Q&A: Flinch

Gil and Vicki,

Sorry, it has been a long time in talking with you. Just to let you know really enjoyed the last book you sent me. It was a true inspiration and is helping me no end with my metal coaching of shooters.

I would like to pick your brains if I may, as one coach to another. I have a very good friend and client who is suffering from trigger freeze. He is in his mid-60s.  He had the same problem about 18 months ago but it cleared up and came back worse than before about 6 weeks ago. Everything he does before the shot is okay. No problem loading the gun getting ready to shoot breakpoint pick-up zone. Picks up target well every time, applies lead, and then cannot pull the trigger.

He is a very experienced skeet shot. He’s shot skeet all his life and in his younger days regularly shot straight 25ex 25+. But now shooting in the high 20s with the occasional 25. He just cannot pull the trigger. He knows the picture is right even swings on after the point at which the shot should have been made, just this mental block stopping him actually pulling the trigger.

I have tried changing trigger fingers, dry firing at home whilst watching TV, etc, lighter loads, and different guns all to no avail. Do you have a method or system I could try? This one has me beat at the moment. Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

Roger Hill
Pro Coach Shooting School

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Roger,

First of all, great to hear from you and glad to hear you enjoyed our last book. 

Eventually, all of us shotgunners will go through what your client is going through, and the sad thing is that it happens more to skeet and trap shooters than sporting shooters. The reason for this is that those games can be shot with conscious awareness of the barrel or shot off the end of the barrel seeing the picture before you pull the trigger. 

The sad news is that as we age, our eyes can’t do what they did for us when we were much younger. And because of this, we must change how we are using them so we optimize what visual ability we have left. 

One of the big changes, at least for shotgunners, is that as we age we lose the ability to track a moving object with another moving object in the same field of view. This is why our grandkids do so well at those video games and we for some reason just can’t get the hang of it. 

What does the change involve? Bottom line, less conscious awareness of what is actually going on and focusing on just one thing, which would be the target, and letting the unconscious brain do the lead thing. Our suspicion is that he is looking at the lead prior to pulling the trigger, and this checking the lead ever-so-slightly happens just as he is about to pull the trigger. 

What is actually happening is what is called a rapid saccadic eye movement, which just means that the eyes focus on an object and then bounce to another object and back again without focusing on the secondary object. When this occurs, the brain shuts down for .2 seconds, and if this bounce occurs on or just before the breakpoint, the result is no trigger pull and sometimes a yip or flinch as the trigger pull is stopped.