Our task is to take our students’ game and, based on their goals and commitments, assess their levels of fundamentals and experience. Then we come up with the plan to help them leave the plateau they’re on and ascend to a higher one. After this assessment, based on our 28 years of professional coaching experience, we discuss the options with the athlete and what will be required from them to implement the changes. If they agree, we then “break it, bend it, blend it!”
In the beginning, it takes more than just desire on the student’s part to actually want to excel. Not everyone is willing to put in the time and effort it takes. Some shooters don’t want to excel for their own personal reasons; they like what they’re doing and are content with where they are. In their mind, they’re as good as they want to be. It’s important that they have that discussion with themselves and that they’re good with it because the worst thing that can happen is to begin to hope they were better.
In our experience, shooters who are content with where they are usually don’t want to go through the failure (missing targets) that it takes to implement something other than what they’re currently doing. Or maybe they can’t make the commitment in time or money it will take to improve to the next level.
Other shooters who have trained with us have found themselves with family or business obligations that kept them from having the time needed to really go for it. That’s just fine with us. It’s not our life. They’re the ones who must do the work, not us. If you want to travel this road, get ready for a really lonely one.
The first thing we must do with anyone who wants to improve is to establish in their minds just how good they want to be. Once we know that, we begin with a calendar, and put down exactly how many times they touched the gun in the previous year and how much advancement they experienced.
As Gil always says, “the mystery is in the history!” This would give all of us some sense of past commitment, what improvement that created, and what would be required to reach their goal based on our experience.
It’s one thing to want to be really good at something and another to be a little more realistic with your expectations and your ability to do what it takes to meet or excel past those expectations. Here’s where the building begins.
Depending on age, we outline major tournaments for the next year, then monthly shoots, and then training days with the gun and at the gym. We also plan when and how often they’ll see us. Once we’re good with all entries on the calendar, the shooter must make a budget just to be sure that everyone knows how much we’re spending, and the who, where, and why.
In the beginning, the number one hardest thing we have to do is to get the athlete to touch the gun every day. The first thing they must build is their basic move and mount, and it will only be built by repetition. In the beginning, it’s what you do off the course that builds the move and mount.
We get questions about what exercises shooters need to get their personal trainer to put them through – especially ladies. We say just their normal exercises, but do the gun mounts every day. And if they want to get it quick, do the OSP Three Bullet Drill and the OSP Flashlight Drill until the muscles in their arms and shoulders burn.
There’s nothing that replaces building the muscles up while perfecting the move and mount at the same time. Your move and mount will evolve, but in the beginning, you must build it for us to take things out of it. And you’ll always need it.
For youth athletes, this is the most important thing they can do to increase the speed of their learning. And it’s also the one thing that they just will not do. However, the ones who do touch the gun every day and watch the Clay Kill Shot Reviews on our website excel at an amazing rate. The older, more mature shooters will actually put in the time it takes to train the brain to fire the sequence correctly. And the more you fire the sequence, the better it becomes without thought. Which is why we’re doing this.
As the shooter moves through their year, they must take a picture of their scorecard and send it to us for us to analyze. Then they make an appointment for a 25 or 50-minute consult with one of us to go over what we see on their scorecards. The first place we look is how many zeros occur in the first pairs and whether or not they were corrected, and the station was run out after the correction was made.
Then, are there any random misses on all stands after the first pair had been hit or corrected? Are the random misses on the first or second bird of the pair or are they random throughout the tournament? Are there consistent misses on the same target on the same pair on any one station? If so, what was the trajectory? We need to work on it.
There are many other conclusions we come to from looking at a scorecard, but the objective is this: to win, you must run stations. If you run half of the stations, well, that’s good – but not a winner. If you run 2/3rds of the stations, it’s a good day. But to win, you must run ¾ths of the stations and only drop a bird or two on the first pairs of the remaining stations. And that’s where we’re going.
We encourage shooters to practice more singles than pairs working on their pre-shot, post-shot, and correction routines, pay particular attention to the sequencing of the steps in their routine, and always predict in detail how and where they want the target broken and then execute based on their prediction. Either the shooter does this phase and excels rapidly, or the shooter doesn’t do it, and has moments of brilliance followed by moments of despair in the same round – and they never get in the zone.
The eyes don’t see – the brain does. And the brain lives a minimum of 80 milliseconds ahead of our consciousness. That’s how you walk, talk, and feed yourself without biting your tongue or tripping. The interesting thing is that the more familiar the brain is with the situation it finds itself in, the farther ahead it can anticipate, and the less conscious chatter there is when you are performing. This is the reason shooting a lot of singles with all the routines is so critical.
It’s not so much what is in your routine as much as it’s the sequence that allows your brain to anticipate farther and farther ahead. And the farther ahead it can anticipate, the more skillful you become, and the easier it becomes for you to slip into the zone. When you access the zone in this way, you can stay there. And great things just happen when you are there because you put yourself there.
You must master the pre-shot routine, the post-shot routine, and the correction routine and they must happen automatically. The only way you create this is through specific detailed repetition. After your visual move of how and where you want the shot to come together, there should be a pause where you focus on nothing for about a second. Then as the gun begins to close, your eyes go to the focal point and the muzzle goes to the point of address, then you call “pull” and execute the shot as you predicted in your visual program.
If the pair is dead immediately, play the sequence in your mind. Then load the gun, play the sequence again, and then close… address… pull. Execute, replay, and do the same thing until all pairs have been shot. When a miss occurs immediately after the shot as you are opening the gun, look back where the miss occurred and replay the miss. Then make a correction and replay the pair being shot with the correction, load the gun, resume your routine and shoot the correction, and repeat.
Again, it is the sequence of events and timing of the sequence that allows your brain to anticipate ahead of where you are and make a consistent smooth, lethal move to kill the targets consistently. If you were to shoot a hundred targets as pairs, you would use your routines 50 times. But if they are all singles, you will use your routines 100 times. And at the end of the day, it’s how many times you’ve fired your routines that allows your brain to say, “I got this. Let’s roll!”
Before you go crazy, you will begin to shoot pairs as a major tournament approaches. At the last practice session leading up to a weekend tournament, your scores begin to consistently stay in the 88+ range, but you will always go back to shooting singles. Our observations in shooting this game for 37 years is that if you hit the first bird in a pair, you will shoot 80% on the second bird. And if you miss the first bird in a pair you will shoot 20% on the second bird. So, you do the math.
We’ve been talking about building your game, and sooner or later you must address a few things like nutrition, sleep, gun fit, ammo choice, choke choices, and hydration, to name a few, because all of it must be addressed.
You must make your mind up based on your results – first from the smaller tournaments, then the larger ones – about how many birds you can shoot in one day, whether you shoot better in the morning or afternoon, what time you need to go to bed the night before an 8 A.M. rotation, and so on.
So, you see in the beginning you must build your game, and then through the process of elimination, refine it and eliminate variables one by one. Then what’s left optimizes your efforts, time, and money investment to achieve your goals. As we said before, being the best at anything is a lonely, lonely road. But it can be quite rewarding.
Just one more thing we’ve learned along this 37-year journey: you can’t do what someone else does as well as they can do it! You can only do something as well as you’ve trained and practiced it, and then eliminate your variables one by one!
