“The will to prepare to win is greater than the will to win!”
– Bear Bryant
We hear this often from shooters who aren’t very consistent: “It’s a game of pairs, so you should practice pairs!” If all you do is shoot pairs, you will prolong having any consistency or confidence in your game. While there’s a time and place to practice pairs, a steady diet of pairs will not lead you to the consistency all shooters would like to have on tournament day.
In our 37 years of shooting this game and 28 years as professional coaches, we’ve discovered that there’s a direct link between the score you shoot and how you practice.
Not enough shooters shoot single targets, moving the breakpoints. As a result, they find themselves chasing the target down and shooting with an argument that goes something like this:
“Push out, it’s too close!”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. Try this!”
“Okay.”
BOOM!
“S#@$%!”
What we’ve come to understand is unless you’re in control of the first target, you’ll never have control over the second target.
So, allow us to pose a question to you. Let’s say, through practicing singles and moving the breakpoint, you could consistently break the first bird of every pair in a place where it makes the second bird easy to see and hit with minimum movement of the eyes and gun. Would that help your ability to score? Would it give you more confidence and consistency in your score?
Then the question comes: Do you have the courage to really do some deliberate practice to improve your game?
When you begin to do deliberate practice on singles, predicting where and what it will look like when you pull the trigger, your number of hit targets will go down first and then go up. When shooters call us for a 25 or 50-minute Skype or phone consult, we first ask them to tell us the difference in the left-to-right and right-to-left sight picture. Then we ask, “What do you do when you practice?” Nine times out of ten, there is hesitation on the difference in the sight pictures. After the silence, they say, “Well, I’m looking at the target, and when it feels right, I shoot.” To that, we ask, “What’s the difference in the way the sight pictures look?” Then the hesitation comes again!
“Is your muzzle speed the same as the target’s speed when you take the shot?”
“Well, I try to make it the same!”
“What does it look like when the speed is matched?”
The hesitation comes again. Silence on the other end of the line.
We have the above conversation with six to eight shooters every week. We tell them to get their gun out, put us on speakerphone and put two objects on a cabinet or bookshelf. Then we take them through the sight picture drill and they understand what the sight pictures look like. You can hear the relief on the other end of the line.
The other thing that disappears is the perceived eye dominance problems because they’re not looking down the barrel anymore. Then we talk about what it looks like when the muzzle speed matches the target’s speed, and they understand the distance between the two stays the same. Then they realize that it’s not so much the distance between the two, but the fact that they create separation between the target and the muzzle. And as they match the speed, the brain adjusts the lead.
Well, in some instances the earth moves. But at any rate, we hear the relief in the voice of the shooter when they finally understand what it’s supposed to look like coming from the right or left and they are different! Then they understand when the speed is matched, send it! Then they’re really relieved and can’t wait to go shoot.
