How Shooters React to Missing a Target or Two
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...
A Change in Our Approach to Shotgunning
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...
The Process of “Neurological Suspension”
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,...
Where Do “Positive Sound-Alikes” Come From?
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...
Shooting Without Thinking
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...
Visual Anomalies and Shooting Plateaus
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...
What Good Shooters See and Why
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...
Accepting the Muzzle in the Periphery
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 Problem with Well-Meaning Shooting Advice
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...
The Anticipation Circuit
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...