Deep Deliberate Practice: Honing the Circuits

Practice is not about breaking the targets.

It is about preloading the shot and deliberately firing the chunks sequentially. This makes it easier for the brain to anticipate ahead of the present and perform the skill without thinking.

The most important and most wasted part of improvement is what and how you practice. The overwhelming number of shooters who try to improve are calling “pull,” chasing the target down with the muzzle, and trying frantically to fix the shot at the end!

They judge improvement by their score, not by how well they predicted what they were going to do and how well they shot by following their plan. This kind of practice involves shooting in short-term memory. It does not have the memory or bandwidth to fire a complicated ten-part circuit like shooting a moving target with a shotgun.

So you want to consciously shoot without thinking?

You’ve got to train it by concentrating on exactly how you want the shot to come together and visualize it as a movie so you can be clear to your brain what and how you want it to create the shot.

The more times you do this deliberately in practice, the easier it becomes for you to deliberately do it at higher and higher levels. Improving the skill becomes a virtual circle.

The better the mental representation, the better the skill. And the better the skill, the better the mental representation.

This would be deep deliberate practice: constantly honing each circuit and not just accepting a broken target as a success unless you break it exactly the way you visualized it in the preload!