Maintaining Your Balance

You don’t give it any thought as you travel through your everyday life but staying in balance is a full-time job that has been turned over to the automaticity part of the brain. This is due to the massive use this circuit gets as you walk, jog, run, play golf, bend over at the waist to pick something up, or simply move through your home going room to room.

Maintaining balance is a full-time job for the brain and is very important when shooting a moving target with a shotgun. When moving with a target, if the shooter has an option to hit the target but lose balance and fall, or miss the target and maintain balance… well, the shooter will remain standing!

The amount of body movement will vary shooter to shooter. Factors include body size and shape, width of stance, elevation and angle of the target, distance the shooter must travel with their eyes and the gun to see and hit the second target of a pair, and how hard the shooter pulls their gun into their body. Even the different clay target games affect how much body movement shooters have.

All of these things will affect how your body maintains balance first and maintains a specific balance point throughout the shot(s). This is critical to consistency and high scores.