Why Are You Scrambling?
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...
The Science of Skill: Building Blocks in Shooting and Life
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...
Skill Comes from Repetition
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...
Being Honest with Your Score
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...
Fear is a Funny Thing
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...
Honing Your Self-Talk
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...
Jitters and Your Learning Curve
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,...
What Fear Does
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...
Fear is a Precursor to Courage
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...
Don’t Confuse Your Subconscious!
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...