After coaching thousands of people, our findings indicate that practice is one of the most misunderstood parts of our game – as well as in the game of life.
As this shooting year begins, it might be a good thing for you to take a closer look at what you call practice. You should actually go back to last year and analyze what you did when you went to practice. Did you achieve your goals for last year? If not, you just might want to look at how you practiced and decide whether or not your practice was preparation for game day. Or was it more play and socially oriented?
Research has proven that it is the amount of hard work and specific practice and training that determines how good a person really gets. So if you want to be good or great at this sport (or anything for that matter) the first place you need to look for improvement is in what you are doing when you practice.
Before we look at practice we need to look at our game. There is some uniqueness in our game that separates it from the other shooting sports. The other sports we are talking about are skeet, trap, rifle, pistol, and archery. In these sports, the games are the same regardless of where they are played.
Let’s look at skeet as an example. You can practice skeet, and when you practice you are actually playing the game you will play on game day. Yes, there will be different backgrounds and the weather will sometimes play a role in making the game different, but the game of skeet is the same wherever you play it. Before any of you skeet shooters get your knickers in a knot, we are not saying that your game is an easy one. But we are saying that becoming proficient at it is much easier than becoming proficient at sporting clays because the targets are the same whenever you play your game.
Sporting clays has five different kinds and sizes of targets that are thrown in different directions and unknown distances and speeds, both as singles and three different pairs presentations. When you are practicing for sporting clays, you never get to practice the course you will be shooting on game day. Each course is unique to its surroundings and is changed for each day of the competition. A perfect score is an exception, not the rule. If you miss high 2 on the doubles in skeet, because you have shot it a bazillion times, correcting it is easier than correcting a miss on a chandelle rabbit at an unknown distance and speed.
So when you practice and train for sporting clays, you are practicing your ability to not only shoot and hit the target but your ability to analyze and plan the shot on the first bird of the pair so that you are set up for the second target.
It is not how much or how often you practice that makes the difference; it is the quality of the practice time that makes the biggest difference. This is a consistent topic on our Coaching Hour and was the topic of a recent article in Fortune Magazine: “What it takes to be great. Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.”
This is a great article and we recommend you read it but knowing you probably won’t, we feel compelled to share some excerpts with you:
“In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.”
“The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice.”
“So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?”
“The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call deliberate practice. It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.”
“For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.”
“Consistency is crucial. Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.”
How should you be practicing? Since you don’t have the luxury of being able to practice the field of play you will be tested on when you compete, you must relentlessly practice the basic fundamentals of your mechanical and mental game.
Shooting the course for fun is not practice. Regardless of how well you shoot, you will not get better just shooting the course. You must practice the component parts of the game. You must become proficient on all six basic trajectories. More importantly, you must be able to consistently break targets in specific breakpoints on each trajectory. Until you begin to practice single targets moving your breakpoints, there will be no rhyme or reason for your successes or failures. If you can’t break the targets consistently in different breakpoints you can’t play shape on the pairs.
In other words, if you can only break the targets in the sweet spot, the target setter has more to do with your score than you do. In order to get good at sporting clays, you must practice breaking different targets in different places so that on game day you are comfortable breaking any target in any breakpoint.
Ever wonder how the great shots make the game look so easy and shoot consistently high scores?
Here is a hint: they are not afraid to look at their game realistically for what it is. When they find a weak spot they attack it and relentlessly train on it until it becomes a strength. They create goals and train to achieve them. They keep a shooting log to keep them on track and remind them where they have been and where they are going with respect to their goals and their game. They create “deliberate practice” that is intended to improve their overall game that contains high levels of repetition. Practice is not boring to them because they are on a mission each time they touch their gun to improve something in their game and to make each part of their game more and more instinctive or subconscious.
They never think about loading the gun without first having a plan, which includes breakpoints. When they make a plan, it is not a casual thing. They are committed to their breakpoints and they break the targets where they want to because they can. They realize that they must practice their mental game as much as they practice their mechanics. They always use their pre-shot, post-shot, and correction routines on every shot they take and they are very aware of their self-talk between pairs and stations. They practice controlling their emotions when training so they are under control on game day, creating a confidence that is unshakable while competing.
Confidence and competence go hand in hand. There is no “free lunch” when it comes to peak performance in any arena.
We would like to close with one more quote from the article mentioned earlier: “Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.”
We find that getting to the top of the game in sporting clays is a five-year curve and we do agree that becoming world-class is a ten-year journey at least, whether you are a shooter or a coach.
Be patient in your curve. You cannot think your way to the right action; you must act your way to the right thought.
