The hunting seasons here in the States are winding down. With spring comes the beginning of our year traveling our continent and South America helping wing and clay shooters alike become better, however they define it.
In our off-season, when we are not chasing sea trout, flounder, or redfish, we spend a lot of time reading the most recent research on skill-building and performance so we can share it with you in our articles, our website, and clinics across the country.
We have recently come across the book “Peak” by Anders Ericsson that we listened to six or eight times. (Don’t get the book – it’s like reading the tax code. Get the audio version!) We are understanding more about skill, skill-building, and how the brain stores your skills in long-term memory. This has confirmed many of our observations over the past years as professional coaches, but the idea of skill being seen as a pattern by the brain that creates a picture of the desired outcome or action is new to us. Ericsson explains that these sequential patterns are stored in your long-term memory, which is limitless concerning storage capacity.
The brain sees skill as a pattern sequence. A series of skills that have been repeated enough times the same way so that they happen without thought is referred to as being chunked together. At this point, this skill moves to long-term memory to free up more short-term memory. When this skill is performed enough times in long-term memory with other skills, a pattern develops, allowing your brain to anticipate ahead of what you are doing. This is how you perform without thinking, so practice is about creating patterns through repetition while not thinking. When you are thinking, you are using short-term memory. This is great for writing down a phone number, but it does not have enough bandwidth to handle complex movements and reactions.
We see shooters all the time trying to think their way through the shot. They never seem to get it, and they will never have a great performance because their practice is about hitting birds and fixing the shot at the end by adjusting the lead. Long-term memory has an infinite amount of storage and is adept at doing very complex tasks, as long as it is preloaded with a chunked circuit that it recognizes.
We have shooters come to us with a self-diagnosed “mental problem,” when their problem is not mental at all. They are not practicing at all, or they are not practicing the right way to develop their long-term memory. While they go to the range and “practice,” they are constantly thinking about what they are doing. And if you are thinking, you are using short-term memory.
As we have said before, we have discovered a direct link between what and how someone practices and how they perform. Remember, the brain recognizes skill as a pattern or a sequence of events. The more you emphasize the pattern and fire the circuit in practice knowing what the outcome will be before you call “pull,” the quicker the brain recognizes the pattern you are asking it to perform. The more you fire that circuit the same way each time, the more the brain can anticipate what you are about to ask it to do and the better you become at doing the skill without thinking.
The brain recognizes skill as a pattern of sequential firings of certain neurons that create movements and actions based on how often they are fired. It is the pattern sequence that is most important.
To illustrate this we will show you two sentences. We think the pattern will be obvious.
Read this sentence out loud:
“The lead if brain the you fix will just will it let!”
Do you see how difficult the words are to read? It’s because this pattern of words does not begin to draw a picture in the brain that allows for the brain to anticipate what the next words will be. Remember, it is the pattern or sequence of words or actions that allow for the brain to say “Ah, yes, I know where this is going” and then it can anticipate what is going to happen, switch to long-term memory, and take over, allowing you to shoot without thinking. When the same words are put in a different sequence, not only do they develop a picture, they are easy to read!
Read both of these sentences out loud three times each:
“The brain will fix the lead if you will just let it!”
“The lead if brain the you fix will just will it let!”
Both sentences contain the exact same words, but one makes sense and is easy to read. The other one doesn’t make sense and is very difficult to read. The reason it is difficult to read is you must look at each word to see what it is. This puts you in short-term memory! This is what happens when you close the gun, call “pull” with no plan and chase the target down and try to fix the shot at the end.
Ericsson refers to this chunking phenomenon as a “Mental Representation” (MR). He explains in his book how in the beginning you are supposed to be confused when trying something new. Failure while learning is not bad. In fact, it is essential for learning.
The conundrum to us is that most shooters are trying to get better without missing the targets. When a miss occurs, they get mad at the miss, which masks the cause. Then they never get good at correcting a miss and they stagnate and plateau. Why they do this is not a mystery to us, because we have been studying this for 26 years as professional coaches. And while science has evolved due to the emergence of MRI research, most shooters never practice the correct way.
So what is the correct way to practice and create these mental representations and use our long-term memory? First, you must learn to move and mount the gun and what the two sight pictures look like by doing the three-bullet drill and the flashlight drill.
Stop trying to break the target. Begin to visualize how you want the shot to come together and what it will look like as the shot is taken before you close the gun and call “pull.” Remember, in the beginning, you are supposed to be confused. But if you have the courage to persevere through the confusion, there are great things on the other side. In practice, it is not how many targets you break that matters; it is how many targets you break correctly according to your visualization of how you want the shot to come together that matters.
On the Knowledge Vault, we have sequences of ShotKam video on game birds and all clay games as well. When shooters watch these videos before they go out and practice or go hunting, it becomes easier for them to visualize or preload what they are about to ask the brain to do. When the preload and the shot are the same, the brain begins to understand in greater detail the sequence of events requested. After you do this in practice over and over the same way each time, the better the mental representations become, because the preload is equal to the representation. It becomes a virtual circle: the better the representation, the better the skill. The better the skill, the better the representation.
It all begins with practicing more deliberately with a plan, and a detailed plan that is a movie of the exact sequence of events that you want the brain to produce. The more you practice deliberately in this way, the more the skills are chunked together as one move and the easier it becomes for the long-term memory to say, “Ah yes, I know where this is going. I’ll take over now.”
At that point, you can shoot without thinking. Because when you are thinking while you are shooting, you are using your short-term memory – and we learned today what that feels like!
