2009-01 – January 2009 Coaching Hour – Evaluation During Practice

Greg M: I don’t think she likes you any less. She just likes Vicki even more.

 Vicki: There you go.

 Gil: Now, we were talking about red, black and blue and green; but we’re going to get to that in just a minute. But have you gotten to a point where you know why you’re doing your competitive shooting? And if you haven’t, that’s okay. I just wanted to know.

 Greg M: I went through the exercises that Brian and you suggested   of why do I do this. I went back to my roots. As I mentioned a minute ago, Gil, I spent 24 years working with Dale Carnegie, and I taught the management program; and one of the things we dealt with there was the planning process and making it a creative function instead of a judgmental function.

 Gil: Ooh, that’s heavy.

 Greg  M: The idea is that to be creative at planning you start with   green light, right brain thinking of the ideal should-be situation, and it’s anything goes. Nothing is illegal. Nothing is ridiculous.

Then you look at the as-is. Then you put steps in between, which just becomes checkpoints. Then you look at what you’re going to do to make those checkpoints.

So, you know, I started with why do I do this, and that was pretty philosophical. And I got into self-actualization as a young child. My dad was not a golfer; but I had some influential people in my life that were shooters, and my concept of success if I were to grow up to be a successful whatever, banker, lawyer or candlestick maker, whatever, what I’d visualize was not having a mansion, the big car; it was having nice guns and shooting and hunting and that type of  thing.

Gil: I want to live on your street.

 Greg M: Well, that was kind of my adolescent vision of success, I guess. So for me a large part of why I do what I do is that self-actualization that, you know, “God, I’ve got four Perazzi [brand shotguns]. I would have never in my life believed that as a kid. I mean, I shoot every weekend.” That’s kind of a self-actualizing thing.

Gil: Okay.

 Greg M: I know people like Gil Ash. You know, there’s a certain success just in the experience itself regardless of how well I do it. And then obviously the ego gratification of not just doing it but doing it well. Like anyone else I like recognition. I’m not driven by it, I don’t think; but when I go to a tournament, there’s a great gratification in getting a punch or at least shooting to a point that I feel like I did as well as I could.

 Gil: Well, let me just interrupt you real quick right there on that point. Until you can look yourself in the mirror, regardless of score, and say to yourself and other people I did the best I could today, you’re not ever going to be satisfied. You’re not ever going to feel good about    it because regardless of your score you’ve got to tell yourself based on everything else that’s going on in my life and based on how much time I’ve had to dedicate to getting ready to perform today I did the best I could with the stroke I brought to the course today.

Does that make sense to you?

 Greg M: Yes.

 Gil: Okay. Would you agree with that, Brian?

 Brian: Yeah.

 Gil: I mean, I have to tell you that is a big thing. And when Vicki    and I quit competing and began to teach full time and we went to tournaments and we saw people that we used to beat and we saw people that used to see us win and I can’t speak for Vicki, but that one phrase, “regardless of my score,” enabled me to feel good about my attempt because being able to say to anyone, regardless of what they said to me, I did the best I could today, and believe it. Regardless of what they said back, like, “Well, you shot like shit.” Yeah, but you weren’t there in the box with me, I haven’t shot a double in eight months, and to shoot the score I shot today I recovered from some really poor moves and was able to get the pair dead, to be able to believe that and to be able to say that.

It’s hard for anybody else on the air to understand what Vicki and I say when we tell you that one of the hardest things that we ever did was to give up competing [and take up coaching full-time] because when you’re at the top and you know when you go to a tournament it’s either you or three other people that are going to win today, and if you don’t win you’re not going to be but two or three birds out, well when you’ve experienced that for two or three years and then all of a sudden you’d like to dream it’s going to happen, but it’s not.

But to be able to have a phrase like “I did the best I could today,” with the game that I brought to the course today “I did the best I could,” that helped me emotionally go through whatever performance I might have.

Does that make sense to you?

 Greg M: Yes.

 Gil: I mean, that’s a big deal, Greg.

 Greg M: Well, like we discussed last month, Gil, I think some of the growth I had this past year was in the way I quit caring about score and my scores went up.

What I wanted to do was master my emotions and attitude and let whatever happen happen; and, as a result, things got better, and that’s the point, I guess.

 Gil: Okay.

 Greg M: Do you want me to keep going on the score thing?

 Gil: Yeah. I think we need to get that to an end. Do you feel like you have at least come up with something. You don’t have to tell us; but do you feel like you at least have come up with something that you can look at as a reason for your doing this, and do you feel like that has helped you make a goal? And if you haven’t, you haven’t, but at least you are on that journey.

 Greg M: No. I think I’ve got a start on why I do this. The other component is I used to live for competitive IPSC shooting.

 Gil: Yes, sir.

 Greg M: And so I went and started in ‘76 through about ‘87. That literally was my life.

Gil: That’s why you look at the barrel so much.

 Greg M: And I was in the political parts of the organization, and I just got burned out. And just when I quit doing that, shotguns were classy. The people were classy. The events were low key compared to that. It was just like a total breath of fresh air. So that’s another reason I’m committed to doing it. By contrast it’s so much fun. Anyway, I need to work some more on the “whys”, but at least I’ve got a head start.

When I started to do some goal setting, I went back to that — that planning aspect of what’s the ideal should-be situation.

Gil: And what did you come up with?

 Greg M: Well, what I wrote down was to be a member of our all-state team, placing no lower than third in any of our local events in master class and placing in the top five percent at our state shoots. That might be a little low if you look at the numbers, but our state shoots are almost perennially held at Claythorne or Glen Oak which are premier locations. So we tend to have pretty large turnouts.

 Gil: Right.

 Greg M: You know, if I was in the top five percent, that would be excellent.

 Gil: Hey, your goal is personal and nobody will judge you for that.

 Greg M: Yeah, but part of the other reasons I like shooting the sport is I really like to write, and I’ve been writing since 1979 but just freelance; and last year I really didn’t do a lot of writing because I had too many other things on my plate.

So one of the other visions of the ideal is to average five articles a year. I think last year I had three, maybe. So that’s my vision. As far as where I am comparing to the as-is, I’m a new master class shooter. I do have one punch in master already, which I feel good about, but I’m kind of inconsistent in my placements. I’ll either do real well or mediocre. I’m not as consistent as I would like, and I’m pretty mediocre in our state events, and I’m not sure that this last year I did better. My attitudinal growth, I think, will help a lot.

Claythorne, I used to get apoplectic going down there because all the shots are under your feet, over water, and it was like shooting on the surface of the moon or something. It took a lot of adjusting and now I’m at the point where I enjoy it.

 Gil: Well, that in itself is a big  deal.

 Greg M: Well, what I’ve got to do to get from the as-is to the should- be are just a series of tasks. There are a lot of things that I don’t do or haven’t done consistently that you teach. I need to keep the stupid shooting log. I’m sorry. I’m one of your classic delinquents with that. I struggle doing that, Gil, and I know I need to. And so that’s one of the main things I need to do.

I need to spend at least 15 minutes on those balance pads every other day. I was real good about it when you first sent them to me, and I really haven’t since about Thanksgiving now. I want to continue reading some books on the mental dynamics of performance. This  past year those golf books have really helped a lot. I need to do the flashlight drill or, what I’ve been doing instead of that, I use a red laser. I liked that a little bit better than the flashlight. I think they accomplish the same thing.

 Gil: Tomato, tomato.

 Greg M: Well, it keeps my interest more. I need to do that at least ten minutes a day three times a week anyway.

 Gil: Yeah, minimum.

 Greg M: So, anyway, that’s where I am. It’s not where I should be, but that’s where I am.

 Gil: It is what it is. I was talking to a customer today, talking about something similar to this; and, that is, his company is having a hard  time setting goals. And I’m going to go over and try to help the upper management get a handle on that or get them out to shoot one afternoon and talk to them a little bit about it, but it’s the same old thing.

You know it as well as I do, a goal is not something that you’re married to. A goal is just a direction. You tell the team the goal line is over there. It’s not a goal. It’s a goal line. Let’s go that direction with everything we do and everything we think.

If we get halfway there and decide that’s not where we want      to be, then we’re going to change directions, and the goal all of a sudden becomes over there. And it’s something that you have to have, otherwise you have no basis to expect to be able to make consistent decisions.

I think Brian would attest to this. Your goals will become much more clearly definable and easier to come by the more clearly you define why it is you’re doing this. It may be hard for you right now, but that’s okay. At least you’re trying to come up with some reason that you’re doing this. I think you’ve set a good goal of writing five articles this next year, something that obviously brings you pleasure; and it enables you to want to go and explore things in shooting, which, I think, is a great goal.

And your top five percent or top three, whatever that ends up being in your local areas, in your state shoot, that’s great; but it’s something that you need to strive for. And without that you’re going to find your frustration level more easily attained without some kind of a goal, something that will give you perspective on the days when things are not clicking as well as you’d like them to click.

So I think you got a good start. You just need to continue and look for something that you can write down that’s definitive as to why you’re doing this. I still think that you need to pursue that a little bit more.

More Brain Research

 Gil: Tell me a little bit more about the red, black, and white thing and the right brain and left brain thing that you’ve discovered in the book.

 Greg M: Well, first of all, I haven’t finished it. We’re getting ready to go to a trade show next week. So I’m kind of up to my elbows. But the first 30 pages get into the left brain, right brain thing. You use the word “epiphany,” and that’s probably what happened because it took me back to what we used to teach in the Dale Carnegie management seminar about how you approach people in a management role will dictate whether you get creative input or judgmental input from them. And we went through some exercises, one of which was to take a sheet of paper or a flip chart, if you’re doing it in front of a group, and write down the words red, green, blue, and black. And then on the next line down write the same words in a different order, but on the third line do the same thing in a different order, fourth line  different order. So you’ve got four lines of those words mixed up.

Then go to another sheet of paper or another sheet on the flip chart. Write the same words in the same order only use colored pens and write the word in a color that is not what the word is. In other words, if you’re writing R-E-D, write it in, say, blue. Write G-R-E-E-N in black. Don’t write the word in the color that it is and mix those up.

And then basically you have someone read the first sheet as quickly as they can comfortably. They’ll just go red, green, blue, green, blue, green, black. They’ll just zip through it.

 Gil: Because the words are written with the color that the word describes?

 Greg M: Well, they’re all written in black.

 Gil: Oh, they’re all written in black. All right.

 Greg M: They’re all written in the same color, whatever the color is. All they’re doing is reading like they normally read.

 Gil: Right.

 Greg M: It’s completely a left brain, judgmental function. No right brain process at all, unless maybe English is a second language to them or something. Then you go to the next sheet and you say, now, these are the same words written in the same order. This time I want you to tell me not what the words says but the color the word is written in. So that first one that says R-E-D but it’s written in black they’ll have to say black. They’re looking at R-E-D but saying black. They’ll go to the next one that says G-R-E-E-N but it’s written in blue. So they’re looking at G-R-E-E-N and then they say blue. And you time them in doing that. It’s amazing how many people vapor lock. They can’t do it at all. And about halfway through the second line they’ll stop and start laughing, usually. Because what’s happening is you’re asking them to do a right brain function, which is ascertain the color. The left brain sees R-E-D, but the right brain sees —

 Gil: Blue.

 Greg M: Yeah. Whatever it is. And so the right brain and left brain are struggling, and they have that moment of vapor lock. And as  I was reading what you wrote, that’s exactly what happens in the shooting stand when you get up and you’re looking at whatever it is, a quartering bird that’s going out from right to left and you’re going to break it at 30 yards, here’s the breakpoint, here’s the hold point, et cetera, and your brain is visualizing how that’s going to feel and look; but then your left brain says, okay, you need to get in front and start about 2 inches below it, and you start having that struggle in your head and you vapor lock.

 Gil: That argument?

 Greg M: So, anyway, I was just thinking that color exercise would fit in real well in that chapter I was reading. It’s because you’re good on those. I’ll never forget the one where you had people look at the door jam and flip their eyes to the next and then flip back; and you’re good at doing those little empirical things that prove your points. It was an ah-ha because that’s exactly what happened in the shooting stand.

 Gil: So it was a good contrasting of right brain, left brain?

 Greg M: Yes.

 Gil: The more we study that the more that seems to pop up, and we’re drawing some more conclusions from right brain, left brain and getting some more data. It’s a very interesting journey that we’re on, and we’re glad you’re on it with us.

So you’re on your journey to finding a goal and a reason why you do this, and thank you. I want to go over that a little bit more in detail with you so that we might can implement that in some of our clinics. Maybe we’ll do that at the advanced school this year. So I want to become a little bit more familiar with what you’re talking about. We’ll talk about that as soon as Charlotte will allow you to mention my name at dinner. Interesting.

How OSP Material Relates to the Game of Life

 Gil: Well, Jay Giusti, who we talked about last month, came by the office yesterday. And it’s hard to call it anything but a testimonial. But he sat across from me at my desk and talked to me about things that he has had to face in his journey with cancer and how the things that we wrote about in “You Gotta To Be Out of Your Mind” have helped him tremendously in walking this new journey that he did not choose to be on, but that he is on.

And he told me, looking right square in my eyes, he said: When you’re on this journey, 50-yard crossers seem small and insignificant because it’s the tournament of life, and I will share with you briefly a little bit of what he said.

I was hoping he as going to be on tonight, but he had to go see a doctor this morning. And he was going to try to drive back to his home in Georgia, and that’s what he did, and he’s not going to be able to be on tonight.

I’m hoping to schedule him to be on next month because if you know anybody else on the Coaching Hour, you ought to know him. When he’s on you need to be here. You will learn some things about being in the present and not taking things for granted and living in the now, and you’ll learn things that we kind of touched on when we were going through our journey with all of this, but his experience has really brought a lot of things home to me. He shared a lot of his experiences with me.

And one of the things that he kept going over about was the log. I want to just briefly tell you what he said; but when he’s on I want you to listen to what he says. He looked at me square in the eye, and he said: Coach, when that doctor said it probably isn’t, I looked at his eyes and I knew it was.

Jay said: When you go to your first treatment and you walk into that room and you look around that room and you realize that everybody in that room has got cancer. It’s your first day of a seven-week battery of treatments. Nine o’clock every morning you got to be there.

He said: Coach, when you are dealt these cards, everything else becomes very insignificant in your life other than your life. Things that you value greatly seem insignificant.

And he said: I went back and I read that book again. I read it in half a day.

And he said: I got my notebook out and I started my log. I’ve kept a log till today, and I will continue to keep that log.

Because it put his predicament, if you will, his situation into a perspective that he could deal with regardless of the consequences. And I’m not going to tell you any more about what he talked about because it means a lot more coming from him, and I want all of you to hear from him.

And he said: I would just love to do that.

He’s the kind of person that eats it, drinks it and sleeps it and lives  it; and some of the things that he told me really struck home, and I want you-all to benefit from him and his experience in his using some of the things that we have talked and walked and worked with you on and how they have helped him get through a very difficult time in his   life.

He’s got a big smile on his face and a bounce in his step. And just the way he says some of the things, the realities of being nonjudgmental, it is what it is, it becomes what you make of it, you know, we all understand those things intellectually; but when you have to face a life or death situation, “It is what it is, it becomes what you make of it,” that takes on a whole new meaning.

In fact, he was interviewed for the book; and I’ve asked Ty to call him back and reinterview him based on his current situation because I think that some of his reflections might even go a little deeper in this book. I feel blessed in having known him and continue to know him. Just casually we said things to him that he took to heart.

He was a beta test reader for our Out of Your Mind book, and when he finished it, he said: We need this book. And when he finished the new book, he said: I thought you had it nailed the first time; but, Coach, we all need this book even more. And he began to tell me how much of a difference it made in his situations. So I’m going to try to have him on next month, and he’s going to talk extensively about his log.

I cannot tell you enough, Greg, and everybody else out there, whether you’re on the line or whether you get this on a CD, I cannot tell you enough how important it is that you keep a detailed log. It will certainly help you keep what happens to you in perspective, and it’ll help you progress at a much more consistent rate and a much more consistent direction.

U.S. Olympics Principles of Practice

 Gil: I want to share something. I’ve got about 25 minutes, and I’ll try     to get through this. Snowflake sent me an article. He sent me a series of articles from Coaching U.S.A., usolympicteam.com; and one of the articles that I read was an article entitled “Principles of Practice” by Richard A. Schmidt, human performance research. And I’m only going    to read a small part of this, but I want you all to know that these thoughts came from this article by Richard Schmidt, and in no means    do I mean to tell you that these are my original thoughts.

But he looks at practice in a little different way. I will tell you that he comes to the same conclusions scientifically that we have come to empirically. You’re not going to learn anything new, but you’ll learn the scientific side of what we’re talking about when we describe practice as it’s either training or practice.

And you’re all familiar with the way that we describe practice: practice means shooting five pair in a row, five pair in a row, move the bucket, go to a different station, five pair in a row. Practice is preparation for game day, and training is doing repetition, doing repetition, doing repetition to build subconscious muscle function.

“To begin, the most important thing you can do to improve is to practice, and it should be deliberate practice. We can all understand that. We all agree with that. Gains from practicing when one is already at a high level are small and very difficult to achieve or even notice. That’s something that you can maybe just accept on face value.

“But let me say it a different way. When you get to a really high level in something, it’s very hard to detect any improvement from practice. Practice becomes more of a maintenance practice as opposed to an improving practice. Whatever improvements you might have in practice and training will be very miniscule because you’re not looking for 15 targets. You’re looking for maybe a target and a half or a half a target on a consistent basis. But the basic practice questions are: how often, what to do, how much; but, more importantly, how to evaluate it.

“You’ve all heard the theory champions do it this way. Often we hear people say so-and-so champion does it this way, and they’re a champion so it must be optimal to do it that way, but research has proven that to be not as correct as most people would like to believe it. We hear that a lot.

“There is a great distinction between learning and performance. Learning is measured by changes in performance, not in practice but on game day. During practice two kinds of results happen. Practice can produce effects in us that are relatively permanent, and this is what we want and we call it learning.

“When you go and practice, you’re looking for something that hopefully is relatively permanent; and as you practice something and you become better at it, we call that the learning process. Practice also produces temporary effects on performance. Sometimes the effect is positive and your performance is enhanced during practice. Sometimes the effect is negative. So your performance is depressed during practice.”

And you-all have experienced this. Say, for instance, like when Steve Grough came down to visit us this year, we were teaching how to let the target come to the gun, you know, get the gun out there and let those big loopers come to the gun; and he would get it and lose it and get it and lose it. And the first time he did it, the first afternoon we tried it on him, I mean, he experienced fairly good results; but it wasn’t consistent. Even though he was learning something, his practice while he was doing it with us did not produce a really positive result, but it was still practice.

And then the next day he came back, and he began to be more comfortable with it, and he got it and he’d run 15 in a row, and he was like: I don’t know how this is working, but it’s working; so I’m going to keep doing it, which is what we told him to do, and he kept doing it and he shot really well. So his practice produced a very positive event. “But the mistake we often make is to consider skill games and practice as necessarily due to relatively permanent learning when they might only be the result of temporary factors. Pay attention. When skill is evaluated on a subsequent day or an important contest, the temporary effects of practice will have dissipated, leaving one with a

different level of performance than experienced during practice. “Perhaps it’s obvious, but we do deliberate practice so that the effects can be evidenced on some test, such as the next competition or the next practice session. Strictly we don’t care very much about our performance during practice so long as our performance on the test is maximized.

“The problem is that many methods of practice facilitate performance temporarily, giving  a  false  sense  of  accomplishment.  And then these gains dissipate by the time of the test is performed, producing disappointing performances when  it’s  needed  most;  i.e.  you have a great practice  session  three  times  in  a  row.  You  go  to the tournament and you shoot like shit. Has that ever happened to anybody  out  there?

“The best example of this is repetitive practice in the driving range in golf. The amount one has learned should not be evaluated during the practice session. Repetition produces temporary gains in performance and gives a strong sense of accomplishment.  When  asked,  learners  have a strong confidence in what they think they’ve learned, but when the later test comes, a round of golf or a round of sporting clays, after you’ve practiced, when you go and say, okay, I’m going to shoot a hundred birds for score or when you go to a local shoot or you go to a   big shoot, when that happens, the gains that you thought you had in practice disappear, showing that your confidence was   ill-founded.

“For scientists in this area the driving range in golf represents the classic misconception about how to practice. Many factors either enhance or depress performance during practice, giving a false picture of how learning has occurred. As a result, learning is measured on some subsequent test of retention after the temporary effects have dissipated. “This test is whatever it is that one wants to optimize by practice.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re practicing for a tournament, whether you’re just practicing, whether you’re practicing for a big shoot. Many times, because of the way you practice, your result in practice does not equal your results on game day.”

Now, when they talk about practice, we talk about practice and training. In this article they refer to practice in two different ways. It’s either block practice or random practice. Block practice is shooting a hundred crossers. Random practice is what we call practice, shooting five pair in a row, change the pair, shooting five pair in a row, change the pair, shooting five pair in a row, change the pair.

Block practice is what we call training just so you’ll   know.

“This is the way we do it in the laboratory, too. We might study different methods of practicing. These produce a mixture of relatively permanent and temporary effects during practice. Then we give a test several days later.”

Now listen to this.

“The method that produces the best performance on the test is the one that has produced the most learning. Again, we do not measure learning based on the performance during the practice phase just as a swimmer would not measure gains in fitness during a swimming workout but rather would wait for recovery from fatigue and then measure.

“When these methods are used in research, we find that some methods produce strong gains in performance during practice but    do not last until the test. In fact we find sometimes that of the two methods, the one that produces the better performance during practice produces the poorer performance on the test.”

Remember that.

“This is critical because our whole goal in doing deliberate practice is to enhance the test performance. You’ve all experienced this. You take  a lesson. You have a good, deliberate practice session on a particular target, shooting it repeatedly and you’re really into it. You really feel confident. Then you go to a shoot a few days later and you see that target and you’re not consistent on it. You’ve been left with a different level of performance than expected at the last practice session.

“The reason you shot well and then lost it was the repetition   and practice of your lesson was only the beginning of the journey to dominate that shot. Don’t evaluate learning in practice. Your feeling of dominating that particular shot was brought about due to the large number of repetitions you had and the momentum each shot gave the next shot, but when you had to do it cold from the start, you were not as confident or successful.

“Your goal for practice is to be able to shoot better on game day.

Do not be as concerned about your performance at practice as long   as we perform well on game day. The biggest problem that many methods of practice will give you are the feeling that you are shooting well, but on game day these gains dissipate.”

And I know you’ve all been there, right? Brian, have you ever been there?

 Brian: Oh, yes. Several times.

 Gil: All right. It is at that point, where you’re thinking: Goddamn it, my last practice session I was ink balling these targets, and I just missed the targets I was ink balling in practice. You throw your hands up and you say I must have a mental problem.

That’s bullshit. You don’t have a mental problem. You don’t have a mental problem. This is where most people really get off of the right train, that you don’t have a mental problem. You’ve been evaluating your performance in practice. Your performance in practice has nothing to do with your ability to perform. It has nothing to do with what you’ve learned. Okay? You practice to learn something.

We all agree with that. But the real test is when you go out there and you say to your group I’m shooting a hundred birds for score today or you go to a shoot and you put the number on your back, like Brian and Craig and everybody else has said, and you go out there and you go to perform. Your true level of ability comes out on game day; but we fall into the trap of judging our ability to perform based on how we practice. Therefore, repetition produces temporary gains in performance and gives a strong sense of accomplishment, but these gains dissipate by game day. When you do mostly training, your success on the next shot was based on what you learned on the shot before.

How many times if I were to take a right-handed shooter after he’s laid off, okay, and put him on a right-to-left rising quartering bird, which is one of the hardest birds for a right-handed shooter, he’s going to miss it behind, behind, right, left, under, which is behind; and then when he finally realizes he’s got to be at 11 o’clock on the bird and he’s got to cover the bird up, then he’s going to start hitting it.

Well, if he had been in a tournament, he would have zeroed that bird on every pair; but once he understands the picture, he gets back into the groove and then he can run 20 in a row. So he feels good about his ability to hit that target, but the reason he can feel good about his ability to hit the targets is because he hit it 20 times in a row. But the reason that happened is because he missed it six times before he ever figured out what the picture was, and then he was just reproducing a move to fit the picture.

He couldn’t do it from a cold position. So looking at his performance in practice gave him a false sense of his real ability. The amount you have learned should never be evaluated during the practice session because many different factors either enhance or depress performance during practice.

Irregardless of how well you shoot in practice, you have not learned it until you have done it on game day. The evaluation of what you’ve learned needs to be done on another day. Say the first 50 shots in the next practice session I’m going to go do this. We’re going to see what we’ve learned from the first shot on or the next competition.

What we’re looking for is what method of practice produces the best performance on game day. There are two types of practice. We talked about this earlier, block practice where you do mass repetitions, a hundred crossers, a hundred quarters.

Now, this isn’t saying that block practice or training, as we call it, is bad. The whole crux of this whole thing is if you’re training, don’t judge. If you shoot 30 in a row the targets you’re training on, don’t tell yourself I’ve got it until you go to a tournament and cold out of the box you break that target five times in a row as the first bird on five pairs.

When you can do it on game day without having the advantage of shooting it a few times and missed it and gotten in the groove    and run ten, that’s one thing; but if you can walk up to that target in practice or a tournament and from the get-go on shot one through ten hit it in the same spot, ink ball it in the same place every time, you’ve got it mastered. But if it takes you three shots to find it and then you run ten, it’s a whole new different set in the eggs. Don’t judge your progress by practice. Block practice is what they refer to as doing mass repetitions, which is what we refer to as training. I’m not saying it’s bad. Just don’t judge how well you’re doing or what all you’ve learned based on block practice.

The other practice they call random practice, five pair in a row, different pair, five pair in a row, different pair, five pair in a row, different pair. And random practice is the one that may not give you the most number of broken targets when you practice, but it is the practice that has yielded the best learning and the best retention on test day or on game day simply because when you are practicing or doing what they call random practice, you are calling on all of your skill sets. You go from one pair to the next pair to the next pair to the next pair and shooting five pair in a row, five pair in a row, five pair in a row, you’re not ingraining one skill set. You’re not trying to ingrain a quartering move. You’re using all of your skill sets, including the skill set of having to go from conscious analyzation of the pairs to subconscious shooting of the pairs.

And it’s interesting what they bring up; and, that is, that block practice typically yields more broken targets or a better feeling about your consistency in practice, but it also after three days falls apart, which says a lot to me. Okay?

Now, we addressed this in our book, You Gotta Be Out of Your Mind, when we talked about the score plateaus and what you had to do to get from one plateau to the next, the amount of training, the amount of practice based on what your score plateau was, based on whether it was pretournament training and practice or whether it was just standard training or practice.

So we’ve all discovered this. We just called it a different thing, but this is scientific research, telling us that block practice allows a person to do good in practice but not on game day. And random practice, although it may not create the best performance in practice, does create a better performance on game day.

Block practice does not mimic what you do on game day. Go back to the driving range analogy. Hitting balls on the driving range does not mimic golf. Shooting a hundred crossers does not mimic sporting clays. The thing that is missing in block practice is moving from one skill set to another.

For us, having to switch from the conscious analytical mind to plan the shot and letting the subconscious take the shot is a big deal or from shooting one pair to a different pair to a different pair and trusting your ability to do that, trusting the skill sets that you’ve trained without going back to that right brain, left brain thing that Greg was talking about earlier.

Consider this example. Say you’re in the fifth grade, and you want to learn long division in your head, and in deliberate blocked practice I asked you what is 36 divided by 12. Struggling you come up with the answer of three. And on the next test I ask you what’s 36 divided by 12 and you say three, it’s because you remembered it. And if I were to give you ten of these examples to memorize, your answers would be quick and perfect on the next test, but you would not be generating a solution to the problem. You would be generating the remembered answers. You would not be training your brain to do long division in your head because you’d be doing block practice. You would be memorizing and regurgitating memorized information.

This is an example where a factor that facilitates performance in practice is detrimental to learning when it’s measured on the next test. It’s interesting the way they looked at it and the way they came to their conclusion. We came to a very similar conclusion when we were talking about the difference in training and practice, but they came to this conclusion in their scientific laboratories.

I didn’t know whether I agree with this until I got to the end of it, but I got to tell you there is a place for blocked practice. There is a place for random practice. The more of a beginner you are, the more you have to do block practice to establish some sort of a database of style and feel and vision and tempo and focus so that you can understand, so that your subconscious can finally understand what it is you’re asking it to do.

But I thought it very interesting that people who do blocked practice typically found a really good feel good for practice when they practice.

Goddamn, I blistered them today. Man, I shot 50 crossers and 45 or 50 quartering birds and I ink balled every one of them except one. Man, I feel good. I ought to just burn them up.

Yeah. But when you do blocked practice or training, don’t evaluate what you’ve learned based on how you train. Evaluate what you’ve learned based on game day. Game day is just a reflection of where your weak points and where your strengths are; and if you can keep that perspective, then go back and train on what you need to train on fundamentally. Use your random practice or your practice, as we call it, five pair in a row, five pair in a row. That would be random practice. You’re having to use all your skill sets. That’s what random practice is. Training is designed to groove the move. Training is designed to enhance subconscious fundamentals. Practice is what they call random practice which means that you have to call on whatever skill set necessary to analyze and break the pair of targets five times in a row.

Although training will give you a better feel good as far as how many targets you broke, it always falls down two or three days after that because you’re judging how well you’re shooting by how many targets you broke when you were training. And, remember, it’s the repetition because you’re able to correct things as you go through them. You hit them, but you don’t hit them as hard. But as you correct them and the more you shoot the easier it becomes, then your last shot was a product of the shot before it.

But when you can go out cold and shoot any target out there, then you’ve really learned. Just be aware there’s two kinds of practice. We’ve talked about it. As I told you before, you’re not going to learn anything new about the practice tonight, but I just thought it was interesting that scientifically they came up with the same things that we came up with empirically. And you don’t need to be judging how you’re shooting by how you practice. You judge that on your score on game day.