For the next 1500-2000 words we are going to talk about something crucial for improvement. But most shooters are not willing to do it correctly or often enough to really get better. Everyone wants to be “more consistent” with their shotgun and their scores, but our experience has shown us that those who are really good with a shotgun (or at anything else for that matter) are not like everyone else; they are outliers.
When we began our journey as professional coaches 25 years ago, we thought that everyone was like us when we first began our competitive careers in sporting clays. Wow, were we wrong. We really did not realize what outliers we were until we began to compare what we did as competitors to get better and win, and what a lot of our students do or don’t do.
Sporting clays came into being in the spring of 1983, and what a change that had on our lives. As the saying goes, “Oh, to know then what we know now” about how to practice and improve, and how the eyes work and the brain converts the visual data into pictures or movies.
We spent countless hours off the field at home doing gun mount drills and just playing with the gun so that it became an extension of our body. All that work paid off when we began to shoot tournaments and win. Looking back on it now, we were building circuits in the brain through repetitive movements so they became a habit that we could count on without thinking when we shot tournaments.
The science of visual-motor skill development has changed dramatically. What we thought we knew about vision and practice and performance when we were competing has evolved since then. Science knows and understands so much more about skill development. This knowledge is evolving so quickly and is so fluid we are finding it hard to even keep up!
As we said earlier, practice is perhaps the most misunderstood part of getting better at this game. While everyone does it, we find that few do it correctly or enough to really make a difference in their game. While you will see your game get better simply from doing it a lot, you will reach a certain level and your improvement will slow and eventually stop and sometimes get worse. This rapid improvement in the beginning, along with the sudden stop in improvement can create frustration, anger, attitudinal changes, mood swings, and all manner of symptoms – most of which are self-inflicted wounds that a credit card will not fix.
Yep, you can’t buy a consistent shotgun game, a good marriage, or a good tomato: all are the result of personal commitment to do something above the normal level of commitment.
We are finding that there is more to practice than just going through the grind of learning the fundamentals, like focusing on the target, mounting and moving the gun, foot position, shot set up and gun speed, breakpoints, sight pictures, and the like. In fact, there are way too many shooters who just go to the range and do what they call practice. But they are just going through the grind with no plan (long or short-term) and they wonder why they are all of a sudden not getting better.
Our answer to most is, “If you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always gotten!”
To get better, you must change something. It is the resistance to change that keeps the overwhelming majority of shooters from getting better. The reason people resist change is the fear of failing that comes from changing. But what they don’t realize is that the very thing they are trying to avoid is the one thing that is necessary to get better! Failure is the prerequisite for improvement. And way too many shooters are trying to learn how to shoot better without failing.
The other day, Gil was watching a NASCAR event that included a lot of collisions, one of which occurred with 20 laps to go. As the pace car came out to restart the race, the announcers were talking about all the weaving in and out the drivers were doing trying to heat up their tires. They went on and on about how reckless it was and how there were only 20 laps to go and how they should be more careful or they could lose the race here at the end!
The only racecar driver in the booth spoke up and said, “Winners are never afraid to lose!” And that’s a thought process that is learned and practiced.
When we have shooters that call and say they are having a problem with their game, the first thing we ask is what they are doing in practice because we have detected a direct link between what is practiced and how a person performs. The reason shooters practice a lot and don’t get better is they are not practicing correctly. And “correctly” is different depending on the level of their game. The E through C-Class shooter will need to be training mostly on singles and on mounting and moving the gun and on shooting the six basic trajectories: left-to-right and right-to-left crossing and quartering, as well as birds going up and birds coming down.
As we said earlier, just going to the range and going through the motions will help and get you through these classes. But if they would practice mounting the gun and practice the sight pictures at home every day, the journey would be shorter.
There is one more thing we should address here that will pay off in big dividends if you are planning to be a top-level tournament shooter. Your attitude while practicing, as well as your reaction to your results when practicing and shooting tournaments, will begin to build a file in the memory part of your brain that you will be able to call on in future pressure situations while competing.
If you always react positively, regardless of result, then you will be building a habit that you can depend on when reality throws you a curve and you fail to get the results you desire on or off the course. You can either learn this from the beginning and breeze through A and AA or you will have to take a step back when you are in A class to learn how to be positive and trust what you have trained. If you think you are different, then give us a call after you have been in A class for a year or so and we will help you understand this lesson, because without it you will not progress much farther and definitely not at a rapid rate. At the end of the day, what you remember about your previous experiences plays heavily on your ability to trust yourself enough to get better and better.
Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson talk about this a lot in their book “Every Shot Must Have A Purpose” and you would do yourself a favor to read it. It is not whether you understand what needs to be done that allows for you to succeed under pressure; it is how many times you have done it and then how many times you have done it under pressure and how you reacted to the results you got every time that determines how well you perform.
We have had shooters go from E to Master in as little as 18 months and shooters who never progress past B or A or AA. And what we have learned is that a person’s attitude about failure has everything to do with where they end up, how quickly they got there, and how long they remain. And attitudes can change!
So the first classes you go through are there to encourage you to improve your fundamentals. When you get into A and AA you must learn how to compete. If you have done your homework correctly, your time in A or AA will be short-lived. As you go from E through B, you will be practicing more singles than pairs, working on your move and mount, and moving your breakpoints so you can begin to play shape on the first bird in a pair, making the trip to the second bird shorter and more efficient.
This is a lonely time if you are doing it right because few people want to really practice or train. They don’t realize the value of building good habits that will hold up under pressure. Most shooters just want to go shoot and call it practice, which is why there are so many shooters stuck at 75 percent.
When moving through A and AA, you will be learning to compete. Most of your training will be on pairs and the more difficult separator targets. You will continue to find a shot in a tournament that you did not shoot well and you will set it up somewhere and learn to shoot it, or you will take the problem to an experienced coach to give you some help.
Vicki had a shooter who practiced singles only for a year and advanced to A class because of the work he did both on and off the course. She had a three-hour private lesson with him on pairs and he was in master class in three months because of the intense work he had done practicing singles moving the breakpoint, doing his gun mount drills at home, and creating a positive mindset in all areas of his life.
So, as you can see, there is no magic bullet or lead secret to shooting consistently higher and higher scores. It is hard work and often lonely work. Becoming more consistent when competing is not about doing something the way someone else does it, because the bottom line is you cannot see or do what someone with more experience than you can. In fact, what we have discovered is that as people move through the classes and become more and more consistent, they begin to see differently, and their perceptions of the target difficulty and speed change dramatically.
What we as professional coaches must do is to define where a person’s ability to focus is and what they perceive when they shoot so we can coach them to the next level of perception and performance.
There is a myth out there that if you could just know what the last club champion knows, or if you just knew what he or she saw when they broke that 53-yard chandelle that you too could become club champion. Becoming a champion at anything involves a lot of hard work and a huge commitment in time, effort, attitude, failure, and money. And there is a big difference in comment and commitment!
