Gun Fits Don’t Correct Sight Picture
You hear a lot about gun fit and follow-through. While they are important, here is where we have come to after thousands of shooters and 55,000 hours each over 26 years as professional coaches: If the sight picture is correct and the muzzle speed is the same...
Your Detailed Mental Representations
The body eventually turns back into itself. Learning is about fulfilling your innate potential. It requires challenging homeostasis and taking control of your destiny. What does the shot look like at every moment? Mental Representations (MRs) allow for the access of huge bits of data in an...
Give the Task Your Full Attention
You must give the task your full attention. You must push yourself past your comfort zone. Finding the barrier is critical for improving. You must isolate what keeps you from getting better. Coming at a barrier from a different direction is the key to getting past it....
The Brain Sees Skill as a Pattern
The brain sees skill as a pattern: a series of skills that have been repeated enough times so that they happen without thought. At this point, the skill moves to long-term memory to free up more short-term memory. When you perform this skill enough times in long-term...
The More Times You Create the Pattern the Same Way
We see shooters who are practicing just trying to break the target. When the broken target is a result of a detailed preload and happens just like the preload, you can believe it and begin to trust it. You cannot trust what you cannot see in your...
Defining Mental Representations
Creating long-term memory is defining mental representations: a visual image we see when a phrase is introduced to our brain. Long-term memory enables the brain to process enormous amounts of data in a fraction of a second. The pattern recognition via repetitions in deep practice makes...
Deliberate Practice: Three to Four Basic Moves
I went to range Thursday night and shot three boxes. While I missed some easy shots, I stuck with the program and did not get emotionally involved. I went back to range on Saturday and shot seven boxes and it all came back. While I had...
Your Brain Needs a Mental Representation
To do anything, the brain must have a mental representation of what it is about to do! The better the mental representation, the better the shot. The better the shot, the better the mental representation, and so on and so on. It becomes a virtual circle when you...
Predicting with Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is about predicting what you are about to do and committing to do just that. The more detailed the prediction, the clearer it becomes for both sides of the brain to be comfortable with the task at hand. Then they become so much better...
You Cannot NOT Think!
Just like you cannot “not think,” you cannot shoot consistently without being aware of the barrel. It's there. It's part of it, albeit a small awareness. Trying to feel your way through the shot and not see the barrel is futile, and establishing an awareness of...