In the last issue, we talked about how we all must eventually develop a sense of where the shotgun is pointed without looking at it and how that is the absolute hardest thing we have to do as coaches. We realize you probably get tired of us talking about this and mentioning it in our epistles. But we got to tell you, if you ever want to get really good at wing shooting or clay shooting, you have to be able to move and mount the gun without thinking or looking at it.
At a recent clinic, Vicki said this to a group of shooters who had gathered around at the end of the day discussing how to bring shooters into the shotgun sports: “Since you are going to have to learn to know where the gun is pointed without looking at it eventually, then why not learn that from the beginning? Shooters who shoot with a mounted gun must look at the gun to know where it is pointed, but shooters who can move and mount the gun always know where the gun is pointed without looking at it and become safer and more proficient shooters, sooner!”
We had previously never really considered shotgunners who could shoot from a low gun position as safer and proficient sooner in their careers. But as we examine it, we do believe it is true. As we look back at our years as professional coaches, the evidence is irrefutable. Those shooters who learn to move and mount the gun and become proficient at it early on in their shooting careers are safer and become more proficient with less effort than those who shoot with a pre-mounted gun. We are going to go out on a limb here and say that shooters who learn to move and mount the gun will learn as much as two or three times faster than those who shoot mounted gun only.
In this issue, we are going to continue our discussion on sight pictures and how the brain is constantly anticipating ahead of where you are. As we have mentioned, seeing is a brain thing, not an eye thing. The more neurologists study the brain and neural activity, the more they realize the less they really know about the brain. Nonetheless, they are making some remarkable discoveries about how the brain anticipates, where it occurs in the visual cortex, how long this anticipation takes, how this affects skill-building, and what skill really is.
One of the examples in a study talked about how the brain can make things seem to be in sync even though they are not. They gave this example: if you were to observe someone dribbling a basketball walking away from you, as they walked away, the timing of the sound arriving and the visual of the ball hitting the ground would eventually be different. But your brain can alter the perception out to about 105 feet and they will look synchronous. However, at 110 feet, the difference in the arrival time of the sound and the visual will be so different that the brain cannot make up the difference and they will look out of sync.
This would explain why, when we shoot a target out to about 35 yards, the report of the gun and the breaking of the target seem simultaneous. And beyond that, there is a perceptible delay, and the farther out, even more perceptible.
The study also talked about how the brain is constantly anticipating ahead of where we are. That is why we are not running into walls or tumbling down stairs or missing our coffee cups in the morning while half-awake. It talked about how it takes this anticipation about 1/10th of a second to occur. The more you used the anticipation, the farther out in front of you it could act, which is what we define as skillful. In fact, the more skillful you are at anything, the less you are really focused on as you act out your skill.
For example, a tennis ball traveling 120 mph will travel 15 feet in 1/10th of a second. So to return a serve going 120 mph, the player will not see the ball and racket make contact. Although the player will perceive they saw it, the reality was their eyes were looking at the last place they saw the ball, and the brain just filled in the perception. They were able to make perfect contact with the ball because they had developed perfect tennis fundamentals (move and mount of the gun) through practice and a lot of hard work. Because they didn’t have to think about what they were doing with the racket, they were able to let their anticipation circuit take over and hit the ball over and over, again and again.
The more they used this circuit, the farther out in front of them it was able to anticipate. This circuit then began to anticipate where the ball was going based on the physiology of the opponent. This allowed them to be positioned closer to where they would make the shot, even before the opponent would hit the shot. This made the game slow down for them and gave them the ability to win match after match.
So skill is the ability to anticipate farther and farther out in front of where you are. The more skillful you are at anything, the less you focus on anything that you are doing because your fundamentals have been trained by you. The fundamentals are then given the signal to do and they just do based on how well your anticipation circuit has been trained. And that comes from how many times you have actually done the action.
Let’s take walking upstairs, for example. Let’s say that there were a set of ten stairs at your office and you had just begun this new job that required you to go up and down those stairs ten times a day. We have to believe that after about three weeks of up and down that your anticipation circuit would enable you to go up and down with out even looking critically at any one of those steps. You would be aware through a casual glance that they were there, the same as the last time you visited them. But conscious focus on them? No way.
Now, let’s just think about this for a second. If you were ascending those stairs and all of a sudden you looked down and checked your feet, even for half a split-second, what do you think would happen? Now let’s put a coffee cup in one hand and ten collated documents in the other. Heck, we are laughing at this as we are putting it together and editing it.
Why did it happen is the real question?
Well, the short answer is you lost your ability to anticipate and you lost your skill for traversing those stairs. As you began the trip down the stairs, your brain was anticipating where all the stairs were and was directing your feet and coordinating the movement to allow you to flow down the stairs and not spill your coffee.
