2013-05 – May 2013 Coaching Hour – Pre-Tournament Warm-Up, How Much

This session, we start by concluding a topic we started last month, wrapping up a few recent observations we’ve been making at lessons. Then, we dig deep into the main topic and visit a couple experienced shooters to get their answer to the question: How much pre-tournament warm-up is the right amount?

More Observations from Recent Lessons

Gil: I want to finish up some of the observations that Vicki and I had made the end of the first quarter of this year. We almost got through them last month; but we got sidetracked. And so I want to finish those up, and then we’ll go on and we’ll talk about warming up before a tournament.

So I had gotten to the point to where we had talked about Vicki and I experiencing decision fatigue due to some of the things that we had to do right up to the time we left for the advanced class, the first one, and we hadn’t prepared, and I’ve got to tell you decision fatigue is a real thing.

And I believe either this month or last month there was an article in Sporting Clays magazine that I wrote on that subject. I know Snowflake sent me an email yesterday and said he just got through reading it and it was a good, clear article. I don’t know what magazine that was in;  but he’s out there. So it’s something that is real.

The more I’ve been aware of it the more I’m beginning to realize that people that are trying to learn to shoot a shotgun without failing and without missing suffer from decision fatigue, and they don’t even know they’re doing it. It came up when I was talking to Craig about routines and some of the things he talked about in getting ready to go shoot a tournament. So we’ll visit that in a minute.

But it’s just a real thing. You just can’t make a lot of decisions in a short period of time without paying a biological price. I keep getting flashbacks about this because we talk about this almost everywhere we go now and different things from my history.

I wrote down here Tom Landry substituting Roger Staubach and Craig Martin and Roger Staubach when they were playing in  the Cotton Bowl and even into the Texas Stadium. He was calling the plays from the sideline, and they didn’t  have  radio  stuff  in  their  helmet, and what he would do is he’d just substitute quarterbacks and send a quarterback in there because he didn’t want to make any decisions.

Now, I don’t know whether he knew anything about decision fatigue or not; but he could have been one of the forerunners of recognizing the problem. It’s why you practice so much so that what you do on game day becomes a routine so you don’t have to think. It could be the reasons that teams or people choke. It’s possible. Who knows? It’s an interesting thought.

Once I began to talk about this in Phoenix and in Dallas at Dallas Gun Club, at Elm Fork and several of the other places that we’ve been, once we started talking to people about this and getting them to quit worry- ing about missing the target, we really noticed the power in it. Just do the exercise. Just make the move. Don’t worry about hitting the target because it involves too many fear based decisions that you have to make. The more we talk to people about it, the more evident it becomes that it’s a crippling thing. It just sheds more light on how important it is that you have routines and that your pre shot routine is there.

Vision Scientists

Gil: So in early March, I was privileged to talk to a couple of new vision therapists that I’d never talked to before. These are guys that work with sports people on improving their vision, and they were sharing with us some of the new research that’s being done in the visual system of the brain, and science is really beginning to discover that there are many pathways that come together to give us the image of the target, and they come into play in anticipating ahead of where that target is. There’s just so much new information out there. It doesn’t negate any of our conclusions with respect to how we use the information; but so much is being learned about the visual system.

Science has proven that the visual pathway processes the lead and the line data of the moving object. In fact, the visual system of the brain actually anticipates where the object is going to be even though the retina sees it to where it is, and that sounds like it’s old information; but what they’re finding is that there are so many more pathways after the retina passes the information on. There are so many more pathways that are involved in this anticipation circuit not only in anticipating where the target is going to be but anticipating what we do and when we do it and how we do it. I don’t want to say it’s overwhelming; but it’s just amazing at the depth of what science is coming out with.

These guys are wanting to talk to us because of our experience in the visual spectrum of sport simply because we have a better working lab in sports vision than they could ever set up, and our lab works every day; but they are getting so sophisticated that it’s way above my head, and I’m thinking that we’re either going to have to go out and visit one of these guys or fly one of them in and keep them cooped up in this office for a couple of days and beat them down and make them explain to us all in 15 syllable words and explain them in common sense to each Texan what those things mean, so we can at least have some kind of a common ground when we start talking about it. When they call us and ask us what we see, we can at least speak to them in a way that they can understand and it’ll benefit them.

It’s just amazing. It’s almost like every  time  they  turn  over  a  new stone or a rock and look under it, they find out that the visual processing system based on our experience can process so much further out in front than we first imagined. It’s just amazing what that three  and a half pound blob of gray matter between your ears can process.

And there are two or three amazing things to me that just keep coming back: number one, is its ability to process. It has the ability to process. Its ability to process well out in front is tied 100 percent to your ability, and how much you have done the actual act that it’s having to anticipate. The more you’ve done the act, the more it can anticipate, and we’re finding that that brain will suppress some data if it’s confusing to the equation and to your brain’s ability to anticipate what you’re about to do. If it’s confusing, the brain will get rid of it. I guarantee you the brain will get rid of it. It’s not going to get rid of it completely; but it’s going to suppress it to the point to where it doesn’t interfere with its efficiency and in anticipation well in front of you.

It’s a fascinating study, and the overwhelming thing to me is that all of this processing occurs below consciousness. It’s autopilot to the Nth degree and it’s constantly in motion. If you’re awake, it’s anticipating. I mean, it’s just absolutely amazing, and the anticipation only occurs, though, to the subconscious brain. It doesn’t occur to the con- scious brain, and those four people that are out there trying to chase those targets and get conscious lead on them, I’m still amazed at the number of people that are still trying to use the conscious brain to get the lead right.

I asked this guy specifically, his name is Scott, if I can break a 20 yard crosser, does the computer have the ability to figure the lead on    a 40 yard crosser, and he said without hesitation, yes. Now, he’s just talking from A to B, B to C standpoint.

I began to explain to him some of the added technique that you have to have to be able to hit a 40 yard target and how that technique is much more precise than a 20 yard target because the technique for hitting a 40 yard target is much smoother, slower movement. Our system, though, is the same. Barrel speed equals bird speed; but it’s a little more difficult as the target distance gets out there; but given the same technique, he said instantaneously, yes, the brain can figure it. He really didn’t understand entirely what I was talking about about the technique; but it’s a combination of the visual input from the vision center and the periphery that inputs to the brain that allows it to anticipate further and further and further out in front.

So what I gleaned from my conversation with him goes back to that anticipation circuit that we’ve been talking about all along; and, that is, your ability to anticipate well in front is tied 100 percent to your experience in doing it, and it sounds on the surface very obvious; but I think it’s not understanding that that leads to the expectation that shooters have. They think, well, I’ve shot sporting clays for three years, and I’ve been shooting in the high 70s, you know. I mean, I understand it all. It’s just a mental thing. If I just learn how to think, I ought to be able to win the U.S. Open next week. Those are just fairytales.

And who is that? Brian, is that you laughing?

Brian B: Yeah.

Gil: But, Brian, you’re an instructor. You know what I’m talking about. They think just because they’ve broken that 40 yard target eight times in a row that they should be able to win the U.S. Open. They seem to forget about the 15 shots before the eight in a row that it took them to find out how to hit that target.

And it’s the expectation that people get into and extrapolate out, yeah, they may have shot good on a few days; but I’m telling you, I’m sure it’s a lot like being a fisherman like Clyde. It’s one thing to win on your home water; but it’s another one to go and win consistently on places that you’ve never been before and you go and you pre fish and you come out and you end up weighing the heaviest stringer. To be able to do it in places you’ve never done it before is what it’s all about, and that’s what those top fishermen do and that’s what our top shooters do.

I was having this talk with Mike Ellison today. Some of you may know him. He’s been to the advanced class several times. He wasn’t able to come this last year because his dad died, and he was tied up in a lot of estate stuff, and he’s coming back next year. And he was calling me today from Seattle, telling me that not only were the guys that run that gun club up there are all screwed up and heavy into the politics of their power, but that he had been out there and had a couple of really good practices, and he wanted to tell me how a lot of the things that we’ve talked about are coming around now, that he’s being able to shoot some more. And he got onto the Knowledge Vault, and he was just shocked at the animations. He said: you guys have really come a long way.

And I said, yeah, you ought to get on there and listen to some of the coaching hours. There’s 142 coaching hours on there right now.

But, anyway, he was just explaining it, you know, how he thought he was doing good and he thought he had a commitment; but there’s another fellow that had shot with us when we went to Seattle the first time. His name is Scott, and Scott was shooting so much better than Mike was, and Mike asked Scott, he said: Scott, how much did you shoot last year? Scott said: I shot 18,000 rounds. Seven thousand were registered targets and the other 11,000 were practice targets. And Mike looked at him and said: my jaw fell off. I’m pushing it to shoot 5 or 6,000 rounds a year. Maybe 2 or 3,000 of them are registered; but the rest of them are practice whenever I can get out to practice. And he said: it dawned on me something that you had said to me several times before, and; that is, just because you know how to do it doesn’t mean you can do it because you’ve got to have done it enough times in order for you to be able to do it under pressure and do it consistently and do it in a place that you’ve never been before.

It’s like Stevie Ray said. It doesn’t matter what road we go down, every road we get on is a cul de sac. And it comes back to time on tar- get, how much experience have you had doing it, and also what’s your attitude when you’re doing it, are you doing it with intent attention to what you want to do; or are you just going through the motions? I’m convinced that when people practice and they just go through the motions and there’s no intensity in their practice that they’re actually being very detrimental to their progress because they’re building circuitry.

I’ve thought about that a lot in reading some of the things and discovering some of the things that we’re finding about the more clear you can be to your brain what it is you’re asking it to do, the quicker it’s going to give it to you and the quicker it’s going to be able to suppress the stuff that’s in the way of it performing consistently for you.

Brian B: Gil, let me say one thing. Garbage in garbage out.

Gil: Yes, sir. And I couldn’t agree with you more, Brian. That’s really what I’m saying. It’s just from observation. I’ll say this about Bob Brewton. I had a lesson with Bob the day after the last coaching hour, and he’s unique in the way he learns stuff. He makes me repeat it four or five different ways, and then he stops and he repeats it in his brain. He repeats it and he repeats it and he repeats it, and he’s visualizing this at the same time. So he is really trying to be as clear as he can to his brain what it is he’s processing that I’m asking him to do, and I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons he picks this up so quick.

Clyde is the same way. He’s very intense in what he does. He’s very coordinated. He understands you’ve got to put in your time. I mean, this guy puts a jig in a teacup 15 feet away or 20 feet way from him every night. That’s how precise his cast is, and he knows that you ain’t going to get to where you can be without the repetitions; but you’ve got to be intent every time you do that. Practice without intention is just garbage in garbage out, as Brian just said.

And I’m beginning to realize and we’re realizing this from using the animations. The more clear the picture our students can have prior to asking the brain to do what they want to do, the more they can visu- alize it in clear color and exact, the more they can do that the quicker, their brain latches onto it, and when the brain does it right three or four times, they latch onto it even quicker. They don’t lose it. I may be all wet. I may be talking out of my ear; but I’ve got to tell you, the ben- efits of having the animations and what we’re seeing in students now, getting them with an iPad, to see it, look at it, look, see this right here, this is where you’re coming unstuck, I want your eyes to be over here. Now, visualize that and where is that going to happen? Right there. Visualize what it looks like. Chuck that lid down. Make sure you know what you want it to do. The more clear we can be to the brain what it is we’re asking it to do the quicker it’ll do it and do it perfectly.

Gil: The less clear you are to the brain, hope is not a plan. Just getting in there and saying I’m going to focus hard and let it happen, hope is not a plan. The more clear you can be to what you’re asking your brain to do, the more quickly it will come around.

Somebody had something to say?

Bob S: Yeah, Gil. Chapter 4 on Performance Under Stress, spends a lot of time talking about the emotional commitment to the goal.

Gil: That’s what I’m talking about, Bob.

Bob S: Exactly. That’s why I brought it up.

Gil: Bob told me to get this book Performance Under Stress by Hancock and somebody else that I can’t pronounce, and it’s one of those medical books that he understands and I don’t. I think it’s a power trip on his part because he wants me to have to spend a hundred dollars for the book and then have him interpret it for me. Do you know what I  mean?

So tell me a little bit about what they say in Chapter 4, Bob.

Bob S: Just summarizing some of the key points that they make is that one of the key elements for controlling your reaction to the stressors that you can’t control in the reality event, i.e., the tournament or com- bat or anything else, is your emotional commitment to the goal dur- ing your training. If you don’t have the right emotional commitment, you have no ability to control yourself under the circumstances of the stresses you can’t control: The weather, they throw you a target that you’ve never seen, the guys are griping at the station about how hard the targets are.

When they go through the discussion in there, you’re going to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been there, done that; but they spend a great deal of time in that Chapter 4 talking about exactly that and how it also affects your ability to control your energy requirements to do the job. 

Gil: Well, it’s good to know that I’m in good company.

Bob S: Well, the book probably wasn’t going to tell you anything you didn’t know. You were just going to have all the research to back it up.

Gil: Well, that’s good to know that we got research to back it up. I’ll tell you I never cease to be amazed at how our journey leads us to the con- clusions, and there are a lot of doctors out there that are really amazed as you well know, how our journey has brought us to empirical conclu- sions that they have proven medically, and I guess it’s a testimony to how serious we are about what we do. We don’t do this haphazardly. We do it with intention and it’s a passion, and I guess without it being   a passion we wouldn’t have discovered near the number of things that we’ve discovered on our journey so far.

Anyway, I wanted to finish that with you. Just remember when practicing you’re really practicing your reaction to the target first. Just like when you eat, you eat with your eyes first. This is why it’s so important to take every shot like it was your last or your whole future depended on it. Just because it is in practice doesn’t mean it don’t matter. They all matter, and your reaction when you see them is the beginning. What will it be? Very important.

Perspectives on Warming Up Before a Tournament

Gil: Last month Bob Brewton asked about pretournament warmup. Let’s see who we got out there.

Hey, Greg, when you go shoot a round, do you try to get there early and warm up or do you just go out there cold turkey?

Greg: I usually go cold turkey. I don’t really have time and, you know, a lot of the places don’t really provide areas. So I would just assume, you know, go look at the targets and start shooting. I don’t feel like warming up does a whole lot for me.

Gil: Clyde, what about you?

Brian B: I rarely do.

Gil: Hang on. I’m talking to Cactus Clyde McAfee first, and then we’ll get to you. Hang on. Clyde?

Clyde: Okay. I like to get there a little early, and if they’ve got something you shoot, I’ll shoot at least five or ten targets and just from the standpoint to get to feel the gun, the recoil, there’s always something about the first station. Now, the least I’ll do as far as the first station is at least let me shoot my gun twice.

That’s a minimum that I’ll do; but I like to shoot not a whole lot, just enough to help me on my focus. If I can get the first eight or ten targets, it gets me sort of set for the day, to be able to see the front edge and all that. I will shoot cold, and sometimes it doesn’t happen. I prefer if there’s any way possible to shoot eight or ten targets before I go out.

Gil: Okay. Anybody else have anything to say about that?

Bob S: Anybody use visualization to do that?

Gil: I’ve used that a lot in my career because when we were competing, the club just barely had enough traps to throw the tournament much less throw a practice or five stand or another event. We typically had to show up and get our guns and go to the first station and go to work. However, I will tell you that in the recent two or three years, a lot of the tournaments, a lot of the bigger tournaments, the tournament promoters are realizing that quite a few of the shooters would like   to go and do exactly what Clyde talked about; and, that is, just shoot four or five targets, 10 targets, 20 targets, 50 targets. And they’re even having complete courses, practice courses, for people to go and shoot during a three or four day event, and sometimes people are having trouble with a certain target and they go to try to find it on the practice course and they may spend four or five practice tickets just shooting that one target to try to work it out right there. You know why they’re there. I think visualization is a good way to do that.

But I’ve noticed in the last 25 days, because we haven’t been able to shoot a lot, I’m not as sharp with a gun as I used to be, and I’m going to have to go out and start doing some practicing. I can still hit quite a few targets with my head off the stock and still do that; but I miss some targets here in Dallas at the four days we taught up there that  I shouldn’t have missed, and it just is one of those things I’m going to have to go out and start sharpening my eye on.

I would like to share with you some of the things that I learned from Craig Hill today. I called Craig, and what was a ten minute phone call ended up being a 45 minute phone call, and I asked him: do you feel like you need to warm up before shooting a tournament, and   he stopped his jovial self and got real serious, and he said, Gil, I am superstitious about warming up before I shoot a tournament. I need at least 50 birds just to get in the groove. In fact, I feel like if I don’t get to warm up that I’m at a distinct disadvantage. Now, we’re going to return to that comment here in a few minutes.

He talked about Stan Fasion. He’s a local shooter here. Stan Fasion is a pretty good shooter. He’s not a dominator; but every once in a while he’ll come up and shoot a really good score and Stan’s comment about warming up before a tournament is I don’t want to waste any good shots on practice; but that’s just the way he thinks about it.

Craig told me that when he’s on his way to the tournament that he’s exercising his eyes while he’s driving there. He’s looking at small things like license plate screws, small parts of the numbers on a license plate, the end of a three, the top of a one, the middle of the circle, and the top part of the eight. He’s looking at the corner of a headlight on   an incoming car or truck. He tries to make his eyes begin to focus on small things in the big picture, and he kept going over and over with  me that in his mind shooting is a hands and eye sport. The hands and the eyes have to get together for you to win which is something similar, I think, to what Clyde was talking about.

And it’s one thing to visualize it. Some people rather just visualize it; but I’m finding that in my research here, I have to read this to you. I got a text back from Scotty Robertson today, and my question to him is: What is your warmup routine at a tournament? Do you shoot a five stand or a warmup round of skeet or a game or something? Please let me know because I’m going to talk about this on our coaching hour tonight.

His answer is this: I think a warmup is a good idea. With that said, I can’t remember the last time I warmed up. Most events start at eight o’clock and I’d rather sleep than warm up. Now that I’m over 40 I have to remember my priorities, sleep, bathroom, eat, bathroom and then warm up in that order.”

So now there you have it from a guy that’s probably been on an all American team so many times that he can’t even remember it. We had a good time when we were at his facility. He and Wendy really took care of us this last weekend up there at Elm Fork, and he’s nice enough to answer my questions like this. He came up to me and he said, you know, anytime I can help you with that kind of stuff you just let me know. Not many people know it; but he’s left eye dominant. I don’t whether I’ve said that on the coaching hour.

Bob S: No. Only in sessions.

Gil: He is left eye dominant, and he’s fairly well right handed with both eyes open, and he’s coming out of the closet in our new book. He and Vicki and several other people are going to talk about their cross dominancy. Jeff Wolfe is the same way.

But, anyway, Craig said when he leaves for the tournament, he is already exercising his eyes. He’s getting them ready because shooting is a seeing contest and a shooting contest. And then he went through several sports. He said boxing is a hand/eye contest. That boxer comes out of the room on his way to the ring and he’s already sweaty. He’s been back in that room warming up on that medicine bag. He’s been throwing jabs. He’s been shadowboxing, and he’s just getting all of   his circuits heated up and ready to spring into action. He said he’s not going to go into that ring cold. He’s going to do a warmup.

Tennis players. Before they go out on center court, they’re out there hitting balls, warming up. How many balls they hit is personal and evolves over time; but the point is they’re out there hitting balls, warming up before that match. They walk into center court, having hit quite a few balls, and then they even hit some balls on center court just to kind of get acclimated to the court. They’re warming up, too.

Bob, I’m going to ask you to chime in here in just a second. Golfers are out there hitting a couple of buckets of balls before their tee times. Again, they’re warming up their circuits. They’re getting them ready to go so when they’re in the match that they’re ready on the first shot and on the last shot.

When you go shoot a tournament, Bob, in golf, do you do a warmup routine? Do you shoot a small bucket of balls, a big bucket of balls? What do you do?

Bob S: Well, I’ll generally hit a big bucket of balls. I’ll generally be there an hour beforehand. I’ll start with easy shots and then work my way up through a driver, through the more difficult shots, and then I always go back on my last few shots I’m going to hit with a sand wedge so I can see the ball. I want to feel good walking off that practice tee. And, you know, then I go to the putting green and then I go tee off.

And when I shoot, you were right, most of the big shoots today have some kind of practice facility. I like to not only feel the gun hit my shoulder, I like to go out and shoot a few easy targets just to see the target break.

Gil: Yeah. I think that’s kind of what Clyde was saying, too. And I know I was the same way. I mean, everybody is the same way. They don’t go practice hard targets the day of the tournament.

And I want you to listen to this now. Okay? Craig told me that he’d shot with Wendell Cherry at the Nationals the last two years, and he shot with him at several big shoots, and he told me that he has gone out there and watched him shoot as many as 150 to 200 rounds in the morning on a practice course before his event and then go shoot his event and then do the same thing in the afternoon before another event. He says he will shoot until he feels it. He wants to feel the target dead before he ever gets to the gun. Regardless of how many rounds it takes, he’s going to stay there and keep shooting until he feels it.

Now, I have one caveat to that. I said, well, how many rounds does he shoot in a week, and Craig said, well, now, this guy is probably shooting 2 to 3,000 rounds a week to build up that kind of stamina, and he has to have that kind of stamina to be able to shoot that much and keep his edge to shoot that much prior to an event and then to keep his edge during the event. So to me that’s really the extreme case.

And immediately Craig said, now, I’m not training now, and all I can shoot is about 25 or 50 targets; but I will do that. I feel like I need to do that just to get everything working together. If I can’t for whatever reason, I will do some stretches and definitely mount that gun to my face quite a few times.

And listen to this, Snowflake. If I can’t do any warmups, I will definitely feel that gun go from the ready position to my face as I visualize a target that I’m breaking.

So as a fallback, Craig would use visualization and actually going through his gun mount routine prior to going to a shoot; but he says he feels really off if he can’t go and shoot at least 25 to 50 targets. Again, it’s kind of like Clyde said. It’s one thing to visualize it coming together; but it’s a whole different set of eggs when you go out there and you shoot 15, 20, 25, 35, 40 easy, fluffy targets and you see that bird coming into the gun and you pull the trigger and you see that smoke. It just kind of dispels the jitters of the first station, and there will be some jitters on the first station, and it’s another way of getting past those because if you’ve already shot 20 or 30 targets, then you ain’t shooting the first station anymore. It’s the third station.

Craig also mentioned to me that his buddy Keith always shoots better later in the round than he does in the beginning, and he said I think it’s because he doesn’t warm up before the tournament. Having to warm up for me is a mental handicap; but I deal with it, and that’s just the way it is.

Let me say that again. He said feeling like I have to warm up in some ways can be a mental handicap on me because if I don’t get to it and I’m not able to, it kind of messes with my mind. He said but that’s just the way it is. And I said: Well, Keith not shooting well in the begin- ning could be a lot things; but you do make a good argument that it might be. I mean, if he wanted to shoot well, if he wanted to train like Craig does but he doesn’t, then I would think that he would go out and try to do what Craig does because Craig is a pretty good shot.

Bob S: And there was a worldwide study on professional and high level amateur athletes on whether stretching or warming up made any difference in reducing injuries which is a little different topic. It turns   out stretching did zero. Warming up did a substantial reduction in injuries, which suggests that the timing issues that you’re talking about really do benefit from the warmup.

Gil: Yeah. I agree with that. I think it’s a timing game and it’s like Clyde said. It’s like Bob with his golf. I mean, he doesn’t just go hit a bucket of balls. He hits certain shots in a certain order.

I know when I shot skeet, when I did a practice round before I went to shoot my hundred birds, I did a practice round and designed a practice round to shoot the birds that I felt the most that could give me a problem and to shoot that bird the most. On station one I shot two high ones and a double. On station two I shot two high twos and a double. On station three I shot two high threes. On station four I shot a high three and high four and a low four. On station five I shot two low fives. On station six I shot two low sixes and a double. On station seven I shot a double and I shot two high eights and three low eights, and that was 25 shots, and every shot that I shot more than once was a target that could be an intimidator based on where you are in the round if you’re straight, and I felt like that gave me an edge going into a hundred bird round, and I shot lots of hundred straights after that warmup, and that’s just something that I developed.

You know, another thing Craig said was this: Another thing I hate to do is to drive two or three hours over to a tournament and just get out of the truck and shoot. He said I’m 53 years old now, and it just takes some time for me to limber up and get all my body functioning the way I know it will have to to win the tournament.

I mentioned to Craig that all of the research that we’ve done agrees that if a person can travel the day before they always shoot better the next day as opposed to driving two or three hours and getting out and shooting. It seems that the anxiety goes way down.

Craig said: Man, when you get there the day before, you get all of your stuff in order. You check your shooting bag. You get your ear plugs, your glasses cleaned, your shells, everything you need. You check it the night before and you just seem to sleep better. You get up refreshed, and he agrees that it was almost a routine or a ritual that he goes through the night before. It just makes him happier, he said, and he used the word happier several times.

After the first time he talked about shooting 25 to 50 shots, he said, you know, when I’ve shot that last shot, and sometimes if I paid for 50 and I get to 35 and everything is just feeling really good, if I’m happy, I’m just going to walk off and go on and do my deal. He used the word happy more than once in reflecting to how it made him feel after he warmed up, and I thought it was unique that, once I started describing the routines that we’ve been talking about, he said, oh, yeah, man,   I got everything. I do everything the same way. Everything is in the same place in my truck. Everything is done the same way. It’s all done. I touch it before I go to bed. I get up in the morning. I’m having my little coffee, and I go out and I touch everything. It’s all the same. He said I’m just happier. There’s no anxiety.

So I asked him: What do you do in your warmup?

He said: Shoot single targets, moving the breakpoint. Don’t know where I learned that and he laughed. He said: I still to this day, Gil, I still to this day do nothing but shoot singles in my warmup because like you taught me years ago the transition to the second bird has to be perfect, and you ain’t going to train the day before a tournament or an hour before a tournament. You’re not going to improve your eyes first and the gun moving. It has to be there; but you can get over the jitters of shooting that single target, breaking it quick, breaking it sweet, breaking it late and then doing another one on another station, single target from a different direction, see that bird across the gun, see that bird to the left of the gun, watch that long incomer come in.

He said: If they’ve got a course, I’ll go through that course with practice tickets, and I’ll just stop at different stations and say: Throw me ten of that one right there, and I’ll shoot that bird ten times, and I may give the guy another token and say I want ten more. And he said: I’m just going to go to those things and I’m going to break them in the sweet spot, I’m going to break them early and I’m going to break them just to see them blow up in the breakpoint, and he said, man, that breakpoint is huge. You’ve got to see them blow up in the breakpoint. You’ve got to know they’re dead before they get there, actually slow- ing the birds down. I want to shoot as many as I want. I’ll shoot until I’m happy, and if I were training, I would shoot as many as a hundred to125. Since I’m not training, 20 to 50 is enough because it will affect your stamina, and stamina is real important to me. The older I get the more I pay attention to it.

You don’t get on the course without a power bar, some fruit, a banana, an apple, water, Gatorade and stay hydrated. It’s really really important. Sometimes you get to the first station and you realize every station is double squadded, and that means it’s going to be a three and a half hour round, and you better have that stuff with you and you bet- ter have used it before. And another thing you better take is you bet- ter take your ass back to that golf cart and you better put your feet up and relax because you ain’t going to do well if you’re pissed off that it’s going to take longer than you expected to shoot the tournament today.

Bob S: Or watching everybody’s birds.

Gil: There you go. That’s important. Craig said: I had to learn this on my own about me. I don’t know how many shoots I lost in the last few stations just because I ran out of gas. You know you’re on a good score, and you have a little delay for some reason ahead of you, and instead of having a little fruit or a power bar, you just sit there, and all of a sudden after the last stations you’re down four more targets and you lost the tournament. You’ve got to stay ahead of the hydration and the nutrition cycle.

So, yeah, I do want to warm up and warm up my routine, and my warmup routine is personal, and I think everyone has certain things that they do that makes them feel good, and what I do makes me happy.

There he is saying that makes me happy going into the event.

He said: And that helps my mental approach going into the tournament. And, Gil, as you know, it’s all mental when you’re at my level, and more of the big shoots are putting out full courses for people to warm up on before their event. It’s a sign of the times.

And so I think the point about stamina that Craig made was one that has a lot of merit, something we should talk about when planning your year. Shooting more in practice to build your stamina. Two to three thousand rounds in a week is a lot; but then Wendell is a great shot and that’s what he does.

And I did ask Craig what happens if his warmup doesn’t go as well as he would like, and he said and that is a possibility, and he chuckled and said: Like you told me, I’ll just look at it as getting the bad shots out of the way before I have to go shoot for score. So you can’t have it both ways. It is what it is. It becomes what you make of it.

So there you have it, Bob.

I expect to have some answers from some other guys that I’ve sent email queries to; but they’re all at the Open this week, and I’m sure they’re getting ready to put their game face on and go do their best at the Open.

When we were competing, it was unique in that we didn’t have the ability to go and shoot a practice round. Every once in a while they might have a flush or a flurry that you go shoot as a two or three man team. You might go do that; but it was put your gun together in the parking lot and go out there and just tie it on on the first station.

So was that revealing to you in any way, Bob?

Bob S: Yeah. Absolutely.

Gil: I thought it was unique that Craig said that he’s really not training right now, but something that I think we all could take away from that, comparing him and Wendell, is Wendell is a lot younger than Craig and obviously me and most of you guys out there. Craig said: I’ve seen him down at the 74 Ranch and take four flats of ammo out and shoot four flats before breakfast. He said that guy is a machine. I mean, he’ll go through ammo like you can’t believe.

And Craig asked him one time, he said: Man, what are you doing? How do you do that. He said, well, if I shoot 2 to 3,000 rounds a week and it’s more like the 3,000 as opposed to the 2,000, if I can shoot to 2 to 3,000 rounds a week in a systematic way, then I’ve built up my system so that if I need to I can go and I can train on a practice course that they have at the Open, and the tournaments are starting to all have practice courses and I can go and I can shoot my 150 to 200 rounds and then go do a 75 or a hundred bird event, and then do the same thing in the afternoon and do the same thing the next day because that’s 600 rounds in a day if he does two events with 200 pre shoots.

So that’s just a lot. That’s a lot of shooting for me. I’ve never shot that much, and I assure you when sporting clays first began over here 30 years ago, I shot four days a week in a tournament at least one tournament on the weekend, and I was shooting a lot; but I never shot anything close to 3,000 rounds in a week. That’s just crazy for me; but, I mean, that’s what he does.

Craig did say that in planning his year, he would up the number of shells he would shoot in his practice sessions just to gain stamina for shooting multiple events, and you add to that his maybe a hundred to 125 shots prior to the event, then another 125 and then the event, and then another 125 shots for the afternoon event and then the event, and to be able to do that two and three days in a row he said he would go out and he would shoot a lot just to build up his stamina to be able to do that, and a lot of times he would shoot the same station over and over again just to face the boredom devil. And so I thought that a lot of the things that he brought out were really unique.

I thought that the other thing that was really unique is that he always shot singles in his practice round, working on rhythm, working on feel, working on how things came together. And, heck, I think it was on the coaching hour two or three years ago or maybe last year that we were talking about Craig McMichael and how Vicki kept Craig on single targets until he got to A class. She wouldn’t let him practice doubles until he got into A class, and once he got into A class, he was in master class in six months once he starting practicing doubles.

So there’s a lot to be said for maintaining that single target practice, moving the breakpoint. I know from working with Craig early on in his career that I had him shooting single targets. I’d him have go out and shoot 1,500 single targets in a week and specific single targets, left to right, somewhere between 32 and 35 yards, measure it off. I want some loop in it and I want lots of belly; but I want you to break that target in five different spots, and when you come back over to the practice field in two weeks for your next lesson, I’m going to take you to that target, and you’re going to have to break them and you’re going to have to break them in the breakpoint, not just break them.

And he didn’t like that; but I have to tell you when I asked him what he did in his practice I could hear him smiling. He said: Yeah, I’m shooting those single targets, moving the breakpoint. Don’t know where I learned that; but it has paid big dividends for me. So there you have it.

And I know that John Krueger doesn’t do warmups. He just doesn’t do it, and he’s one of the greatest shots in this country.

So I guess, Bob, to really answer your warmup question, it’s more of a personal thing. I suspect now that I’m in my sixties if I were to go back and shoot tournaments again and train that I would probably be like Clyde. I don’t believe I would shoot as many as Craig was talking about shooting just because of my age; but I would probably be like Clyde. I would like to go find a simple target, just a simple crossing target so I can see the bird come to me, get in front of it, watch it come in, stabilize the picture, get a feel, get rhythm, that timing down, get my circuits excited, if you will, much like the boxer or the tennis player or the golfer that Craig was talking about.

Bob, let me ask you a question, and we’ve got a few minutes left. What happens in your pre practice routine if you have trouble with a certain club? How do you handle that emotionally?

Bob S: Well, that’s where I go back to hitting a shorter club, you know, a wedge or a sand wedge to regroove my swing, to make sure I’ve got my swing where I want it, and then I go back and hit the difficult club; but I want to leave that practice session feeling like I’m in the groove or in the zone.

And it’s the same when I warm up to shoot. My goal there is to get into a rhythm, get the jerkiness out of the movement of the gun, try to smooth things out.

So it’s probably different in golf than I try to practice in shooting. I’m trying to slow down, is my objective in both sports. I tend to get there and get everything put together, jumping around, go to the registration station. I’m trying to have a period to slow down. And it’s the same both in golf and shooting for me.

Gil: Yeah. Slowing down is important. Craig kept using the word happy. He said it just makes me happy when I know I’m in control. He said: After I’ve seen the first six or eight targets blow up, Gil, it’s just like it used to be. I mean, there’s no doubt. I know it’s there, and I just shoot until I get tired and until I’m happy with the way I’m shooting and I’m happy with the way I’m focusing and I know my coordination is there. I know my timing is there. I know my rhythm is there, and I just keep shooting until I’m happy.

It was unique and I’m sure he didn’t realize it; but it was unique to me how many times he used the word happy, and happy is a feeling. It’s just the way he feels about it and there you go talking the language of feel. The language of feel is a subconscious thing.

And slowing down is important, Bob. We spend most of our time trying to get people to slow down. I don’t know what it is about athletics that makes people want to speed up. I guess they just want to get it over with or whatever; but we spend most of our time getting people to slow down. I don’t think there’s a person on the phone tonight that we haven’t worked with on slowing down, getting in rhythm, finding a rhythm, getting in sync with the target and letting the target come to you. It’s just an amazing thing.

So, anyway, our time is up. It seems like once I get on a roll and all this good stuff starts coming out that I run out of time every time; but I got one more minute. Clyde, I’m going to talk about you for a second.