Shooters come to us from all over the country in our clinics and private lessons who are trying to register with the target (inserting the muzzle on or close to the target). Then they pull away to get the lead and match the speed when the lead is right and pull the trigger.
Wow, that is confusing just writing it down.
Is there any wonder why their scores top out in the mid-60s to mid-70s? And they hit the proverbial wall and just can’t get any better? Can we all agree that if we are thinking while the target is in the air, nothing good is going to happen?
Skill is what happens when you are not thinking! When you are thinking, you are trapped in your short-term memory, which is good at remembering something for a short time and then forgetting it. (The older you get, the quicker you better write it down!) And it is really good at criticizing you and evaluating how you are doing while you are performing.
Our research shows that evaluation about anything – your shooting, the weather or background noise, the smell of someone’s cigar or perfume, or just about anything – is without a doubt the best way to submarine your performance.
In this article, we will be referring to some passages from “Be A Player” by Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson, which you should read if you have not already. While it is about golf, we have realized that performance in any arena is neurologically based and is about preparing your brain to make the correct decisions, sometimes in as little as a fraction of a second. This preparation occurs in practice in our game. And as we have said many times, practice is one of the most powerful tools we have, but it is also the most misunderstood action by shooters (and golfers, for that matter.)
In their book, Marriot and Nilsson mention a study that proves the human brain is not wired to do the same repetition the exact same way over and over again. This is why emphasizing “perfect at the end” is so powerful:
“Why is the idea of variability so critical for golfers to understand? In our opinion, too many players focus on achieving consistency.; They practice the same shots and swings over and over, convinced that more time on the range will enable them to perfectly replicate a swing that will never let them down.
But scientific research now shows that endless hours on the range are ineffective. In 2006, Stanford University’s Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering and neurobiology, showed that humans aren’t capable of perfectly replicating a physical action. Shenoy, who studies the neural basis of movement, explained: ‘The main reason you can’t move the same way each and every time—when you’re swinging a golf club, say—is that your brain can’t plan the swing the same way each time.’ ”
Almost all golfers today are young and in great shape. And due to the evolution of the game, they are practically clones of the recent greats like Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson. However, when you go back 30 years to the age of Arnold Palmer, Jack Niklaus, Ben Hogan, Chi Chi-Rodriguez, Gary Player, and the like, their swings were anything but perfect clones of each other. In fact, in most instances, they were anything but similar to the swings of golfers today.
All of those great golfers with their own unique swing and follow-through had one thing in common that made them great: when the club and the ball made contact, the ball went where they intended it to go! They were consistent in the last 15 percent of every shot at the contact point. Regardless of where the club came from, the contact point was perfect most of the time.
In short, while their form was less-than-perfect by today’s standards, they could score on the golf course.
The more recent studies on effective practice that we have discussed extensively on our Coaching Hour podcasts explain that there are basically two types of practice – random and blocked.
In blocked practice, the shooter will go to one target and shoot the same target over and over and over from the same station and in the same breakpoint, thinking that doing so will make them more consistent. Shooters who do this will be concentrating on their setup, their move and mount, and the complete swing through, breaking the target, trying to repeat it and make it perfect.
When practicing this way, because they are trying to make it perfect, shooters will typically be a little more consciously aware of what they are doing while they are doing it. In the beginning, there is a need to do some blocked practice. But if you can break it up and make it more random, your results will be better.
Rather than standing in one place and shooting the same target in the same breakpoint 100 times, pick a trajectory like left to right crossing, go through the course and shoot all of the left-to-right crossing targets in two or three different breakpoints – say, five times each. If you want to maximize your practice time, you must do your visual preload of the movie of how you want the shot to come together and believe it and execute the shot according to your plan. This allows for random and blocked practice to be achieved at the same time. The next time, do right to left in the same manner.
In the beginning, shooters are typically going to the course with a flat of ammo and shooting the stations according to the menu and calling that practice. And when they run out of ammo, practice is over. If they find a certain shot that gives them a little difficulty, they might shoot it over and over trying to groove that particular shot. But in our experience, practicing this way will not allow for better and better performances under pressure.
When shooters practice without a visual preload of what they are about to ask their brain to do, they close the gun, call “pull,” chase the bird down, and try to fix the shot at the end. This leads the shooter to think while they are fixing the shot, much like the shooter we described at the beginning of this article.
Calling “pull” without a specific visual preload of how you want the shot to come together leads to the argument in your head as the shot comes together. This begins the evaluation process, which feeds fear, which makes you speed up and causes your confidence to evaporate.
So, where does confidence come from? The same place consistency comes from – how you practice. In fact, confidence and consistency cannot be practiced. They are what is leftover from practice.
How do we become more confident and consistent? Change the way you practice, always using a visual preload (a movie of exactly how you want the shot to come together). Stop trying to just break the target! Push yourself to break the target the way you want to break it. In practice, even you break the target but not according to your plan, don’t be satisfied until your visual preload and the actual shot mirror each other. This is the birthplace of confidence and consistency.
When you have looked at a target in practice and played the movie how you are going to break it and then executed the shot and the visual was exactly like the actual shot enough times, then and only then will you become confident under pressure. There is a reason that confidence and competence build on each other. And together they create consistency.
Eventually, you will begin to take your practice to another level and stop wishing, hoping, and trying – all of which involve thinking. When you go to a tournament and begin to break the targets the way you want to break them and stop trying to fix the shot at the end, you will begin to experience the consistency and calm you are looking for.
We all have a circuit in our brains that is anticipating ahead of where we are. But when we put a shotgun in our hands, we stop anticipating and begin to think and react due to the lack of a committed plan.
What we are learning now is it is not as important how the shot begins; it’s more important how the shot ends. Being perfect in the last 15 percent of the shot is becoming clearer to us. The more vivid the preload of the movie of how we have practiced the shot coming together, the easier it becomes for the brain to consistently produce the shot the way we want it to come together.
You have all experienced this during a shot when the hands just pushed the gun somewhere and the gun went off and the target broke!
When practicing using single targets, always vividly imagine how the shot comes together and tie both sides of the brain up with doing different things, thereby working together. This is a big deal because your swing will not be the same every day you go to shoot.
Recognizing how your body’s rhythm is on any given day, training with what it is, and making adjustments and scoring is huge. This is why we believe that concentrating on the last 14 percent of the shot and letting the first 86 percent take care of itself is so powerful. Chasing the target down and trying to fix it at the end creates tension and panic, which allows for the argument to get in, and robs you of consistency in your game.
Being perfect in the last 12 to 15 percent of the shot is what I am concentrating on. I will engage both sides of the brain, creating “synchronicity” throughout the shot. This stops the argument most shooters have in their head because they are trying to not think. This is impossible to do, just like not seeing the gun!
Most shooters are shooting with an argument because they have not given their brain a clear directive about what they are about to have it do. For us, synchronicity is totally committing to the shot you are about to shoot, the way you want the shot to come together, and the result you have visualized before you close the gun and call “pull.”
The more you vividly preload the shot and the more your results mirror your preload, the less you will think during the shot, and the more consistent and confident you will become, and the better you will shoot.
So, the first by-product of preloading the shot is not thinking when the target is in the air. The other by-product of having a detailed visual plan for every shot is the ability to instantly correct after the first miss and replicate the correction and run the station out.
