You are all familiar with the phrase “practice makes perfect.” We find that practice makes permanent and perfect practice makes perfect.
To say it another way, how you practice is more important than how much you practice. In our experience, we find that people confuse practice with playing the game. Practicing incorrectly creates more problems for shooters than they realize, both mentally and physically.
Does it sound like we are playing word games? Read on.
By now you have gotten the gun out of the gun safe, dusted it off, gone to your local club, and begun your shooting year. We hope you have made some goals for your year – or at least written down why you are spending time and money shooting sporting clays (or trap or skeet for that matter). That is the biggest decision you will make this year. Without defining success, it is impossible to be successful. Without a clearly defined goal, it is impossible to make a clear plan to achieve anything or feel good about anything you might luck out and achieve.
For example, let’s say your goal was to punch out of B class by the end of the year. You mapped out your year to attend a certain number of tournaments and an appropriate amount of practice sessions in between. At the end of the year, you punched into B class. You feel good because there is a great amount of satisfaction in making a goal and achieving it. It’s also easier to make another goal and go for it. If you had punched into B class without making a goal, you would be lucky. You cannot duplicate or improve on luck because you did nothing to bring it about.
After a few years of breaking targets and shooting holes in the sky, you look into the mirror one morning and find yourself in the declining years of a mediocre career as a clay target shooter. Nobody likes to look at themselves as mediocre.
Goals work. Make challenging goals and work hard to achieve them.
The working part to achieve goals is through practice. There’s that word again. Practice is probably the most misunderstood part of this game. On our Coaching Hour, we refer to practice in two ways: training and practice.
We look at training as working on your mechanics: working on your move and mount on all six trajectories, crossing left to right and right to left, quartering left to right and right to left, birds going up, and birds going down. Practice on the other hand is about shooting five pairs in a row, five pairs in a row, five pairs in a row – just like on game day.
People who do not achieve their goals go out to practice and just shoot the course. They look at their score and if it is better than last time, they feel like they have improved. But if it is worse than last time, the blame game begins. Rather than taking responsibility for their performance and doing something about it, they blame everything else they can think of for their inability to perform or improve.
How quickly could you learn the game of baseball if the only time you touched the ball, bat, or glove, was in a game? You never practiced hitting, catching, or throwing the ball. The way you learn how to play the game is to train on the component parts of the game. The same can be said for sporting clays. You will never shoot better than your basic move and mount. You can intellectually understand how to move and mount a shotgun, but until you take the time and make the effort, it will never happen.
Technical expertise is always preceded by experience. Experience comes from first training the move and then putting the move into action when playing the game. You can’t play the game with any consistency while thinking about swing mechanics. When the swing mechanics are trained and in the subconscious, then and only then does the game become easy. It becomes just a puzzle. “Where do I need to break the first target to make the second target easily seen and broken?”
Sporting clays is a game of breakpoints. Just like playing shape in pool. If you can leave the cueball in a position to always make the next shot easy, it becomes a simple game that’s easy to play. If you can’t, that game with the fifteen numbered balls becomes the devil’s tool, whether you’re in River City or not.
In the game of golf, the hole in the green is the target and the ball is the point of focus. In sporting clays, the breakpoint is the target and the clay is the point of focus. You can’t play breakpoints if you’re thinking lead or swing mechanics. Shooting a shotgun is an art, not an engineered science. Only when the move becomes subconscious does the experience you gain from practice or playing the game become beneficial in improving your score.
How should you train?
Training is about shooting single targets, moving the breakpoints. You must become proficient at breaking the targets in more than one spot, not just where they are sweet. To play the game, you must be able to break the targets early as well as late in their flight paths on all six trajectories. Pick out one of the crossing moves (left-to-right or right-to-left) and shoot it until you master it. When you can break it in a minimum of three different breakpoints at distances out to 30 yards, you have begun to master the move on that target trajectory. When you can break it ten times in a row in each breakpoint, you’ve dominated that target trajectory. You’ve got five to go.
Practice is different. Practice is about breaking five pairs in a row in the same breakpoints. It must be like you to run five pairs in a row. The more you do it in practice, the easier it becomes for you to do it on game day. Make the pairs easy because it is the easy ones you must have all of to win!
As your consistency improves, then and only then increase the difficulty. All practice targets, whether practice or training, must be shot with your preshot routine and specific breakpoints. Smoking targets not in your predetermined breakpoints does little for the consistency of your game. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t lead to higher, more consistent scores.
The amount of practice and training will vary depending on your tournament schedule. The farther away your next tournament is, the more training you should do – and the less practicing. As the next tournament approaches, shift to more practice and less training.
Each non-tournament session should have some training in it – maybe only a box of shells on one trajectory with a routine and breakpoints. But something. The better your move becomes on all targets, the better your scores will become and the more time you should spend on practice. You will never dominate every move or target in this game, but that fact should not keep you from being determined to do your best at trying to practice and train your way to better more consistent scores.
We find that people who set challenging goals get to experience the satisfaction of achieving them more often than those who don’t.
