There is a difference between comment and commitment!
There are a lot of shooters out there who would like to be a great shot, but few have the means and time to dedicate to what it takes to become one. It is not the money, but the time involved to build the game. And so few have that time.
Our young shooters excel at such a tremendous rate due to the myelin model of rapid insulating their neurological circuits. Myelin is the insulation that grows around the circuits in the brain that allows for rapid and consistent firing of the circuits with little or no interference. When heavily insulated through repetition and training, these circuits can actually alter human behavior as it is happening!
In the beginning, they have great success with very little effort and expect that to continue only to become disappointed when their games don’t improve at the same rate without greater and greater commitments to train. Rapid myelination during late teen years and around 30 years makes what happens to younger shooters understandable. And in great measure, it is responsible for the better shooters in the world being either side of 30.
The fact that some of them grew up shooting on family-owned ranges or had parents who had the means to facilitate unlimited target shooting when they were young was certainly not a detriment! We began our journey in sporting clays in our mid-thirties in 1983 and the current great shooters of today have been shooting sporting clays competitively almost their whole life. So it stands to reason that they should be the great shots that they are!
When you combine the myelin model with the right kind and amount of training, greatness is the result.
A coach can help, but like most things we do in life, we must be the builder. And it takes time, money, and effort above and beyond the norm to achieve greatness. As we age it takes more and more repetitions to achieve the same amount of myelin. And eventually, there is not enough time in the day to train and keep the insulation at its peak form. Then performance suffers.
This is what happens to shooters who are in their 50s and 60s and 70s! Myelin is a living protein and must constantly be rebuilt through training and practice, because when you don’t continue to practice and train, it degrades and replenishment only occurs when you fire the circuit. It is a great advantage to have a coach who has both gone through these cycles themselves and helped hundreds of others go through them as well.
A 50 or 60-year-old shooter can’t do what a 25 or 30-year-old shooter can do, and it takes as much as two to three times longer for an older shooter to train something into his/her game. The aging process changes the body and older shooters don’t have the flexibility nor do they have the balance and vision that younger shooters do. So what you teach them might not be how you shoot, but how they can shoot better.
As a coach, this experience is huge. And knowing just how much time a person will have to commit to achieve a specific goal and whether a goal is really achievable! Where a person lives can have a huge influence on how rapidly they improve. Maybe a shooter lives in a place where there is only one small range to practice on, and to get the target diversity to really push performance they will have to travel two or three hours one way. Then they have the cards stacked against them to begin with when you compare them to someone in Houston, where there are six ranges within 90 minutes of each other!
Coaches inevitably end up coaching like they shoot. And the ones who coach the most end up shooting the least due to their coaching schedule. In fact, they spend more time at ranges than any other shooters. But if they shoot to demo a shot, they are typically using a client’s gun that does not fit. But they still have to hit the target.
Finding a full-time professional coach with some grey hair (or not much hair at all) would be the desirable choice.
Just to be clear, we are not saying that you can’t learn from a great shot. You can, but you will learn different things from a top shooter than you will a professional experienced coach. Again, we are not saying that you can’t learn from someone that is younger or a top shooter. But when someone has put in the time to become a top shooter, they could offer some advice based on how they shoot and how they compete, but their perspective of what they see and do can rarely be transferred to someone with less experience than they have.
As we age, what we see is that most older shooters are not remotely aware of how much nutrition and sleep play into their performances.
What we see is that typically shooters break their eating routine during a tournament, especially on a three or four-day event. The more you can keep to your home eating and sleeping routine, the better you will perform. What you do nutritionally and sleep-wise should be just as much a part of your training and practice as mounting the gun and visualizing a shot. But unfortunately, these are the last things older shooters are aware of, much less are in control of.
In fact, nutrition and visualizing a detailed plan of the shot you are about to take are the two most overlooked parts of improving performance and consistency!
You hear shooters talk about learning to really look at the target, but what most do not understand is that the brain sees, not the eyes. What you perceive when looking at a target has more to do with what you have trained your brain to ignore than actual visual acuity on or at the target.
The more the brain is trained to ignore things like glare, background, muzzle, and lead, the more the muzzle speed is the same as the target’s speed, making the target slow down visually. Then it becomes easier for you to “really see the target!”
Repetition in practice is grossly UNDERRATED!
Being a top performer in any arena requires intense training and practice. And when you put the time in, what you see becomes different. Remember, vision is a brain thing, not an eye thing. And the way the brain interprets the visual stream of data from the retinas at the highest level is amazing to us.
The mistake we see so many make is thinking they can see what their buddy can see or what a top performer can see. While they might be able to see visually the way the top performer can see, the way their brain interprets the data is nowhere close to the brain of the top shooter.
To be a peak performer at anything requires the performer to build their own performance circuits through repetition in practice, training, and competition. The better you get at anything, the farther in front of where you are your brain can anticipate and guide your performances.
In order for the athlete to continue to get better and better, the brain must, through chunking different circuits together, be able to “see” or comprehend more and more from less and less actual conscious data. So, the top performer sees less but knows more, which requires less and less thinking. And this allows for higher and higher performances!
What you see as a shooter evolves. As we have said many times before, no one ends up with the same game they began with!
How you perceive when shooting is not based on understanding what someone else sees, but on how many times you have planned and executed your plan on a certain shot. The more you do the same thing, the more it becomes a habit and happens with less and less thought.
When you shoot a 50-yard chandelle, for instance, the first time you shoot at it you are aware of the different steps you went through to get the gun in the correct place to break it. And you are most likely thinking about all of them. After you have hit that same chandelle 500 times from 50 yards, and 500 times from 30 yards, and 500 times from 60 yards, then you no longer have to think while you are shooting it because through repetition, the brain has chunked all the parts of the shot together and they are now one thing.
The more you fire the circuit in the brain the same way, the more myelin grows on the circuit. And the more it is myelinated, the more the brain looks at the steps in the circuit as one thing, not a sequence of different circuits that are fired sequentially.
When you go through this process through planning and repetition on all different angles and distances and target speeds, you have an inventory of these shots filed in your brain.
Then you see a target on a new course where you have never been. As you are watching it, a flashback occurs in your brain, and the visual of what it looks like to break that target pops into your mind. You know what to do to break it. You cannot use anyone else’s target inventory; you must build your own.
Here is something you might not know about building a target inventory. How often has this happened to you? You went out and put your time in on a particular target for one complete training session? And after you found it, you hit it more than 50 times and you left feeling pretty good about your ability to hit that target. Then you come back a week later and it’s like you have never even seen that target, much less broke it 50 times the week before.
Have you ever wondered why your brain didn’t remember what it looked like to hit that target? Well, pay attention.
The reason those breaks were not in your memory was that you did not preload the movie of where, when, and how you were going to break that target, and then shoot that target the way you planned it. To build the target inventory and have it remain in your long-term memory, you must deliberately plan the shot in detail and execute the shot according to the plan. When this happens, and the shot mirrors the plan, through repetition and deliberate practice, you begin to build mental representations in your brain that are filed in your long-term memory.
Without the deliberate plan before closing the gun and calling “pull,” you will be shooting in your short-term memory. And the short-term memory can remember what the shot looks like shot-to-shot after you found it, but the short-term memory is good at forgetting what is has just done when it goes on to something else.
You have to build your own shooting game through deliberate practice; you can’t expect to “see” what someone else sees unless you have a target inventory that is similar to theirs. This is why so many shooters “see” the same lead on the same target in so many different ways!
This does not mean that you can’t learn from someone who shoots better than you. But it does mean that while you might understand what someone else sees, you must deliberately practice this perception into your game in order for it to become a part of your game and your long-term memory!
There is a reason its called short-term memory!
