If you hang out at the local sporting club enough, eventually the topic of practice will come up. And man, can you get a tackle box full of different ideas.
Most of these well-intended opinions about how to master a game with as many variables as a Chinese fire drill have to do with trying to increase a person’s score. Score, after all, is the way we should judge our progress in anything we’re attempting to improve on, right? Well, from our perspective, score is the last thing you should be looking at when evaluating your game if improvement is your goal.
No, we haven’t gotten too much sun teaching in the Texas heat. But we do continue to learn more and more about improving shooting performance in students all over the world, some of whom we’ve never met.
If we were talking about shooting a simple game like skeet or trap, then score would be a good measure of performance and improvement, because you actually can practice the game you will be tested on at the tournament. But when we talk about analyzing performance in a game that has as many variables as sporting clays, if you only look at score, you’re setting yourself up to try to fix a perceived problem that, in most cases, turns out to be something much smaller.
If you only look at score then you will never be able to isolate the root cause of your problems. Because your score could be a reflection of presentation, weather, how you slept or didn’t, nutrition, or any number of other things. Some are in your control, but most are out of your control.
One thing that keeps coming up in our seminars each year is that what you practice, how much you practice, and how often you practice determines, to a great extent, how well your performance elevates. What we find is that shooters don’t practice the right way and their performances reflect exactly how they shoot when they do what they call “practice.”
Most of them are chasing the elusive score that they think they deserve because of the time they’ve spent shooting and the money they’ve spent on targets and bullets. To quote one of our great friends and students Craig Hill, “You get out of it what you put into it.”
The problem we see with most shooters is that they keep chasing that dream without making the correct goals when they practice or shoot in a tournament. When they evaluate based on score and give great emotion to everything they did wrong, then they become a product of that emotion. This does anything but elevate score.
Then there are the shooters who are hoping for the Clay Target Fairy to swoop down and touch them on the head with her magic wand and they’ll instantly be transformed into a smooth consistent subconscious shooter who’s able to win the next club championship.
You know who these guys are. They’re the ones who have the latest in chokes, glasses, fluorescent sights of all colors, bullets that go so fast they don’t have to lead the target as much to hit it, and they take lessons from the last winner of the club championship. These guys actually think that the guy who won the tournament has a secret that enables him to know something about how much lead to give all the targets they keep missing, and if they could just take a lesson from him they would then be able to shoot as well as him.
Now, let’s think about this reasoning and what it entails for the student and the champ. To think this way and actually believe it requires us to buy into the fact that a person of lesser ability and experience could be just as good as the champ if they knew the magic secret! To break this down even further, this would mean if they knew the secret, they’d be able to achieve top-level performance simply by knowing it.
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