The core purpose of the visual system is prediction. Our visual processing system, when you combine that with other senses, provides information to the central nervous system to allow a prediction of what is coming next. Our game is based on what is coming next. Rather than trying to predict where it’s going to be, […]
More than two decades ago, I was coaching a student in FITASC, and he asked me, “What do you think about?” I said, “When you’re between stations or between shooters on a FITASC parkour, I want you to look at the ground and see if you could find a Viceroy cigarette butt.” “A what?” “A […]
When you watch an elite shooter, everything is always the same. You can think all you want to with the gun open, but once it’s closed, it’s go time. If that gun closes and there’s a thought, if you look at the barrel or a bird in the distance or something, you need to open […]
When we’re looking out at the horizon, we see a circle of vision. Two-hundredths of one percent of that circle is where your sharp vision resides. Your sharp vision cannot see movement and it’s only five milliseconds behind real time on the arrival time of the data from the fovea to the motor center. It’s […]
Deliberate practice is critical for reaching a focus ratio of 95-5. The baggage that everyone carries through all of these plateaus is worrying about the lead. The more you think about it, the more you reference it, and the more it’s going to hurt you. At the highest level, you don’t have to worry about […]
Everything we do with a shotgun occurs in the periphery and how much awareness of the barrel is an evolution. We’ve all been through it. When I’m shooting well, the lead looks the same on almost every target. It’s just space, but it’s stable. If I see a target that is fast crossing at distance, […]
I had a lesson not long ago with a shooter who’d been shooting with a pro-tournament shooter, complaining about vision problems and closing an eye. He’d been told over and over, “Now this target’s going to take three feet to the right and a foot under.” And he was very frustrated. After showing him what […]
Sports vision expert Dr. Dan Laby taught us that there’s no difference in reaction time between experienced and non-experienced athletes in simple reaction situations such as “red light, green light, stop, go.” You’ve been doing it your whole life. However, there is a dramatic difference in non-trained and trained athletes in complex decisions where the […]
Put 100 shotgun shooters in a room and ask all of them to raise their hands if they would like to be more consistent with their shotguns and everyone in the room will raise their hands. But how many of them will leave their hands up when you ask who is willing to actually spend […]
Tiger Woods in his early career tied with several guys going into the last day and they just left him in a cloud of dust. And they asked him, “Well, Tiger what happened today?” He said, “While I did not score as well today as I had hoped, I feel that my performance forced my […]
Do you have any affirmations that you tell yourself and others that you’re going to do at the next tournament you go to? For instance: “I’ve been working on my process, and I want you to know that when we get to the tournament, all I’m going to do is read the targets, get in the […]
You can’t be mediocre and then show up at the tournament on Sunday and be excellent. Excellence is a way of life. You gotta strive to be excellent at everything. This doesn’t mean you’re going to be perfect at it. You can give it all to God and say, “I trust you, I’m going to […]
There have been hundreds of times in the last 35 years when I’ve had a really good shooter who’s trying to learn a new move. He’ll be struggling and hit it three or four times. And here’s the problem: he thinks he has it. He’s gone to evaluating. He jumps into the evaluation quagmire, and all […]
For most, training your mind to be stronger than your feelings is such a far reach that they can’t even imagine themselves always reacting in a positive way in a difficult negative situation, because it is easier to just give in and enjoy the negativity. Thinking in a situation like this is difficult and must […]
So, you think you have a mental problem or your mental game needs to be improved? You might think this is the only way you can explain the missing targets you know how to break in clutch situations. While you might have a mental problem, let’s look at your overall entire game before we use […]
In the beginning, it will be difficult for you to commit to a shot as predicted because of your desire to break the target instead of executing the prediction to see if the prediction was correct. When you begin to train this way – by committing to the shot the way you want it to […]
Shooters often do not practice with intensity, which can confuse them. They go through the motions and fun, and then when they go to a tournament they try, and their brain doesn’t recognize them. They’re not relaxed or happy-go-lucky – they’re not having fun. They’re trying. What you have to do in practice is build […]
After you break the first pair, the typical emotional reaction is relief. Wrong. When you break the first pair, and you break that second bird of the first pair, as you open the gun, the first thing you ought to do is replay visually what you just saw. That becomes a preload for the next […]
The ideal way for the brain to move the body is small muscle, big muscle. And when I’m moving, as I call or I’m moving before I call, it’s so much easier for me to get everything synced up. Because my hands are moving, if the small muscles are moving before you see the bird, […]
In a study on baseball that Dan Levy and Dave Kirscher did, they looked at simple reactions and complex reactions. They compared trained athletes to everyday people. When the decision was a simple decision, like “red light, green light, stop or go,” there was no difference in the speed or accuracy between the trained athletes, […]
In the beginning, we know when a shooter is shooting with a gun doesn’t fit. We know it shoots high. I’ll typically give the shooter my gun and then he hits five targets in a row at 50 yards that he couldn’t touch with his gun. And then he says, “Oh, but I couldn’t shoot […]
No one ends up with the same visual confusion they begin with. And don’t make too much over eye dominance. Learning the sight picture and the three-bullet drill will make most dominance issues fade away. Practice the sight pictures over and over and always predict how you want the shot to come together. Trigger time […]
When you’re looking between the birds of the pair, you’ll understand just how much time you really have to shoot the pair, which will eliminate the hurry on the first bird or the first pair. And eventually will get you more X’s. Never miss a target because you think you have to hurry. Whenever you […]
I had a lesson with a 70-year-old guy who had been taking lessons from the young guns – trying to pull away, trying to insert, trying to match speeds then pull away, all manner of things at the end of the shot. When he hit it moving the same speed at the end the first […]
Goals are very personal. How you look at things, how you name them, and the value you draw from them are also very personal things. In some of the emails I’ve gotten from the guys who are going to be on tonight, they’re all saying the same thing. You need to research where you are, […]
When a new shooter says something about the confusion, someone – albeit well-intended – throws their hands up in the air and proclaims that you’re left-eye dominant. You immediately feel like damaged goods, and some well-meaning person puts tape on your non-shooting eye and the confusion goes away. The reason it goes away is that […]
In our research, we have begun to understand that there are different kinds of practice. While there are many different phases of practice, we want to deal with two of them here- “blocked’ and “random.” When a shooter goes out and shoots the same target over and over again in the same breakpoint, that would […]
When we see the obvious mistake, we know where the mistake began, and we attack the root cause which is rarely where the shooter missed the target! Remember that your skill is what you have trained the brain to fill in when it finds itself in familiar circumstances. So, for you to improve, you need […]
When shooters begin to learn to see the target behind where the barrel is pointed, they stop looking at the barrel. The barrel has a place in the picture, but it is always in the periphery. We have been using a gun mount practice to show the brain what it really looks like to see […]
Consistency and confidence cannot be practiced; they are what is left over from practicing, which is why you must bring your practice game to higher and higher levels. There is a myth out there that you can talk yourself into becoming a better shooter. But sorry, that golden ring or silver bullet doesn’t exist. You […]
One big thing we have been emphasizing is that skill resides in a person’s memory. A person cannot visualize something they have never seen, so there is no shortcut to becoming proficient with a shotgun – especially in hunting situations. In addition, our brain has no ability to do what we want it to do […]
In our 31 years now as professional coaches, we have seen thousands of performers who have had differing degrees of skill with a shotgun, fishing rod, golf club, tennis racket, public speaking and many more activities. The ones who eventually end up being really good are the ones that attack skill building as “desirable difficulty!” […]
Gun fit is a fairly broad topic that encompasses many different facets, starting with how consistent the shooter can mount the gun. Of course, this comes from repetition, repetition, repetition. We are sure you have been told or have read that gun fit is important and is a key to being successful on the range […]
The ability to take disappointment out of a situation is a full-time job for a coach. It also needs to be a full-time job for a competitor if they really want to be good. Our brains will take the negative road in a heartbeat. You must train yours to say things in a way that […]
The one trait that seems to be common among all successful competitors is the ability to stay calm under pressure, which leads to the ability to think clearly and act according to a plan – to stay process-oriented instead of outcome-oriented. We use the phrase “process-oriented” when referring to this mental state of mind. It […]
Have you ever heard this phrase? “That gun fits you but to shoot it well, you will have to either use a little more cheek pressure or just float the bird a little” Our 30 years of research has shown us that if you must use more cheek pressure to make a gun shoot for […]
“I wonder where in the learning process the unlearning of bad habits comes in. Maybe you don’t unlearn at all. Maybe the process of learning anew writes over the old habits in the brain!” Look at skill as a set of railroad tracks that are all rusted from lack of use and the elements. When […]
I had a lesson with a fellow, and we worked on a station had trouble with at a tournament. I had him shoot them as a true pair, which was a pretty tough one. The wind was at our back and it was blowing the second target about 60 yards out there, and the first […]
I was working with Craig Hill after he had gone to the world shoot and finished eighth in the world. He came to me again and awked, “Okay, what do I have to do different?” “Describe your practice routine,” I said. Now, Craig is 6’6, a big ol’ boy who can handle recoil. No problem […]
There’s a direct correlation between preparation and performance. We can get by when we’re on the road with less-than-ideal nutrition or exercise. But we have to have sleep. Sleep is a commodity, and once you get behind on a four or five-day trip, you never get caught up. Sometimes we have to be a little […]
“I’ve been shooting for two years and should be shooting better than C class. I have too many unforced errors. Thoughts on my dilemma?” This shooter wants to know: is it focus? Is it routine? Is it commitment to the breakpoint? Is it overthinking? Is it confidence? What exactly is it? We’ve answered these […]
When people shoot year-round and compete in winter tournaments in Florida and Arizona, somewhere between June 15th and July 15th, they hit a wall and plateau out and go down. It takes them until the end of August or middle of September to work their way out of it. We were not aware of it […]
Brian set an especially deceptive set of targets at American Shooting Center one time, and I did a clinic on how to read targets. He had a pair coming from the left and the traps were real close together. But somehow, he figured out a way to make a target come off the trap and […]
“When a true pair is thrown, either close together with similar flight paths or crosses early in their flight path, are there some general practices to minimize the visual confusion? Move pick-up points? Hold well under targets? Any guidance would be appreciated.” The biggest thing is to make your plan. Which target are you […]
Most people practice in their short-term memory, but you’ve got to force the brain out of its comfort zone to put together a new circuit. The more you do that, the better it becomes at recall. So, when you see a pair or a target you’ve never seen before, it can go to things that […]
I had a student who was really good out to about 30 to 35 yards, but when a target was any further than that, he wasn’t so good. “Okay, tell me what kind of targets are giving you problems,” I said. “If they’re fast, I can hammer ‘em, and if they’re close, I can hammer […]
Our brains are wired to focus on the negative. This can be a major hurdle for athletes who aspire to excel in competitive environments like skeet or sporting clays. But the key lies in flipping this tendency on its head. When faced with a disappointing performance, it’s vital to find the positives amidst the negatives. […]
I had a client from the Northwest who was advancing well by focusing on single targets, determining breakpoints, and testing her predictions. However, her progress derailed after taking advice from an experienced shooter at a local club. He suggested she shift her focus to the second target more swiftly. Consequently, she shifted to practicing pairs, […]
One trait stands out amongst successful competitors: the ability to stay calm under pressure. This calmness fosters clear thinking and a focus on the process rather than just the outcome. The mental state referred to as being “process-oriented” evolves through trial and error, successes and failures, eventually leading to a mindset that allows for clear […]
In our sport, lots of shooters impulsively close their gun and call “pull,” proceeding to hurriedly track the targets and trying to hastily correct their shot at the last moment. This often leads to confusion as to why there’s no improvement in their performance. We typically start by asking our clients if they feel they’re […]
Skill development is an intricate process rooted in biology and psychology, both in shotgunning and life itself. The key to mastering any skill, including shooting, lies in understanding how our brains evolve with practice. During adolescence, a protein called myelin plays a crucial role. It wraps around neural circuits every time a specific action is […]
You can think of skill as a series of railroad tracks. When they’re not used and exposed to the elements, they become rusty. But when they start to be used again, they get shiny – almost polished-looking. Remember that your skill comes from repetition, and to be able to trust that skill, you need to […]
You can’t run away from the score, but your ability to admit what the score is and admit the situation you’re in is huge. Controlling doubt and fear is also huge because if you can admit the fact that you’re only down two going into the last station and let that in, you’re ahead. Don’t […]
Shooting with confidence and trust is a whole new and wonderful way to play our game. It’s very typical to learn conscious sight pictures, and one day hopefully you’ll be able to trust them. But if you learn to trust from the beginning without the fear of missing, learning comes more rapidly and you learn […]
Most of the time self-talk is just babble. It’s just going on and on and on. There are times and places for self-talk, but most of the stuff that we hear on the sporting clays course is a justification to people around you that you know why you missed and you’re not stupid. But that […]
All of the disappointments that shooters go through are just spots on the learning curve. You know the ones I’m talking about: The first station jitters, the last station jitters, the station running jitters, the long crosser jitters, the window shot jitters, being in the lead jitters, I don’t want to shoot like crap jitters, […]
Expectation comes about because of fear. Fear will bring the eye, the bird, and the gun together. Fear puts the gun in the way, puts the gun in the equation, and the first thing that fear does to you, if you have any amount of fear in your mind about a target you’re about to […]
Fear always pulls the gun into the picture. Fear always puts the gun between the eyes and the bird. “I have a hard time admitting that I was afraid,” a student once told us. “But the more I thought about it, it is fear. I’d never really thought about it as fear. I always call […]
Emotional post-shot routines define success as making us happy. Non-emotional reactions to success confuse the subconscious. It is not sure whether it should continue breaking the target or not because its job is to make us happy. The greater amount of emotional happiness in our post-shot routines, the clearer the pathway to happiness, and the […]
You might not think of shotgun shooting as a physically strenuous sport. Now, if you’re an E-class shooter, shotgun shooting is probably not a very strenuous sport. But when you get into the master class competitions and you’ve got to be on cue at a certain level, there are a lot of other things that […]
You can turn your fear into a motivator. That’s what I’m trying to do. Every time I come to an impasse and I know fear is there, I can feel it. I know that there’s something good getting ready to happen. There’s something good on the other side of that fear if I will let […]
You’ve got to be willing to put yourself in a position to fail in order to succeed. And you’ve got to be willing to look at it from the standpoint of “the more times I put myself out there in a position to fail, the more opportunities I’m going to have to win because every […]
If the crossing point is confusing visually, then accept the confusion. And give yourself a picture of what you want to happen after the confusion. It has to be a picture. You can’t resist the confusion or worry about the confusion or try to see one of the birds through the confusion. You simply accept […]
A shooter reached out through our website and I called him. He said he’d been working with his local coach and hadn’t gotten any better and needed help. He had sent me photos of eight to ten of his scorecards. Now here’s a killer: there was no real pattern in his hits and misses. When […]
There are certain things that you need to assume or that you need to get out of the way. Working with a lot of high school athletes and high school coaches, gun fit is a huge thing for them. There are no guns made out there that are going to fit somebody that’s 5’6 and […]
When I’m in the zone (whether it’s teaching or competing) my conscious plan has to be taken care of before I ever load the gun. I have to know what it’s going to look like. I have to know where I want it to happen and how I want it to come together before I […]
We have become so much more aware of the power of the subconscious mind and how quickly it can make things right. This is especially true in shooting clays because we see them every day. I’ve seen some gun mounts where the person didn’t even deserve to be in the same ZIP code as the […]
Don’t be afraid of going to three shoots and having the same thing happen to you over and over again. Because if the same thing happens to you over and over again, guess what? You can look at it as “I’ve got a terminal problem and I’m going to die from it” or “all I got to […]
You’re not always going to bring your “A” game to the show. As hard as you try, you’re not always going to do that. I went to the Beretta World Championships in 1987 and was fortunate enough to spend probably 45 minutes under a tent while it was raining. I talked to the move/mount/shoot guy, […]
Working memory is limited in duration and capacity. It can hold on to things for about 10 to 20 seconds if you don’t do something with them. And there can be no more than four things in the working space at any one time. One of the interesting things in studying working memory is that […]
When you begin your new year or come back from your break, it’s important that you write down what kind of targets you practiced; how many, the frequency of practice, and the duration of practice. Whatever you did last year, if it worked out, you ought to repeat it again this year. If you didn’t […]
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. […]
“The last year and a half have been relatively easy for me to goal set – punch into A, then punch into AA. Now my short-term goal is master class. But I’m trying to figure out a long-term goal. I want to end up competitive in master class. But how do I word it on […]
Every shot you take in practice and in a tournament, big or small, has to be with a hundred percent commitment to the plan and your routines. When you’re congruent and in the zone, effort is optimized. You’re not stressed. You’re in control of the target. You stop trying and, through determination, you begin to […]
The first year that the World English Sporting came to our country, I was doing an experiment in the offseason leading up to it. I had a full in the top barrel and a modified in the bottom barrel, and I was shooting everything with mod and full. Everything. I got to the world shoot; […]
Science has proven that the visual pathway processes the lead and the line data of the moving object. In fact, the visual system of the brain actually anticipates where the object is going to be even though the retina sees it to where it is. That sounds like it’s old information. But they’re finding that […]
As you work your way up through the classes you’re actually learning to shoot; but once you punch into master class, you have to really learn how to compete. As you’re going along doing your best to compete and learning to compete, one of the reasons that you’re able to compete in master class is […]
When you react, you’re going fast. When you anticipate, you’re going slow. What do we want you to do? We want you to get to the breakpoint early so that in effect slows the bird down so you can control the bird. Anything that has to happen precisely can happen in slow motion rather than […]
You can turn your fear into a motivator. That’s what I’m trying to do. Every time I come to an impasse and I know fear is there, I can feel it. I know that there’s something good getting ready to happen. There’s something good on the other side of that fear if I will let […]
So, let’s talk a little bit about how we practiced the three times we had time to practice leading up to going to the actual tournament. In our research, we have determined that when we shoot different shots (especially in sporting) many shooters think that they are using the same circuit – just with different […]
In our three practice sessions before the National Championship, we shot no more than three or four boxes, and shot only singles. But we each announced what approach we were going to shoot and where we were going to break the target. This forced our brains to recall parts of different circuits synchronously in seconds […]
Back in the mid-80s, I finished a really good round of sporting at Greater Houston Gun Club. Andy Banks watched intently as I ran the last station and asked what my score was. I didn’t know. So, Andy asked to see my score card. “Andy,” I said, “It doesn’t matter who wins or loses as […]
Most shooters’ reaction to adversity is to allow themselves to speed up in everything they do – especially in how fast they talk. This leads to a timing problem, which leads to hope. Then this leads to evaluation, which deeply drinks the hormonal cocktail of choice – cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that makes your […]
As coaches to many shooters worldwide, both in person and through our Knowledge Vault, we’re often asked about helping them overcome a missed target or a loss by only one or two targets. The typical reaction to a less-than-satisfactory station for the majority of shooters is immediate gibberish as they exit the stand. They reflect […]
Six to eight years ago, we dramatically changed our approach to coaching clay and wing shooting after reading Anders Ericsson’s book “Peak,” where he talks about why and in what detail the brain must have a mental representation of what you ask it to do before you ask it to do it! So, we changed […]
When the approach is to not see the barrel, shooters are calling on their limited capacity working memory system to do too many things. This is why they are so inconsistent and on different birds on different days. Adding to this outcome, even if they’re successful, the successes do not make their way to the […]
Committing to the shot you are about to take is the most important thing at the moment you enter the cage. A vivid movie of where and how you want the shot to come together is necessary for the brain to recall from long-term memory the circuit necessary to hit the target. Most shooters have […]
The core purpose of our visual processing system is the prediction of what’s coming next. Vision, along with data, form our other senses that provide sequenced information to the central nervous system. This allows for a prediction of what’s coming next. Eventually you must begin to understand that one aspect of skill is the ability […]
We each do 8-10 scheduled consults each week, and without exception, 95 percent of the shooters tell us they have plateaued and don’t know how to get better. Our first question to them is “Do you feel hurried when you’re shooting? Or do you feel like you’re chasing the targets?” Almost all of them immediately […]
Talk to a good shooter and they might say they see “the front” or “the rings.” Or they see “the target slow down” or “the target get really big or clear.” But that is a result of the thousands of successful shots they have taken with a prediction and the execution based on the prediction. […]
The overwhelming majority of what we perceive when shooting a moving target occurs in the periphery. And things we perceive in the periphery are really behind real time. Remember, it takes the periphery almost 1/3 of a second to process and understand what’s going on. By the time you’re aware of it, what you are […]
When you’re shooting with someone better than you, quite often when you have a trouble with a certain target, they might want to help you by telling you what they perceive when shooting the same target. And what they tell you is real to them based on the amount of shooting they have done. The […]
When we ask shooters to describe what they see that tells them to send the shot, they usually say “I see the front of the target” or “I see the target get really clear.” But they don’t describe any sequence of events leading up to sending the shot. Let’s inject a little phrase here that […]
In our travels doing clinics, and in our Skype or Zoom consultations with new shooters, we often hear these phrases: “I don’t see the barrel. I just focus hard on the target.” “When I see the front of the target, that’s when I send the shot.” “When I see the target slow down, I send […]
We have shooters from Canada, Europe, Australia, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and Chile who email us to say how much less confusion they’re experiencing in their wing and clay shooting and how much more consistent they have become in their shooting. There is one more common thread that all these shooters are discovering that enables […]
Here’s another really big paradigm shift in shooters as they become more experienced on clays and birds: they begin to see the target behind where the barrel is pointed. Now, we know this sounds like double-talk. But we have found that when the shooter, through repetition, changes the way he pictures the shot from getting […]
The Three-Bullet Drill is designed to show your brain what it really looks like to have the gun ahead of a target coming from the right or the left. And the two pictures are really different. Place three shotgun shells on a bookcase about 8-12 inches apart and step across the room and face the […]
One of the quickest pathways to proficiency is a gun mount drill we have dubbed “The Three-Bullet Drill.” Tens of thousands of wing and clay shooters all over the world have used this simple drill to explain to their brains how they want the visual data stream from their retinas to be interpreted. Just like […]
We don’t even check for dominance anymore in our clinics because the eyes don’t see – the brain sees. What the brain perceives in shooting a moving target is a product of how we’ve trained the brain to see it. As we said previously, what the beginner shooter sees when shooting a moving target is […]
When shooting a shotgun at clays or birds, the target is always in our primary visual circle and the gun is always in the periphery. What that looks like differs greatly shooter to shooter and depends on whether they shoot clays or birds. In the beginning, the shooter unfortunately will be focused on the end […]
