Being Prepared for a Variety of Conditions

There are a couple of different kinds of practice. There’s conditioning practice like when you go to the gym and work out and run to stay slim and fit, and it could be your gun mount practice. It could be the three-bullet drill, playing with the gun, or just having the gun in your hands. That could be conditioning.

And then there’s practice where you develop specific skills.

Our game is about handling the infinite number of different situations under which you’ve got to shoot these targets. Sooner or later, you’ve got to realize that there are a number of different situations. Some are man-made. Some of it is just the difficulty of the target. But you have to be prepared to shoot these targets under a variety of conditions, and the targets themselves create many different conditions that have to be overcome.

Either of these types of practice will decay if they’re not maintained. If you don’t use them, you’re going to lose them.

Successful athletes spend much of their time working on particular skills that are difficult because they have one or both of these two traits. One, they may require a fast response to an unpredictable or predictable action by an opponent like hitting a baseball, returning a tennis serve, or shooting a moving target that you’ve never seen before. Two, the movements must be fluid and dynamic.

Our game requires on-the-spot analysis of targets that you’ve never seen, which is a conscious function followed by fluid, dynamic movements that are reactions to what these targets are doing with a plan that must be subconscious.

Improving a specific aspect of your game requires a high number of repetitions and immediate feedback and specific self-regulation. Effective self-regulation is something that you do before, during, and after your practice. It begins with setting goals – not big, life direction goals but more immediate goals for what you’ll be working on today.

 

This is an excerpt from the February 2012 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.