In print and online, you can read and hear about “shortcuts” and “quick fixes” to improving your clay and wing shooting results. You eagerly read and watch them only to find your hope turn into disappointment.
There is nothing quick or easy about building skill. Regardless of what the skill is, it is going to take time, effort, failure, correction, repetition, determination, and an endless number of different emotional ups and downs before it becomes automatized.
Like it or not, that is the skill building process. And the real paradox we see in almost everyone we encounter is that they are trying to learn a new skill without failing and failing is the most necessary part of skill building.
When facing a long crossing target that makes you a little uncomfortable on your first attempt because you have no expectation of hitting, we are sure that most of you simply call for the bird. Then the gun magically goes out there in front, the trigger is pulled and the target breaks. You were simultaneously shocked, relieved and surprised at how far the gun was in front of the target when you pulled the trigger. You hammered the target!
So, we have established the fact that you can break the target. And you know what the lead was because you saw how big it was… so you should be able to repeat it. Try as hard as you can, you just cannot put the gun out in front of the target where you know it needs to be!
The other thing we have proven is that the more you emphasize lead, the bigger it gets and the less you emphasize lead, the smaller it gets. You can’t visualize something you’ve never done. The more you experience it, the more it becomes a visually acceptable picture in the brain and information processing system. We are talking about perceived lead on this mystical target, and we have helped thousands of shooters learn to shoot longer targets.
But here we must defer to our friend and skill building consultant Dr Leif French. Leif has been studying skill building for as long as we have been professional shooting coaches and really has some insight as to the evolution of getting the gun farther and farther in front of the target.
It is an evolution. And our technique of keeping the gun in front of the target and keeping our nose on the target as it comes to the barrel makes the evolution much quicker.
Something we have observed in shooters is that the less you shoot longer targets, the more your ability to put the gun further and further out in front of the target shrinks proportionately. It’s as if you must keep doing it to be able to keep doing it until you have been out there so many times successfully that the fear is gone.
Leif explained it this way (paraphrased): When we use our natural pointing ability to point at everyday objects, it is engrained in our motor cognitive skills to point at, or relatively near most objects. However, ask someone to point at a clock on the wall, but instead point their finger 15 feet (or further) to the left or right of it, and the information processing system crashes. So, the person automatically brings their point back closer to the clock because this is a visually acceptable picture for the information processing system.
Pointing further and further in front of the target will therefore require systematic deliberate practice over an extended period to be able retrain the brain to accept “further in front.”
This is a particularly challenging skill level to develop, mostly because our natural processing systems have been automatized for us to point at or very near the objects we encounter.
Our research shows when you begin, through deliberate practice, to become much more comfortable with the gun further and further out in front, the easier it becomes to put it out there and let the brain adjust it as you match speed.
