The Challenge of Barrel Awareness
The barrel is part of the picture, and you can’t “unsee” the barrel! Once a shooter accepts the muzzle as part of the picture and, through the mounting drills, gets their brain to deal with it and keep it in the periphery, life as a shotgun shooter...
Practicing Correctly
The reason shooters practice a lot and don’t get better is they are not practicing correctly. “Correctly” means something different depending on the level of their game. The shooters between levels C and E will need to train mostly on singles, mounting and moving the gun,...
“Winners are Never Afraid to Lose”
I was watching a NASCAR event on TV the other day that had a lot of collisions. One occurred with 20 laps to go. As the pace car came out to restart the race, the announcers talked about the drivers weaving in and out, trying to...
Prediction and Long-Term Memory
Regardless of the outcome, any shot without a prediction and an execution based on the prediction will not make it to long-term memory. It will remain in your short-term memory, which is an expert at forgetting what it just did! Search for “building long-term memory” in the...
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...
Deliberate Practice: Perform the Skill Without Thinking
If you practice deliberately and with a detailed preload of the movie of the shot coming together before you close the gun and call "pull," then, through repetition, the brain can recognize the exact skill you are planning to use and can anticipate ahead of...
Quarantine Update
Here we are on day 3,080 of quarantine - or it feels like it, anyway. We have had the office closed down since March 20 and have been spending our time cleaning out boxes of stuff. We moved into that office in August 2003 and there were...
Developing Skill Through Deliberate Practice
When you have been shooting well in the past, nothing matters and everything is quiet between your ears. But how does this "not thinking" occur? When you are shooting well, it’s as if the brain already knows what it needs to do to hit the targets...
Negative Self-Talk While Shooting
Our research has shown us that almost every thought a shooter has while performing will eventually bring focus and attention back to the barrel and/or the lead. In some instances, the omnipresence of the seemingly uninterrupted stream of random thoughts turns into an avalanche of eventually...
No Argument in Your Brain
When shooting your round of 25/25 on skeet, there was no argument in your brain! This allows you to access your long-term memory and not think while the target is in the air. We see shooters who are trying to not see the barrel or trying to...