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Author: Frontier

Priming Words

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After the Shot?

You hear a lot about how important the pre-shot routine is for consistency and creating the zone experience. In our speeches about the mental game, we put a lot of emphasis on it.  But for the pre-shot routine to be the key to open the door to the zone, it must be the same sequence […]

Seeing Behind the Barrel

Seeing Behind The Barrel   As a person gets better at shooting moving targets with a shotgun, the brain links the multitude of sequences together so they become one thing.   We see things now that we did not know even existed 40 years ago. Once the brain understands which barrel image you want it […]

2025-12 December Coaching Hour – The Importance of a Detailed Visual Plan

  The Benefits of Recoil Reduction (0:30) Speed Match, Visual Planning, and Shooting in the Fog (4:13) Tough Targets in Trap and Skeet (22:40) Having a Detailed Plan (29:35) Lessons from Fred Couples’ Smooth Swing (40:12)Dry Eye and Visual Acuity (52:53)   Brian: Okay, welcome to the December 2025 Coaching Hour. A few things were […]

2025-05 May Coaching Hour – Maintaining Focus and Consistency

On Creatine (5:00)Wisdom About Shooting and Aging (7:26)Learning Consistency at the 2025 Advance School (13:33)Losing Focus Mid-Flight (36:58)The Sight Picture on a Rabbue Target (52:34)         Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour May 2025. We asked for some topics and we got quite a few. Thank you very much to everyone, whether […]

Best Practices for Hearing Protection

Whether you shoot clays or birds, good-quality hearing protection is of utmost importance in shotgun sports. In the March 2025 Coaching Hour podcast, Bob Shannon talked about best practices for protecting your hearing. We personally only use Pro Ears Predator Gold muffs, which we’ve used for nearly a decade and highly recommend.  Here’s a summary […]

The Evolution of Perceptions

In our travels to more than 30 shooting facilities around the country each year, we see a lot of you in our clinics and seminars. Your feedback about local events, regional competitions and charity shoots nationwide is nothing short of inspirational. Your stories about successes and breakthroughs at different events from reading our writings and […]

2025-01 January Coaching Hour – Routines, Rituals, and Mastering Your Timing

Starting Your Shooting Year (1:04) Keeping a Log (28:40) Watch the Kill Shot Reviews! (8:30) Using Affirmations in Practice (37:00) Routines, Routines, Routines (47:02) Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour, January 2025. We started doing this in November of 2001. It’s been a long, exciting journey, and there’s so much good information out there. Man, […]

Believe in “Regardless of Result”

You will never rise to the level of your goals. You will always fall to the level of your systems in preparation. Now, when you can internalize that, then that means if you don’t do well, you need to improve your system of preparation. At the beginning of the 100-yard dash, everybody has the same […]

2024-10 October Coaching Hour – Why Do You Shoot Competitions?

Why Do You Shoot Competitions? (3:15) How Much Does It Cost to Shoot Tournaments? (23:20) Is It Worth It to Shoot Tournaments? (32:52) It’s Been Worth it for Us – Target Difficulty or Not (41:13) New Video Series on the Knowledge Vault (47:12)   Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour. This would be October 2024. […]

Responding to a Compliment

When you shoot well and you get a compliment you should always attach your gratitude to that person. First, you have to look them in the eye and say, “Thank you for noticing.” And it needs to be sincere. We’ve always tried to help people to attach their good score to several specific things that […]

Honest Assessment of Your Performance

Tiger Woods in his early career tied with several guys going into the last day and they just left him in a cloud of dust. And they asked him, “Well, Tiger what happened today?” He said, “While I did not score as well today as I had hoped, I feel that my performance forced my […]

Excellence as a Way of Life

There’s a direct correlation between the way you practice and the way you perform. Most shooters’ evaluation of their ability is a little or (in some instances) a lot higher than reality, and their commitment to improve their ability is in the work they’re continuing to avoid. You must begin to accept nothing less than […]

Mental Toughness and Habits

Mental toughness is not about how you think, it’s about what you think. But more importantly, it’s about how many times you thought it in the same way such that you are, when you’re in the zone, you are operating on your habits. When something is a habit, it happens at a high level without […]

Affirmations About Running Your Process

Do you have any affirmations that you tell yourself and others that you’re going to do at the next tournament you go to? For instance: “I’ve been working on my process, and I want you to know that when we get to the tournament, all I’m going to do is read the targets, get in the […]

Is It Really a Mental Problem?

So, you think you have a mental problem or your mental game needs to be improved? You might think this is the only way you can explain the missing targets you know how to break in clutch situations. While you might have a mental problem, let’s look at your overall entire game before we use […]

Turning Rituals into Habits

Here’s another simple thing that shooters don’t do, and it’s a real game changer from the consistency standpoint. After breaking a target, they don’t stop to replay what they just saw happen so they can use that movie to preload the next shot. As we mentioned earlier, this is called the post-shot routine and it […]

Trusting Your Sight Picture Inventory

In the beginning, it will be difficult for you to commit to the shot as predicted because of your desire to break the target instead of executing the prediction to see if the prediction was correct. When you begin to train this way – by committing to the shot the way you want it to […]

Don’t Go Down the Negative Road

You can’t be mediocre and then show up at the tournament on Sunday and be excellent. Excellence is a way of life. You gotta strive to be excellent at everything. This doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it. You can give it all to God and say, “I trust you, I’m going to […]

Peak Performance, Repetition and Failure

Peak performance, regardless of level, is still peak performance. And in the beginning, performance in front of others with an unknown outcome brings about all sorts of fears of the unknown. This situation feeds your brain with phrases and feelings that make little sense away from the situation, but when you’re facing the situation for […]

Mastering at Least Two Trajectories

There are six basic target trajectories: left-to-right and right-to-left crossing and quartering, and targets going up and falling. And until you master at least two, you will not experience much consistency or confidence in your practice or tournaments. So, what do we mean when we say master a trajectory? Here is where the work begins. […]

Can You Commit to Your Shot?

We see this a lot in new and intermediate shooters. It’s partly because they don’t have the shot inventory to properly visualize how and where they want the shot to come together, or they have been chasing all the targets down and trying to fix the shot at the end. Either way, if the shooter […]

Getting Out of the Evaluation Quagmire

There have been hundreds of times in the last 35 years when I’ve had a really good shooter who’s trying to learn a new move. He’ll be struggling and hit it three or four times. And here’s the problem: he thinks he has it. He’s gone to evaluating. He jumps into the evaluation quagmire, and all […]

The Post-Shot Habit

The ability to visualize in detail and execute the preloaded visual process in practice to see if it was correct is where most shooters fail to really get better and develop the mental side of their games. How well you’re able to visualize how and where you want your brain to take the next shot […]

Training the New Sequence

Nobody comes out of the womb predisposed to be able to shoot a shotgun at moving targets without experiencing confusion. We’re talking about the confusion of looking at a target and getting the gun muzzle in front of it while matching speed and taking the shot. Everything about hitting a moving target with a shotgun […]

The Challenge of Positive Reaction

For most, training your mind to be stronger than your feelings is such a far reach that they can’t even imagine themselves always reacting in a positive way in a difficult negative situation, because it is easier to just give in and enjoy the negativity. Thinking in a situation like this is difficult and must […]

Rituals Turning Into Habits

Have you ever told yourself to calm down? Maybe it was before a presentation or in a job interview. Or perhaps at a tournament on the first stand of the first day of the three-day main event? What about the first stand on the third and final day of the main, down 12 with 13 […]

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

How well you understand that the gun must be to the right or left of the target has little to do with your ability to consistently do it. The number of times you have done it has everything to do with how consistently and successful you will be when actually at the range or in […]

Consistent Work on Your Fundamentals

We ran across an interesting thought not long ago. If you do something to improve your shooting game for 15 minutes a day every day for a year, you will be better than 95 percent of the people out there. This brings us back to the reality that there is a direct correlation between how […]

Is It a Mental Problem?

So, you think you have a mental problem or your mental game needs to be improved? You might think this is the only way you can explain the missing targets you know how to break in clutch situations. While you might have a mental problem, let’s look at your overall entire game before we use […]

Gun Mount Practice Tips

We have discovered the most frequent mistake shooters make when practicing their mount at home in the garage or gun room. When they mount the gun, they are looking at something – a light switch or a duck’s head or a lampshade – and when they mount the gun to their face and shoulder, they […]

The Great Conundrum

For most shooters, there is no rhyme or rhythm in their results when shooting a shotgun at a moving target – painted or feathered. If you shoot a shotgun enough, when you’re surprised by a target at the range or bird in the field, you look at the target, mount the gun, and pull the […]

Commitment to Deliberate Repetition

The magic shooters are looking for is in the work they are not willing to do! There is a difference between comment and commitment, and nothing could illustrate it better than the example we just shared above. When your brain understands through repetition what it really looks like to hit a moving target, the more you […]

Building an Inventory of Sight Pictures

In the beginning, it will be difficult for you to commit to a shot as predicted because of your desire to break the target instead of executing the prediction to see if the prediction was correct. When you begin to train this way – by committing to the shot the way you want it to […]

Surprise and Sacrifice

For most shooters, there is no rhyme or rhythm in their results when shooting a shotgun at a moving target – painted or feathered. If you shoot a shotgun enough, when you’re surprised by a target at the range or bird in the field, you look at the target, mount the gun, and pull the […]

Mastering a Trajectory

New shooters don’t have the shot inventory to properly visualize how and where they want the shot to come together, or they have been chasing all the targets down and trying to fix the shot at the end. Either way, if the shooter is successful, it will be short-lived. We find that the target presentation […]

Giving 100 Percent, 100 Percent of the Time

Shooters often do not practice with intensity, which can confuse them. They go through the motions and fun, and then when they go to a tournament they try, and their brain doesn’t recognize them. They’re not relaxed or happy-go-lucky – they’re not having fun. They’re trying. What you have to do in practice is build […]

The Stumbling Baby Effect

Nobody comes out of the womb predisposed to be able to shoot a shotgun at moving targets without experiencing confusion. We’re talking about the confusion of looking at a target and getting the gun muzzle in front of it while matching speed and taking the shot. Everything about hitting a moving target with a shotgun […]

Ego and Evaluation

Shooters can get so obsessed with breaking the target instead of the process. You can’t do anything unless you have a plan. This game is all about ego. And ego is all about breaking the bird. So, that evaluation part when you’re trying to learn makes it hard for everybody. They evaluate the day on […]

Fear from a Lack of Plan

You can see people walk up to a stand, and they are scared to death to get ready to shoot that target. They don’t have a plan of what they’re going to do with the targets. And you can just see them when they’re gripping their gun, with sweat coming down their face, because they […]

What Should Your Post-Shot Routine Look Like?

After you break the first pair, the typical emotional reaction is relief. Wrong. When you break the first pair, and you break that second bird of the first pair, as you open the gun, the first thing you ought to do is replay visually what you just saw. That becomes a preload for the next […]

The Contents of Your Pre-Shot Routine

Less is important. The mistake that most people make in the beginning is they put way too many things in their pre-shot routine, which means they haven’t done enough of what they do in their routine to make it a habit. It’s eight things instead of only three things. Less is more. Less is important. […]

Overcoming Muzzle Awareness

We have often wondered why some people find it is so hard to learn wing or clay shooting and others don’t. The other day, Gil had a conversation with long-time friend and client Dr. Dan Fischer from Chattanooga while driving. They were discussing one of his good friends who was having trouble with muzzle awareness. […]

How Much Detail in Your Routine?

How detailed should your routine be once you’re in the station?  There are several levels of detail that we can discuss, depending on whether you’re in a tournament or whether you’re in a practice session, or whether you’re just watching clay target kill shot reviews and visualizing. I know that when we are practicing, which […]

Small Muscle, Big Muscle

The ideal way for the brain to move the body is small muscle, big muscle. And when I’m moving, as I call or I’m moving before I call, it’s so much easier for me to get everything synced up. Because my hands are moving, if the small muscles are moving before you see the bird, […]

Regardless of the Result

clinics

Leading up to a big event, we’re all excited to go to the Open or Nationals. But if I expect to do well, I need to have to time to practice, and for maybe months or weeks and days leading up to the event, I begin to repeat to myself and to others affirmations. They’ve […]

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