Refinement and Focus
Achieving mastery in clay or wingshooting is about more than just accumulating hours of practice or mastering the technicalities of the sport. It involves a deep understanding of one's own mental and emotional processes, as well as the discipline to refine and focus on the...
Mechanical Fundamentals in Shooting
A key observation from years of coaching is the impact of cheek pressure on consistency and improvement in shooting. Excessive cheek pressure, often believed to provide a more aggressive approach, can actually hinder potential. This becomes more evident in older shooters, where balance and less body...
Understanding and Application of Knowledge
All skills start as mere knowledge. However, the crux of mastery lies in understanding when and how to apply this knowledge. Let’s apply this to skeet. Identifying and correcting specific issues, such as problems with High 2 or Low 5 shots, requires not only knowledge of...
Diagnosing Skeet and Sporting Clays Misses
Skeet and sporting clays both present unique challenges. Before you can even begin learning how to compete in skeet, you need to learn how to break targets in the same breakpoints on each station every time. It’s a more regimented game of the same targets over...
Paying Attention to Your Successes
We’ve learned that, in building a good mental game, you have to look at things for what they really are. Our brains are predisposed to not give successes nearly as much thought or emotion as we do failures. And it’s a real problem. It’s a real thing...
Shooting “Bling”
If I could find ten people that would give me a million dollars to have a AA game in sporting clays overnight, I’d make them all drink a pint of goat’s blood and then leave town with their money. They would be too sick for...
Expectations and Honesty
Expectations should be about the time that you put in and being honest with yourself. Being honest with yourself is what it's all about. When you're in the cage, it's just you and the target. These are some questions you can ask yourself: “Are you good enough...
Letting Go and Setting Goals
If you’re competing to have a very open look at who you are and your abilities, then you have to admit to yourself that when you go to a competition you have to let go of caring about how you shoot. You’ve got to let...
Looking Behind the Barrel
The very act of putting the gun in front of the target without seeing it makes the shooter want to look at it. When the target comes to the gun, the gun is part of the picture. This is significant because the target is the...
What Caused the Errors?
Deciding what caused the errors is the most critical part of self-evaluation. That’s one of the unique things about our system. Once you start working on being really smooth, once you’re early in the breakpoint, you can better evaluate why you missed. When we show our...