether you hit it or not, just to feel good and know that you can break the targets when you focus on them. So I just wanted to throw that out, and thank you-all for participating in that.

Maintenance Practice

 Gil: The next thing I want to talk about is something that I started talking to Bob about earlier today when he called and that is something that Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson call maintenance practice. It’s something that we’ve talked about again, but it’s a little bit different spin on it; and, I think, it would be good for us to talk about it in just a little bit. I think that we could probably all agree that the most challenging part of sporting clays or any sport, for that matter, probably, is achieving a certain level of consistency or a certain level of consistent performance.

You might be faced with a difficult or tricky pair and you make the plan, you believe it, and you run the station and it feels good; and eventually you’re going to go out and you’re going to shoot a great score on a tournament and you’re going to come back the next day and it’s just not going to be quite as great.

And the question is inevitably going to come: Why can’t I shoot well all of the time? That would be consistent. The ability to repeat success separates good shots from average and great shots from the good ones.

We are all more consistent than we realize we are, and one of the areas we are more consistent in is that we get in our own way more often than not. A smooth, consistent move and mount that’s able to be applied to any target in the field doesn’t just happen. It’s not the result of divine intervention. It is, however, the result of hard work and is the result of carefully-structured practice; and they call it maintenance practice.

Now, Bob, what did you call it? It was about fundamentals, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

 Bob P: The fundamentals. I’m not sure what exactly you’re speaking of in terms of maintenance practice in terms of the shooting sports; but in the martial arts what would be practicing the fundamentals in karate, and it has to be done. I mean, this is no second thought.

You do have to do the basics; but you want to avoid calling it the basics or calling it the routines, so you kind of remove the notion that it’s going to be boring.

 Gil: Okay.

 Bob P: And really you’ve got to set it up so that you set many challenges for yourself. So, for example, if a gun mount is what you call one of your fundamentals, each time you go out you would do so many reps of that. And challenge yourself to do it. You don’t stop halfway and you don’t do more than that. You get your brain to accept that we’re going to do this routine, and maybe when you first start you do a limited number.

And then as your season progresses you establish a set number of reps for everything you do. You complete that, and then you go on to the next stage and the next stage and so that everything has its place.

 Gil: Would it be fair to say that another way would be to set up the correct nurturing environment in your practice mentally and physically, having it be fun, having it be a challenge, but mentally setting it up so that it’s not drudgery. It’s not a mundane thing. It’s an exciting thing that you’re committed to.

 Bob P: Absolutely.

 Gil: Another way of saying that?

 Bob P: Yeah. Absolutely. And knowing when you do that and you get your muscle memory working for you, every part of your game is just going to come alive. And you’re just not going to believe the results.

Gil: Everything must be maintained in order to function properly. This is a quote: “The best get better by developing a relentlessly consistent standard of play.” We all want badly for the day to come when it all comes together. We’re looking for that day.

 Bob P: And the more you practice, the more you do those fundamentals, and make them fun and enjoy them, the efficiency of your whole body improves and so those three-day competitions you’re the last guy standing or last woman standing. Right? Everyone else is going: Man, am I ever tired and is it ever hot.

And you’re looking around and you’re kind of chuckling because you could do another day of it. But it’s just because you’ve gotten your muscles to be smooth and efficient.

 Gil: And just because you ran the last station doesn’t mean you’re going to run the next one, and just because you didn’t run the last station doesn’t mean you’re not going to run the next one, right?

 Bob P: Yeah. It’s just that.

 Gil: You got to prepare yourself so that your whole well-rounded game is able to rise to the top every time you ask it to perform.

 Brian: Well, that’s the payoff. I mean, that’s what you’re looking for from the practice.

 Gil: The day when it all comes together.

 Brian: I sent you an email about two of my students about doing the flashlight drill. And one of the kids that has never shot crossing targets or much of anything, and he’s never seen a chondelle or a battue target.

I showed him how to do the flashlight drill and told him it was quite essential to have this mastered for his first outing because he was going to be joining a bunch of seasoned shooters, and he was quite a novice, and we were going to move pretty rapidly.

Well, his first day of practice he goes out and he’d been practicing five days, and his mother kept telling me that every time she turned around he was telling her: well, I’m going to my room to practice.

 Gil: He had been practicing his gun mount five days? Not shooting the gun but practicing his gun mount drill?

Brian: The flashlight drill, and we do the lateral move as well as just pointing it into the corner. So, anyway, he goes out and he’s up there against some guys that have already been shooting three years. He goes out there and embarrasses one of them who’s really a superb shooter for 13 years old. I mean, he’ll chase adults out of his way. He got embarrassed because this little boy just wore him out on International Skeet, and then we did a Five Stand.

Well, yesterday, the boy that got embarrassed, he went home and he practiced the drill. He came back and he smoked them like he couldn’t believe. He understood now what that’s all about. He saw firsthand now and you talk about driving nails into people? That did the job.

I can’t over emphasize that’s one of those little things. You guys talk about trying to make it a game or make it fun and stuff. It’s got to be that way, otherwise it is a laborious deal. So you’ve got to make it a game because it’s so essential to what we’re trying to achieve.

 Gil: I will echo what you just said. We had been working with Dean Olson for about two, two and a half years; and he called me one day just panicked.

He said: I’m just in a slump. I’m off.

I said: Meet me out at the field. I can be out there in 20 minutes. He says: That’s fine. I can be there. Meet me  there.

And I watched him shoot one shot. He was just distraught. He hit the bird, but it was ugly.

And I asked him: Have you been doing your gun mount drill? And he looked me square in the eye and he said: You know the answer to that.

And I said: The lesson is over. That’ll be $150. And he said: You’re serious?

I said: $150, please. The lesson is over.

Maintenance practice. Basic fundamentals. You’ve got to take care of the machine.

 Bob P: One of the things that really gets people doing maintenance practice is that it can be boring.

 Gil: It can be boring if you look at it as a drudgery, that I’ve got to do a hundred of these today; but if you look at it as an exciting way to get the fundamentals that ingrained in your subconscious and carry them to a higher level and if you’re more feel-based in your awareness of what’s going on than results or score or number-based, it’s so much easier to look at maintenance practice as an exciting thing.

Bob P: But even then sometimes you have to trick the unconscious.

 Gil: Now, this is what I’ve been waiting to hear right here.

 Bob P: Well, you have to distract it. One of the ways is to make it exciting and think of the outcome. Another way would be to count your way through it, to actually count, and by counting it distracts the unconscious.

So you’re going to do a hundred mounts. Well, count your way through them. Make sure that you really count every one of them, and just your voice inside your head will displace your boredom or anything like that and maybe even play music if you’re doing flashlight drills. Add to the experience. Make it exciting. Get yourself pumped up. Think about the reps as you would feel on the course. Play also with your adrenaline. See if you can get your adrenaline up where you want it to be. Bring in other factors, as well.

 Gil: All very good points, very good points.

 Bob P: Listen, do your gun mounts as you’re listening to the Coaching Hour.

 Gil: You’re going to have a hard sale on that one, I think. You certainly could, though. You certainly could.

Well, one of the things that I gleaned from this article I’m just about to get to is the fact that you always got to visit the fundamentals. I’ll use Dean as an example again, the year that he shot so well. He was on the Coaching Hour and we were talking about it, and I asked him: What changed in your practice?

And he said: Gil, every time I go to the range before I shoot my 100-bird tournament, when I’m practicing, I’m training. I always shoot one, two, three boxes, whatever I feel I need to; and I go through each of the six basic trajectories, nitpicking the move, always working on my fundamental moves, always working on my fundamentals every single time. Maintenance practice.

He said: If there’s a move that I felt like that I didn’t do quite as well the last time even though I won, I’m going to work more on that. If there’s a move that I’m working with right there that day that doesn’t feel good, I may shoot another box at it, but I’m always going to visit my basic fundamentals because it’s all fundamentals. Regardless of what problem I have, regardless of how I cloak the problem and bring it to you or Vicki, the solution is a breakdown of the fundamentals.

And that’s pretty much what this whole chapter has been about. If you maintain an automobile, it’ll last you. God knows it’ll last you for years, and it’s the same as your game.

Now, here’s a quote. Listen up. “Constant use with careless maintenance can lead to an erosion of skill that is not even noticeable until one day the whole engine just breaks down and you find yourself with a swing that can’t find a fairway.”

Obviously that’s a golf analogy. Constant use with careless maintenance. You must be sure that all components of your game get the atten- tion they deserve, but first you must determine what parts of your game need attention and you need to be specific. You don’t need to list 50 things that you have to be able to do well in order to have a good game. This is where you begin to look inside yourself. This is where you begin to read your log again. This is where you begin to remember the situations you were in last year or the year before or the last tournament or the last big shoot you were in.

You begin to go back through and you begin to look within yourself and figure out, not 50, but figure out three, maybe no more than four things that you feel like that if you scheduled regular practice sessions on those specific things based on your game, not somebody else’s game. We all know the gun mount is important. We all know the preshot routine is important. We all know all of those things that we’ve talked about on this Coaching Hour for I don’t know how many years now, and we’ve written books about them, that we’ve coached you on them.

We all know all of those things that are important to have a well- rounded game, but each one of you has three or four things. I think they called them tendencies in the article. You all have certain tendencies that show up in your game periodically. Some of them are technical and physical: Gun mount, grip pressure. Some are rushing toward the  end of the set. Some of them are mental or emotional, but it’s almost imperative that you know what your specific tendencies are.

We have said to each and every one of you at some time when we’ve been coaching you that when you really have a breakthrough, we really get down to the bottom line with where it is and the root cause of your problem has been revealed to either Vicki or me. And therein lies your biggest problem. That problem right there that we just found, that we’re going to help you overcome, you will see that problem at every level you get to.

Every time you get through another level and find yourself on a plateau where you have to work hard and learn new things to get to     the next level, every time you find yourself there that’s the first place you go. It might be grip pressure. It might be moving your eyes. It could be any one of a number of different things, but we’ve all said it to     you. Those are your tendencies, and each one of you have a different tendency, two, maybe three.

And this is a good time to do a little soul searching and look at your past performances and try to figure out what two or three or maybe no more than four things that you can visit on a daily or a weekly basis with respect to a maintenance practice that will give you what they call your greatest return on investment as far as practice minutes or hours.

Working on your tendencies is a big part of maintenance practice, but remember what Brian might see as his tendency Driscoll might not have and what Greg sees as a tendency he has. You all have those tendencies, but you got to start looking back at your log. That’s why it’s so important to keep a log so you can determine what those tendencies are because now is a good time to look at them and pick out three or four. You know they’re there. You’re going to see them again. They keep coming back.

Well, wouldn’t it makes sense if we were to design a maintenance practice to where the exercises were directed at those tendencies that you specifically have? It doesn’t matter what they are. Hell, a physical or a technical tendency might be grip pressure. It’s not equal. Eyes not still when you call pull. Maybe you’re anticipating the target. Maybe you focus too long on the target and you didn’t slide your eyes. Mental or emotional tendencies might be not maintaining congruency, not starting the day congruent, assuming or taking your congruency for granted, being judgmental.

Be neutral or happy. Looking at targets whether they’re hard or  easy. They’re not hard or easy. They just are. Your routines. Believing and trusting your plan. Those are things that just come to my mind that I’ve worked and I know Vicki has worked with many people on, and those are just examples, and you guys don’t have a lot wrong. And what we’re talking about is using a system of looking within yourself. Don’t be afraid to look within yourself. It’s okay to face the dragon. You’ve got the tools, but look within yourself to find those little things that you know are there. They’ve come back to bite you two or three times. And devise a practice regimen. Devise specific exercises that  allow you to focus directly on those tendencies. And do you know why they  keep  coming back?

It’s because they’re the things that are the most deeply embedded in your subconscious, and that comes from the preconceived notions that you had when you entered the game. You’ve justified it in your own mind. It’s there and you overcome it and you reach another plateau and then sure enough you see that. It’s like Miss Rudolph and that tarantula. You see that tarantula again and you work your way through that tarantula again, and you work hard at that plateau.

The March Tip in Sporting Clays magazine talks about a different way to look at plateaus. A lot of people look at a plateau as bad. A plateau is just merely an amount of time that you have to be patient and practice in so that you do something enough so that it becomes subconscious; and one day when it becomes subconscious, poof, you’re all of a sudden at another level, another plateau.

A plateau is not bad. A plateau is a very normal part of the mastering curve, and it’s where new skills are honed and new skills are embedded into your subconscious at a higher level which allows you then to per- form at another level.

I guess what I’m asking y’all to do is to look at your game like I look at your game almost every year for the past six or eight years. Brian has always called me at the beginning of the year and said: Hey, I want to come over. I want you to look at me. Tell me what you see.

Man, I don’t know what I’m going to see. We go out there and I just start pulling targets and we talk a little bit, and I may say something after the first shot. I may not say anything for 30 minutes. Some of you might find that hard to believe. It’s about trying to help each and every one of you.

Find those little things that have recurred over the last three years regardless of how prominent they’ve been; but to try to find them so that you can begin to develop practice drills, or whatever, whether it’s mental or physical, so that you can begin to push those things deeper away from your performance.

And I agree with Bob. It can’t be a mundane thing, but I will tell you this. Once you really realize that you have certain tendencies that are keeping you from taking your game to the next level. When I realize that I’ve got a problem, it’s exciting to me to devise ways for me to learn my way through and earn my way through that plateau and become very proficient at it.

To me, it’s a great feeling, to look at that problem as something that I’m going to dominate and conquer as opposed to, well, I’m going to try to practice my way through it and hope it doesn’t come back.

 Brian: I imagine Bob will concur with this, but that’s just learning how to use the feedback.

Gil: Dad-gum it! Do you concur with that, Bob?

 Bob P: Absolutely.

 Gil: Dog it! You-guys are reading my mail. He stole the punch line, and I’m happy you did it. We work with you-guys on this stuff, and it’s exciting to us to reveal them to you; but I have to tell you they’re pretty obvious to us.

You know, Vicki and I will talk about you guys or talk about other people after we’ve had a couple of days of instruction with you and say: How in the world can they get so screwed up in that short of time? What’s the deal? Is it us? What’s going  on?

And after repeat visits with people we find that each person has a certain tendency. They have two or three things mechanical or mental; it doesn’t matter. But they’ve got two or three things that came from their original preconceived notions about what they thought they had to do and they’ve given it a lot of emotions; therefore, it was deeply embedded in the subconscious, and you got to replace those. And you never get rid of that, that once something is in the subconscious and it’s a habit for life.

What you got to do is you got to replace it with something that’s better, and the only way you replace it is through repetition. Change the neurotransmission highway, but you’re going to see it again.

And the reason I’m so excited about this is I want you in the beginning of this year just to jot down some things that you feel that you have seen more than once. You can look at it from the standpoint of what three things could I do in my game, or four, that could give me the greatest boost in performance. I don’t care if you do it that way. What things have I seen in my log that have kept recurring in performances that were not quite as good as I would have liked them. Look at it that way. I don’t care. But begin to do something specific to put that fire out, to begin to look at it for what it is. It’s just an opportunity for you to dominate something else, and call it maintenance practice. To me, it’s just another way to look at a way to get your game more on a square, even keel basis.

One more quote: “Often when players skip maintenance practice they will play well for some time. Even though there is a mechanical breakdown or maybe a negative temper release, your body and brain will compensate for the flaw that has crept into your game, and     you don’t notice anything until it gets quite bad and the body can’t compensate any longer.”