Whether you are a serious tournament competitor or a casual recreational shooter, you have experienced being nervous when performing in front of other shooters, or even bystanders who know nothing about what you are trying to do or even care what your outcome might be.
Our brains are most comfortable when they are in situations or circumstances that they’ve been in many times before because it is easy for them to anticipate ahead and to know what’s coming next. When we shoot a moving target, our brains must see the target where it is but put the muzzle of the gun where it will be.
So, in essence, shooting a moving target is playing in the future while you are in the present at the same time. If the brain cannot continually anticipate ahead of where it is, it does not like it and will react in a variety of ways, none of which leads to a good performance.
Are you confused yet?
We have been studying famous neurologist David Eagleman, who’s written many books on the brain: how it interprets our reality even though it’s encased in our skulls in total darkness, and how it receives intermittent signals from our senses and interprets our reality based on the sequence of the signals.
This is fascinating to us because for 28 years we’ve been observing the human brain doing just this. We’ve been experimenting with different approaches (both visual and verbal) to get the brain to respond to consistently hit a moving target. We recommend you go to YouTube and check out what he has to say in his many videos about how our brains create our reality.
It’s actually the sequencing of the impulses that enables the brain to operate a minimum of 80 milliseconds ahead, and sometimes as much as 300 milliseconds ahead of what is really happening. This is why when we’re in strange or unfamiliar surroundings, we become nervous. The reason we’re nervous is that we’ve never been in the specific situation before, and the brain cannot anticipate even the 80 milliseconds ahead, which is its normal operating range of anticipation.
When that happens, not only are we not sure of ourselves, but we go really conscious with our thought process. The conscious part of our brains operates as much as 200-300 milliseconds behind real-time, which leads to constantly second-guessing everything we do. That keeps our brain from being able to anticipate what’s coming next, which leads to more doubt, which causes the uncontrolled release of adrenaline. That’s what you feel as the jitters. Remember: it’s the sequencing of the signals from our different senses that allows for critical and consistent interpretation by the brain.
Okay, so back to the sporting course, just when these jitters occur, what they really are, and how to control them.
The jitters can occur just about anywhere, but they mostly show up due to two neurological functions: hope or evaluation. In fact, on a recent Coaching Hour podcast, we talked about how hope and evaluation were performance killers and were the root cause of why shooters get nervous when shooting in front of others.
So, let’s talk about hope first. Hoping to shoot well comes from a lack of preparation or a lack of confidence due to incorrect or inconsistent preparation. Both of these come from not wanting to fail in front of others, because of what they might say or think about you – neither of which you can control. So, you’ve really given your results over to the very people you were afraid to fail in front of in the first place!
You leave for the shoot hoping to shoot well, you arrive hoping to shoot well, you register hoping to shoot well, and you get to the first station hoping to shoot well. And when it’s your turn to shoot, you’re hoping to shoot well, and when you leave the station your brain says, “You suck!”
Going to the next station, you’re now evaluating how you’re going to shoot today based on how you just shot the last station. Your evaluation takes you into the minefield of emotions, which triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which increases your heart rate and opens the door to imagining the worst that could happen. Did we mention that our brains don’t like it when they don’t know what’s coming next for whatever reason?
This can be felt as anger, frustration, whirling of incomplete complete, sweaty palms, increase in blood sugar, increase in heartbeat, shortness of breath, not being able to fixate on anything, big muscle moves (not small muscles first), movements speed up for no reason, involuntary movements both in the body and (especially) eyes, to name a few.
Needless to say, by the sixth station, you’re not having a good time. And the sad thing to us is that there’s a way for you to not let any of this happen in the first place.
The bottom line is the jitters are a result of the brain not being able to anticipate ahead of the circumstances it finds itself in, either due to fear of failing or never having been there before. Some shooters are just more nervous than others.
Our observations based on more than 40,000 athletes we’ve encountered in our professional coaching journey have shown that regardless of what causes your jitters, they can be overcome. And experience is the best way to overcome them. Not experience at the tournaments, but your experience on the practice field. But to do this, you must change your goals and how you practice!
The nervous feelings, regardless of how they manifest, all are based in fear. And you conquer fear through training and focusing on what you are going to do, not on how you are doing. Eventually, you must get over missing, score, and what others might think about you. You’re gonna miss, the score is what it is, and you can’t control what others think. Stop digging that hole!
In our many seminars, this comes up regularly. The way we get the audience involved is to talk about public speaking – a fear that many have and can immediately relate to. The first thing you must overcome in public speaking is that you must be a master of the material. Then you must be organized in your delivery and have the courage to say, when asked a question you don’t know the answer to, that’ll you’ll find out and get back to the person.
When you speak in public, you have two options: you’ll either hit it out of the park or stink it up. And if your attitude is “regardless of what happens, I will learn from it and be better the next time,” you’ve taken the outcome out of the equation. This keeps you from hoping or evaluating while performing! There are those two words again.
Now let’s explore exactly what you have to do in sporting clays to become a master of the material. Because until you become a master of the material, you will keep hoping!
You’ll eventually realize that you must touch that gun every day and do something with it: the OSP Three Bullet Drill, the OSP Flashlight Drill, visualize target presentations and move and mount the gun into the shot, seeing the target on the correct side of the gun. Do something with that gun, because until everything you do with that gun happens 95% perfect 100% of the time without thinking about it, you are not a master of the fundamentals required to shoot at higher and higher levels.
Shooters who watch the Kill Shot Reviews of pairs of targets we have shot with the ShotKam on our website are finding that watching them before they go train or shoot a tournament enables them to visualize in greater detail their prediction of how and where they will shoot each bird in the pair. When you get the opportunity to shoot, you must train at a higher level, with prediction and execution based on your prediction.
Not near enough shooters practice shooting single targets in different breakpoints, which leads to not having confidence on the first bird of each pair. The target setters are not going to allow you to break the first bird on every pair in the sweet spot.
In our book, You Gotta Be Out of Your Mind, in Chapter Twelve, “High Intensity Practice, with a Purpose” we talk about different practice ratios based on your average score and how far off your next tournament is. It does vary a lot based on where your game is!
Like it or not, our game is a first bird game. If you can consistently and confidently break the first bird on every pair where you need to break it to make the second bird easy, then and only then will you be in the 80s! The keywords in the last sentence are consistently and confidently. Consistency and confidence cannot be practiced. They are the residue of practice, which leads us to the last part of this epistle.
Consistency and confidence come from repetition, repetition, repetition, which is disguised as training and practice. Remember us saying in the beginning that it was the sequence of the signals from our senses that allowed the brain to anticipate ahead of where we are, and to be relaxed about what we’re doing because it knows what is coming next… based on the sequence of the signals from our senses?
Perhaps the biggest mistake shooters make is not the number of targets they practice, but not practicing them with a consistent pre-shot, post-shot, or correction routine. It’s the sequencing of the steps in the pre-shot routine that is so critical. We want the brain to know without a doubt what you’re asking it to do and where, and more importantly, when! This is accomplished through visualizing in detail the movie of the shot coming together and where you want it to come together.
As you start your routine by closing the gun, your brain knows within a tenth of a second when you are going to say “pull” and ask it to perform your prediction. This is how you shoot with confidence and without thinking!
Remember, the brain is more relaxed when it knows what’s coming next. Practicing with a routine that’s exactly the same every time allows the brain to know what, how, and where you want it to take the shots. But it’s equally important to know when you are going to ask it to act! This allows every move you make to be a small muscle-big muscle move because the brain is not surprised when you call “pull.”
We cannot emphasize enough how important it is that the sequence of events in your routines and actions are the same each and every time. This allows your brain to know when you are going to ask it to perform. Without this cornerstone in your game, you will continue to surprise your brain when you call “pull” and experience anxiety, which causes the jitters. But you won’t know why, and you’ll continue to perform below your potential.
The first symptom of anxiety is to speed up your sequence, which keeps the brain from being able to anticipate ahead and know when you are going to ask it to act. As you begin to close the gun, you want your brain to say, “I got this. Let’s roll!”
In our book, that sounds like confidence!
