We shot our first sporting targets in the spring of 1983 at the first public sporting clays range in the country: Champion Lake Gun Club in northwest Houston. There was an Orvis shooting range in Fulshear, but it was private and mostly a teaching facility that was not open to the public. There was also Chuck Dryke’s place in Sequim, Washington but his place was similar to the Orvis facility.
At Champion Lake, a round in the beginning was 25 targets. On Gil’s first round he missed the last bird due to a gun malfunction and was hooked. In the first tournament of 50 targets, he shot a perfect score and was “gut hooked!”
This beginning lead to us traveling the country with our son Brian, competing at different clubs and sharing what we knew and had learned about this new game called sporting clays. During that time, Gil carded another perfect score and even won HOA with a 66/100 which, he would tell you, was to this day probably the best score of his life.
As luck would have it, we were fortunate enough to win at many of the places we visited and were nicknamed by Bob Brister “The Texans” in his Thursday Houston Chronicle column. He talked about how this new shotgun game was evolving and how this group of shooters from the Houston area were winning almost everywhere they went to compete. As we traveled, people began to recognize us and would ask us how we did what we did. It was from those questions and our experience that our lives were changed forever. We became known to other shooters as people who could not only shoot the game but could teach it equally as well.
In 1990, a shoulder injury forced Gil to stop shooting for almost a year. He began to really study the game and developed a passion for coaching and how vision worked to explain to others what we saw and did when we shot. It wasn’t long until Vicki got sucked into wanting to understand more about how it all worked and. In 1994, Vicki won the national championship and we sold our photography business and continued to teach professionally.
Wow, has the game changed since then! And how the science of sports vision has evolved!
In our first book “If It Ain’t Broke, Fix It” we talked about score plateaus that our students went through and why they had occurred and what had to be practiced to get to the next one. Fifteen books later, we admit that although the game itself has changed, the plateaus still exist. But what needs to be done to move through them has changed a little, which is the point of this installment.
With the invention of the MRI, what was suspected to occur in the brain was expanded exponentially, and the science of sports vision was born. While we are sure some people think nothing new has been uncovered about vision and its application to sports like ours for the last 80-100 years, from where we sit nothing could be farther from the truth! The half-life of scientific information now is so much shorter than back then. We continue to learn more and more about how the brain interprets the visual input from the eyes and how to train the brain to do it more specifically and quickly. We are amazed at what we are experiencing in our coaching results and what a positive change our learning has made in our ability to diagnose problems and immediately engage in the real solutions that fix the problem long-term.
In this installment, we are going to talk about four plateaus that all shooters share, what causes them, and how to practice your way out of them the most efficient way.
Score Plateau 65
You are here because you have fallen in love with the game and you can’t get enough of it.
Up to now, you have just been playing around with different things. While you can hit some of the targets some of the time, something is missing in your game: consistency. And no matter how much you shoot and practice, you just can’t find the consistency button.
You are learning to move and mount the gun, or you should be. If you think you will get very far in this game without learning to move and mount the gun, you are badly mistaken. Many of the pros shoot gun up, but what they don’t have to do is check the beads to see if the gun is mounted correctly because they have a consistent move and mount. They know – without looking – that the gun is mounted properly every time. When they mount the gun, it’s like hitting the space bar on the keyboard of your computer – it just happens. That is where consistency begins. If you will learn to move and mount the gun now, you will learn as much as three times faster going forward.
While learning to move and mount the gun without looking at it, you are settling into a comfortable grip, stance, foot position, break zone, and hold points. You will feel like you are making progress, but you are still moving the gun too fast.
Your gun fit is evolving. You are learning how to merge the gun in front of the target on line and take the shot as you mount. You don’t have time to check the lead, which makes you look at the barrel and miss. You are battling thinking while you shoot and not being in control. This creates the inconsistency.
Because you have not put in the time to learn to move and mount, you close the gun, mount it, check beads in the breakpoint, move the gun to the hold point and check beads again. You cut your eyes to the focal point, call “pull,” chase the target down and desperately try to fix the shot at the end. Then you curse and blame your result on everything but yourself!
The reason you are here is you have to think about what you are doing with the gun, which puts the gun in the shot. You are either in the cage with the gun or downrange with the target. You can’t be in two places at once! Learn to move and mount the gun and 65 will be in your rearview mirror.
Score Plateau 75
You are here because 75 percent of the targets in the round can be shot with 3’ of lead or less and the size of your pattern makes up for many mounting and pointing errors. But if you have learned to move and mount the gun you won’t spend much time here.
Now you have to learn sight pictures (there are only two) and train to minimize the amount of movement during the shot and begin shooting targets with less follow-through. Why less follow-through? Well, our targets are delivered in pairs and the target setter will pick your pocket in the transition between the first breakpoint and the pickup point on the second target.
So two things have to happen here: you must begin to learn to break the targets in specific breakpoints (sweet, early, and late) so you can play shape on the first bird of the pair and minimize the amount of eye and gun movement to the second target. As you implement this in your practice you will see your move from the first breakpoint to the second target become more efficient due to less follow-through to stop and change directions. Your practice must move to a higher level with goals and routines on every shot. It is here where you must stop trying to take the shot when the gun touches your face and learn to accept the gun in the periphery. You learn to control your gun speed at the end of the shot and begin to predict what it will look like when the trigger is pulled before the gun is closed and you call “pull.”
If you want to leave the 75 percent range, you must stop closing the gun, chasing the target down from behind, looking down the barrel, and trying to fix it at the end. You must practice the sight pictures on targets from the left and the right and know what it’s going to look like before you close the gun. Once you learn the sight pictures and how to match gun speed to target speed, you will begin to learn how to self-correct and correct after the first miss – not the third. To get into the low 80s, you must begin to self-correct. And all misses on your card must be only in the first pair!
No more excuses! You must begin to own the result and take the responsibility of fixing your game on your own. It is here that learning to be honest with yourself and committing to improving will play a big role in your goal-setting and success.
Score Plateau 83
You are here because you have a perfect gun mount that happens consistently without thought. You have stopped looking at the gun in the setup and down the gun during the shot. You have stopped cutting your eyes looking for the target.
It is here that the journey of learning how to score begins and you practice pairs more now than ever before. You must be critical during practice. If you smoke the targets but the move was all wrong, don’t be satisfied. Because you have practiced everything from the muzzle to your toes and you know what it will look like before you close the gun, you can finally begin to concentrate on the target. This is where you can really begin to see the target.
You only have 100 percent of focus and up until now, your focus has been shared with all of the other mechanical parts of your game, which keeps you from having enough focus to really see the target. Once, through practice, you have mastered your mechanical game, you don’t have to focus on move, mount, gun speed, lead, follow-through, and all that stuff. You have freed up so much focus that can now be used for the target.
Here, your routines must be perfected and practiced and learned, and everything you do on tournament day must be structured into a habitual routine. You gotta get on the road and travel and put a number on your back and just go shoot. And while you are traveling, you must learn what you need to eat – including quantities and times. Learn how to sleep well on the road, and how far you can drive and shoot well in a one-day shoot. You must begin getting eight good hours of deep sleep every day at least two weeks before a big competition and learn what it takes for you to get in bed and get good restful sleep during the tournament.
You will find that you will need to eat and be in bed by 8 PM because the last two hours of the eight-hour sleep cycle are the most important – that is when what you have learned the day before is committed to permanent memory. You got to enter a tournament with extra sleep in the bank when you get there. A commitment to going to the gym and learning to eat right will become new habits that will serve you well going forward.
Score Plateau 93 and Above
It’s hard to call 93 a plateau. Most shooters would love to be able to say they had plateaued at 93. But the sad truth is that few shooters have the commitment to do what it takes to get here. They never put in the time on their game to practice consistency and as a result, they never become consistent.
We have coached hundreds of shooters to this level, and without exception they all have flawless moves and mounts and never check the gun in the setup or the shot. They have burned the sight pictures into their permanent memory and when they look at the show birds, they instantly see the movie of how the shot is going to come together. Every time they call “pull” they have given their brain a clear picture from the library of sight pictures they have specifically put in there from hundreds of practice sessions.
One day they are shooting in a tournament and realize they are on the cusp of winning one and they pull from their experiences of the past. They realize they can’t get careful or become hesitant and check the lead because every time they tried that in the past it has not worked. This memory gives them the courage to let it go and trust themselves enough to really finish on top the first time. After they get that one under their belt they know how they got there and what it feels like to win one. They then feed on that as they reach to higher and higher levels of performance.
And that, children, is how you get to the top. Only in fairytales will shooters win their club championship and the next week win the Open or Nationals. To do that takes a lot of hard work… and the dictionary is the only place where success comes before work!
