Skill is what happens when you are not thinking!
We have read several studies about why people do recreational sports and how many of them seek coaching. While the number of people seeking shooting instruction is definitely increasing, the reason why people do recreational sports intrigued us most.
In a recent study in UK Sports Coaching, researchers referred to the fact that everyone has a deep psychological need to feel competent. Most people take up a recreational sport because it is fun, so the coach must mix skill improvement with fun. And the two don’t always mix easily.
In the traditional sense of coaching, improvement typically follows a fairly strict order and sequence that is decided upon by the coach. In coaching recreational sport, the student typically determines how quickly they want to progress and how often they are willing to train and explore doing new things to learn how to do something better. After all, they do want to get better. At the same time, though, they are doing the sport because it is fun first. The fun must remain in it for them to continue. But what we are learning is that the need to feel competent is the real driver.
Success has everything to do with the frequency and duration of tasking. The quest for competency is really a driving force for why people do a sport. But competence alone is not the driver. There is more and more evidence that shows people have three psychological needs that will influence their motivation to do sport:
1. Competence
2. Relatedness, and
3. Autonomy.
When these needs are met, several things happen, all of which we have witnessed in our clients. Our shooters experience enhanced motivation, enjoyment, effort, persistence, performance, and psychological well-being. We see that our clients keep coming back to us and keep shooting on their own because they keep getting better. It is almost as if they are getting a buzz from it.
So, we come back to competence: making our shooters feel good about developing their skill level on clays or birds and realizing that when the target is still, competence can be achieved quicker and easier than when the target is moving!
Perhaps the most difficult thing to explain in our sport of clay and wing shooting is what it really looks like when you pull the trigger on a moving target. If the target is still, then the sights are aligned with the target, and the trigger is squeezed. The outcome is more determined by the trigger control than the sight picture. When the target is moving, the shooter must look at the target and keep their eyes glued to the target. They must mount the gun and point it ahead of where the bird is.
On the surface that seems easy to do, but the reality is that it is the single most confusing picture on the planet to most first-time wing or clay shooters. On our website, we have gone to great lengths to explain with video animations and ShotKam shots on clays as well as game birds what that looks like.
Scientists call this perceptual-cognitive training. It has to do with how the brain anticipates and follows through with what you do in recreational sports. Everything you do is a series of circuits in your brain firing in a sequence that creates an action. It is typically a reaction to a movement of some kind, which translates into a visual cue to the brain. The quicker the brain can recognize this cue and the clearer it becomes through repetition, the better and more specific the response. That in turn creates competence, something we all like having.
Perceptual-cognitive training has shown the greatest and most specific effects on performance in sports that involve the interception of a target, as well as sports requiring strategic reactions, like soccer. Well, we feel that wing and clay shooting is definitely a sport that involves the interception of a moving target and one that requires strategic reactions!
One of the studies we read had to do with pitch recognition in baseball players. Perceptual-cognitive training was used to move correct interpretation of the pitch being served up by the pitcher from 25 percent to 75 percent (!) watching only the first 5 milliseconds of the pitch. This was as it left the pitcher’s hand with all other cues about the pitcher’s other movements blocked from view. The players were asked to guess what the pitch was just by seeing the 5-millisecond clip of the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and nothing else. If they guessed right, great. If not, they were corrected and they went through the process again and again. The above results were the outcome.
We found it interesting that the great baseball player Willie Mays was known to spend two hours before each game viewing previous game films taken from behind the plate. He would watch each of the pitchers he know he would face in the upcoming game. His history as a batter is in the record books, and he was clearly doing perceptual-cognitive training before it had a name!
The brain cannot attempt to do anything until it has a picture. The more vivid that picture, the better the response will be (competence). As we understand it, the picture in the mind’s eye first evolves as many different cues. Then as the response occurs over and over again, the brain begins to be able to anticipate the picture with fewer and fewer preliminary cues! This is how skill is developed through repetition.
The “picture” in shooting a still target is a much more simple static picture with fewer cues that can more easily be learned and anticipated by the brain. But the picture of shooting a moving target is dramatically more complex, with countless more cues. This explains why understanding what the sight picture looks like is so important in wing and clay shooting, and why it is so important to practice moving and mounting the shotgun until it becomes automatic and happens correctly without thinking.
It also explains why it takes so many more repetitions to produce competence with a shotgun on a moving target than with a rifle, pistol, or bow on a stationary target. The more familiar with the initial cue the brain becomes through repetition, the sooner the action of intercepting the moving target can begin. And the sooner the action can begin, the more time you have to react, and the better the reaction becomes.
The thinking brain takes about 300 milliseconds to function. So if you are thinking about what you are doing, you are already behind. The more skillful you become at anything, the less you think while doing it, and the fewer cues required for you to anticipate far enough ahead of the action and react correctly every time. Chunking allows the brain to group many cues into one, which allows the brain to anticipate farther and farther ahead of what is about to happen.
The more you practice the fundamentals, the more competent you will become. And the more competent you become, the more you will enjoy wing and clay shooting.
Remember: Skill is what happens when you are not thinking!
