Gil’s Blog
You’ll want to bookmark this page so you can come back periodically to see what bits of wisdom and information that Gil has to convey. It’s instructional, it’s honest and has been known to include humor on occasion. Send Gil a message if there are any areas of information you would like for him to respond to.
In order of date
Don’t Go Down the Negative Road
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 you̵...
Getting Out of the Evaluation Quagmire
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 h...
The Challenge of Positive Reaction
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, becaus...
Is It a Mental Problem?
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. W...
Building an Inventory of Sight Pictures
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. Whe...
Giving 100 Percent, 100 Percent of the Time
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...
What Should Your Post-Shot Routine Look Like?
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 y...
Small Muscle, Big Muscle
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 syn...
Complex Decisions in Shooting
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 dec...
The Old Way vs. New Way
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 t...
Muzzle Awareness is a Journey
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 f...
Reading Pairs
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 pai...
Tying Up Both Sides of the Brain
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 ...
Be Specific About Your Shooting Goals
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 ...
Physiological Diplopia and Neurological Suspension
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...
Blocked vs. Random Practice
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 “...
From Shooting to Building Your Own Game
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 th...
The Three-Bullet Drill and the Sight Picture
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 be...
You Can’t Practice Confidence
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 y...
No Shortcut to Proficiency in Shotgunning
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 sho...
Desirable Difficulty
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 man...
Gun Fit: Adjustable Combs and Cheek Pressure
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 ar...
The Sun Will Still Rise
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 nega...
Keep Process-Oriented
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 st...
Do You Need More Cheek Pressure?
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 sho...
Knowledge and Understanding – Consider the Railroad Tracks
“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 a...
Are You Making it Stable?
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 blowin...
Practicing with Just One Flat of Ammo
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 practic...
Sleep is a Commodity You Can’t Do Without
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 com...
Fixing Unforced Errors
“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 rout...
Taking a Six-Week Break
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 e...
Accepting the Visual Confusion
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 toget...
Minimizing Visual Confusion
“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 po...
Force the Brain Out of its Comfort Zone
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, w...
Practicing Slower Moves
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 s...
Flipping Negative Thoughts
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 t...
You Need a Strategic Approach
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...
Staying Calm Under Pressure
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 s...
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 ...
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 brain...
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-...
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 ...
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 i...
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 justificat...
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 runnin...
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,...
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 thou...
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 becaus...
Don’t Neglect Nutrition and Sleep
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 ...
Turning Fear into a Motivator
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 t...
Being in a Position to Fail
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 ...
Crossing Bird Confusion
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 c...
Analyzing Your Scorecard
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 t...
The Evolution of Gun Fit
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...
The Quiet Eye Sequence
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...
The Paradox of the Anticipation Circuit
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 s...
Failure Shows You Your Patterns
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 ...
Looking at Your Top and Bottom Scores
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 t...
The Limits of Working Memory
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 work...
How Do You Start Your Shooting Year?
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. W...
Being Prepared for a Variety of Conditions
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 co...
Being Competitive in Master Class
“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...
Practice and Compete with the Same Intensity
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 optimiz...
Skeet Chokes and the Feedback Loop
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...
Visual Pathways
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 ...
Learning to Compete in Master Class
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 ...
Sharpening Your Anticipation Skills
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 co...
Turning Fear Into a Motivator
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 t...
Practicing Before Nationals
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 differ...
How We Practiced Before Nationals
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 w...
Evaluation and Living in the Past
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, And...
Speeding Everything Up and Cortisol
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...
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...
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...
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 d...
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 ...
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 sys...
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 ...
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 t...
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 periphe...
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 tar...
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 descr...
“Positive Sound-alikes” and Consistency
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 ...
Matching Muzzle Speed and the Road to Consistency
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 mu...
Seeing the Target BEHIND The Barrel
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 lik...
The Three-Bullet Drill: How to Do It
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 th...
The Three-Bullet Drill: Creating Your Reality
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...
Practice Improves Your Sight Pictures
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...
Being Aware of the Periphery When Shooting
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...
The Difference Between Shooting a Rifle and Shotgun
When shooting a rifle, the shooter is looking down the barrel and lining it up with the target. While holding the barrel on the target, the shooter begins to squeeze the trigger and the gun goes off. ...
Focus on the Target: The “Mainest Thing” About Shotgun Shooting
Whether you are a clays or wing shooter, none of us start with the same game we end up with. What we do and what we see is an evolution based on how much we practice our passion with the smooth bore. ...
Foot and Hand Positions on Targets Below Your Feet
The elevation of the target has a lot to do with foot position and the front hand’s grip position. When shooting overhead targets off high towers, the front hand must come back towards the action of...
Young Shooters Sticking Their Elbows Out
Here’s another anomaly we often see often in younger shooters. With the gun mounted, their elbows are sticking straight out to either side. To this day, we cannot understand why they do this. Your e...
Shooting Single Targets with Prediction
Shooters who practice more single targets moving the breakpoint and predicting how and where they will break the target and then executing their prediction gain a consistency in their game quicker tha...
The Height of Skeet and Sporting Clays Targets
Skeet and sporting clays are similar in many ways, but there is one basic difference: the height at which the targets are broken. In skeet, the targets are hooped and set so they have a common crossin...
Variations in Weight Displacement
When the stance is right for the individual height and body shape, maintaining balance is simple and repeatable. Maintaining a central balance point and good shooting posture so the gun fits is a resu...
Balance in Trap, Skeet, and Sporting Clays
Let’s talk about the different clay target games: how their similarities and differences affect stance, weight displacement, and balance. In trap and skeet, the targets are the constant. Both games ...
Different Centers of Gravity and Your Shooting Stance
Because of the balance issue, shooters with different centers of gravity could need a more open stance, a more closed stance, or more upright or leaning forward stance to position their head and cheek...
Routine, Anticipation, and Balance
We find ourselves observing people doing things they’ve practiced enough that they can be done without thinking. Then it becomes more and more evident that, through repetition, the brain has learned...
The Importance of Balance
While balance alone allows for us to move through our complex lives every day, maintaining balance is taken for granted by humans until you reach your 70s. Then you’re made aware of just how importa...
Maintaining Your Balance
You don’t give it any thought as you travel through your everyday life but staying in balance is a full-time job that has been turned over to the automaticity part of the brain. This is due to the m...
Why Are Most Guns Stocked Too High for Americans?
Here is another phrase we have heard in conversations: “To shoot that gun well, you’re going to have to apply more cheek pressure and have to roll your head forward to pull your eye down closer to...
Cheek Pressure in the Showroom vs. Cheek Pressure While Shooting
One of the first things we learned is that when shooters mount a shotgun in the showroom, they always put more cheek pressure on the comb than they do when they’re actually shooting the gun. When we...
Gun Fit and Mounting Consistently
Ask any well-read shooter and they will tell you that gun fit in wing/clay shooting is really important. But few know what gun fit really is. Because they haven’t put in the time to consistently mou...
Simple and Complex Repetitions
Skill is built through simple repetition in the beginning. As you become more skillful, the repetition becomes less simple and then more complex, as well as predicted prior to performing it. Through t...
Should I Change Chokes?
Choke is a mystery many will never understand. And as a result, it will confound more people than it will help. My research has proven that you can adjust the diameter of the shot cloud inside of 25 y...
Recoil is the Enemy
At the end of the day, recoil is the enemy. Anything you can do to mitigate recoil will be an advantage. We all have Isis recoil systems on our Krieghoffs and absolutely love them. One-ounce loads at ...
More on Chokes: Skeet vs. Modified
Improved cylinder, light modified, modified and improved modified have the same 25” reliable killing circle at 25 yards. A .020 modified choke has the same diameter reliable pattern from 25-45 yards...
Using Chokes: Too Much vs. Not Enough
Using too much choke on close targets is just a bad as not using enough choke on distant targets. The normal progression in skill building in sporting clays is lethality at 25 yards, then at 35 yards,...
Your Gun Fit Evolves with Repetition
Relentless repetition builds skill. Building skill with a shotgun is a long-range goal and takes a lot of patience, time, and effort – not to mention money! Remember, the gun is the cheapest par...
Long-Term vs. Working Memory
The file for the next shot is created in our long-term memory and then handed off to the working memory to execute the shot. Our long-term memory is infinite, but our working memory is limited in both...
How the Brain Retrieves “Files” While Shooting
Most shooters don’t realize that each time they prepare to take a shot at a moving target for the first time, the long-term memory takes bits and pieces from different files it remembers from its pa...
More Consistency with Less Practice
The OSP system of shooting allows for better, more consistent performances with less and less practice once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of setup and movement and have a defined, comfortable amo...
Same Speed at the End
“Same speed at the end” allows you to see what it looked like as the shot was triggered so the shot can be replicated or corrected. When shooting the OSP system, do not get involved with the lead....
The Problem with the Pull Away Method of Shooting
I’m amazed at the number of shooters who are still trying to pull away from targets and are erratic at best in their scores. Pull away shooters miss a lot of targets in the last half of a stand and ...
Your Gun Fit Leads to Better Sight Pictures
One conclusion I have come to about gun fit is that when it really does fit with light cheek pressure and shoots 50/50, all your sight pictures make sense. This makes them more consistent, as well as ...
Do You Need a High-Rib Shotgun?
A local shooter here in Houston who is moving from skeet into sporting clays has learned a valuable lesson about stock fit. He’s in the pattern stock phase and is shooting an “Ashed” comb on his...
Light Cheek Pressure: Less is More
If you feel like you have to mount your gun perfectly to hit anything, your gun does not fit. Did you know the harder you have to put your cheek down on the comb to make your gun shoot where you want ...
Putting in the Time to Build Your Sight Pictures
Building sight pictures is why you practice. Not enough shooters put in the time to practice deliberately to build their inventory in their long-term memory. Most shooters just go shoot the course and...
The Only Two Things to Consciously Think About
Just looking hard at a target will land you solidly in the mid-60s to low 70s. There are two things you need to consciously think about. One, keep the target on the correct side of the barrel. And two...
You Have to Know What it Looks Like
It seems that there are coaches out there who tell shooters to just look hard at the target and not see the muzzle. But if you don’t know what it looked like when you pulled the trigger how do you r...
You Need to Build Trust
Without prediction and execution of your prediction in practice, you are not building long-term memory. The part of this game that you are supposed to trust is what you have built in practice and in t...
Random Practice on Single Targets
Random practice, as opposed to blocked practice, requires the brain to retrieve skill circuits from your long-term memory. While you don’t get the feel-good of shooting the same target over and over...
Shooters Who Want to Learn Too Fast
The more we watch the shooters we work with evolve, the better we get at communicating the little things that speed up that improvement. While each shooter is different, they all must make similar com...
Score Plateau: 93 and Above
Score Plateau: 93 and Above It’s hard to call 93 a “plateau.” Most shooters would love to be able to say they had plateaued at 93. But the sad truth is, few shooters have the commitment to do wh...
Score Plateau: 83
Score Plateau: 83 You are here because you have a perfect gun mount that happens consistently without thought. You have stopped looking at the gun in the setup and down the gun during the shot. And yo...
Score Plateau: 75
Score Plateau: 75 You are here because 75 percent of the targets in the round can be shot with three inches of lead or less, and the size of your pattern makes up for many mounting and pointing error...
Score Plateau: 65
You are here because you have fallen in love with the game and you can’t get enough of it. Up to now, you have just been playing around with different things. While you can hit some of the targets s...
The True Commitment Required for Greatness
Great performers are not born with some innate ability that predisposes them to be able to be great at anything. They all have spent thousands of hours doing what it is that they do. But each person b...
“What Are You Going to Give Up?”
Some think if they would just try harder, they will improve and eventually find the “holy grail” of consistency. But try as they may, that holy grail turns into a nosegay of excuses that simply ma...
The Move and Mount is Crucial
Here’s a little-known fact: shooters who can move and mount the gun learn as much as three times faster than those who don’t! Said another way, people who refuse to learn to move and mount the ...
Building Long-Term Memory in Practice
We are finding out that practice is perhaps the most valuable tool in our game of shooting a moving target with a shotgun. At the same time, it’s the most wasted tool. Shooters shoot a lot and think...
A Flexible vs. Fixed Mindset
Our research shows that a person’s mindset is the greatest single determining factor that opens the door to higher and higher levels of performance because it must be learned. The majority of shoote...
The Myths of Skill
In his book Peak, Anders Ericsson mentions that there are three myths associated with skill and improving skill. We think it’s important to talk about them. That way, you can be aware of them and n...
Building Long-Term Positive Memories
You become what you repeatedly do, and eventually, you become what you remember. How you file those things in your brain as positive or negative will determine who you become. In their book Be A Play...
Inconsistency and Evaluation: What’s Holding You Back?
Ask a room full of sporting clays shooters if they would like to be more consistent, and they’ll overrun you with enthusiastic responses. Few, if any, really know why they are so inconsistent. T...
The Limits of Massed Practice
Our intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to the single-minded repetitive practice of things we want to master. We’ve been led to believe that the regimen of massed practice is essent...
The Power of Learning and its Challenges
Remember that the most successful students take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy. You may not have been taught how to do this, but you can do it and will likel...
Vary Your Practice as Much as Possible
In Houston, we’re fortunate that we have quite a few clubs to go to. But if you practice at the same place every time, you need to vary it as much as you can. I recommend mixing it up as much as...
Shoot Every Tournament You Can
Do you want to push yourself? I encourage you to go and shoot every tournament you have the time and money for. I’ve realized that this is one of the main reasons top shooters are top shooters. ...
Linking Your Movements Together
As you go on the journey of shooting single targets, you work on perfecting your game through repetition. You work on being critical; not about whether you broke the target, but how the target was b...
The Brain’s Synchronous Circuits
I’m intrigued by the concept of the brain combining parts of different circuits and coming up with a synchronous circuit that will break a specific target. I’ve never really looked at the fact...
Freeing Yourself from Mechanical Thinking
Shooting singles in different breakpoints is so critical, and playing the game is so powerful! Playing the game – shooting single targets in your predicted breakpoint – forces you to recal...
Make the Post-Shot Routine a Habit
The vivid preload is so essential, and it comes from making the post-shot routine a habit. People don’t do a post-shot routine, which is the part of building performance that’s wasted the most. Th...
Using Your Anticipation Circuit
The more you get involved with the mechanical process, the more you get in the way of what the brain does the best. And it does it in an amazingly short amount of time. Remember: the anticipation circ...
Recalling is Essential… and It Works!
Allowing the brain to recall opens up all the subconscious databases. It allows you to concentrate more of your focus on the target when your visual process is vivid. The more vivid your visual proces...
How Your Brain Puts Circuits Together
On a recent Coaching Hour, I talked about how there’s less emphasis on the mechanics of the shot back in the cage and more emphasis on the last 15 percent of how I wanted the shot to go, as well as ...
Your Perceptions Change with Consistency
As professional coaches, we must define where a person’s ability to focus is and what they perceive when they shoot. That way we can coach them to the next level of perception and performance. In fa...
Learning to Compete: It’s Lonely When You Do it Right
As you from E through B class, you’ll practice more singles than pairs. You’ll be working on your move and mount and moving your breakpoints so you can begin to play shape on the first bird in a p...
Developing the Right Attitude about Failure
Your attitude and reaction to your practice and tournament results begin to build a file in the memory part of your brain that you will be able to call on in future pressure situations while competi...
The Challenge of Barrel Awareness
The barrel is part of the picture, and you can’t “unsee” the barrel! Once a shooter accepts the muzzle as part of the picture and, through the mounting drills, gets their brain to deal with it ...
Practicing Correctly
The reason shooters practice a lot and don’t get better is they are not practicing correctly. “Correctly” means something different depending on the level of their game. The shooters between lev...
“Winners are Never Afraid to Lose”
I was watching a NASCAR event on TV the other day that had a lot of collisions. One occurred with 20 laps to go. As the pace car came out to restart the race, the announcers talked about the drivers w...
Prediction and Long-Term Memory
Regardless of the outcome, any shot without a prediction and an execution based on the prediction will not make it to long-term memory. It will remain in your short-term memory, which is an expert at ...
Deep Deliberate Practice: Honing the Circuits
Practice is not about breaking the targets. It is about preloading the shot and deliberately firing the chunks sequentially. This makes it easier for the brain to anticipate ahead of the present and ...
Deliberate Practice: Perform the Skill Without Thinking
If you practice deliberately and with a detailed preload of the movie of the shot coming together before you close the gun and call “pull,” then, through repetition, the brain can recogniz...
Developing Skill Through Deliberate Practice
When you have been shooting well in the past, nothing matters and everything is quiet between your ears. But how does this “not thinking” occur? When you are shooting well, it’s as if th...
Negative Self-Talk While Shooting
Our research has shown us that almost every thought a shooter has while performing will eventually bring focus and attention back to the barrel and/or the lead. In some instances, the omnipresence of ...
No Argument in Your Brain
When shooting your round of 25/25 on skeet, there was no argument in your brain! This allows you to access your long-term memory and not think while the target is in the air. We see shooters who ar...
Self-Correction: The Big Step
Until every shot you take is first a prediction of when where and how you are about to break the next target, and then the shot mirrors that prediction, you are not building long-term memory or skill!...
We See It Every Day
When I am shooting well, things really look the same to me. Everything is in slow motion like the ShotKam videos in our Knowledge Vault! The futility of trying to see what someone else sees comes from...
Oh, To Know Then What We Know Now!
As I said in an earlier post, when I am shooting well and really in sync with the targets, everything looks almost the same and seems to be moving in slow motion. The mental pictures just come as a fl...
Focus on Target
I have 95 to 98 percent of my focus – awareness, attention, thought, intent – on the target and enough awareness of the muzzle to know the target is behind where it pointed, and that the m...
The Secret of Change
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new! Many people would learn from their mistakes if they would stop making excuses! The quote of the da...
50/50 Flat Shooting Gun
A range owner in North Carolina shot my gun and instantly wanted me to cut his Guerini so it would fit and shoot like mine. So, he sent it to me and I cut it to fit me and sent it back. He has had......
The Sight Picture Makes So Much Sense
The biggest common reaction to shooting a flat-shooting gun is the shooter’s pictures are reciprocal on left-to-right and right-to-left targets and the sight pictures make so much sense! I shot ...
Rib Height and Gun Fit
Rib height has little to do with how well you will shoot one gun over another. In the end, it is the relationship between the rib height and the shape and height of the comb and where your cheek softl...
Make Progress or Make Excuses!
One of the reasons you can’t learn from any book or coach is that you must see how these emotions and circumstances manifest themselves in you. It is not the end of recognizing the problem that you ...
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 th...
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 ...
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...
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 shor...
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...
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 ...
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 boxe...
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 representa...
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 ...
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 throug...
Accept Variablilty
Accepting the variability swing to swing and shot to shot was a huge understanding for me as a shooter and as a coach! Knowing that I can’t make the same perfect move, mount, and shot every time I c...
The Biggest Mistake We See
At the end of the day, the biggest mistake we see athletes make is a lack of a detailed preload of the movie of how they are committing to make the shot come together. It is the leading cause for pe...
It’s Not What You See That Makes You Good!
The biggest mistake we see other athletes and coaches make is they think it’s what they see that makes them good. As chunking occurs, the brain learns what to ignore. This allows them to see ...
The Brain Creates the Zone
How does the brain create the zone? And what is actually happening when you are in the zone, which in turn allows for more people to trust it and experience it? It is about repetition and anticipating...
Exaggerated Stress
“Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.” ― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage...
Yogi Berra’s 10 Best Quotes
• “When you get to a fork in the road, take it.” • “It gets late early around here.” • “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.” • “The future ain&...
Keep Standing
“Regardless of how many times you are knocked down, keep standing!” “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra ...
Never a Wrong Time to do the Right Thing!
“Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the virtue of a foolish person.” – Rick Rigsby “You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence should be a habit...
True Measure of a Person
Failure is inevitable and is the most feared confrontation of most people’s lives. But at the same time, it is a necessary part of skill-building. I said something the other day in a way that I...
Wisdom Through Failure
Wisdom can come to you in the most unusual of places – a lot of times through failure! When you combine wisdom with optimism, you can get the perfect storm of rapid skill development because you...
Three Myths of Skill Building
In studying skill-building we have come across something that we think you will find interesting as we did. The Three Myths of Skill-Building “Skill is Genetic.” “She is a natural....
The Value of Practice & Training
The true value of practice and training is that they allow you to train your brain to anticipate farther and farther into the future. Repetition begins the process and detailed correction allows for i...
You Live in the Past!
You don’t know this because your brain lies to you and then covers up the lies, which is a good thing. If your brain didn’t fudge reality, you wouldn’t be able to hit a baseball, drive a car, or...
Learn From Your Own Failures
We temper our corrections with all of the things about the shooter in mind. This ability must be learned and honed from years of experience being wrong over and over again. Good judgment comes from ba...
Why Pro Shooters Don’t Make Great Coaches
Why don’t pro shooters make great coaches? They invariably try to get you to do and see what they do and see when they shoot. They believe that you can do it, but you can’t. More often than no...
Don’t Let Your Opponent Outwork You!
You coach a beginner, encourage an intermediate, and share ideas with an advanced shooter. The shooters you are talking about are only missing two to six targets per 100, and the smart ones are still ...
Learning with ShotKam
I go back to Doss and what we discovered last Christmas with his ShotKam. His picture was not stable. It was collapsing on all shots, which led to an inexplicable periodic slash at the end of his sho...
Pre-Mount in Routine
Our conclusions are typically drawn from how many times we have to make the same correction on thousands of students. Let’s say an elite shooter came to me and asked for help. If that elite shoo...
Sleep!
Sleep is the most often overlooked aspect of peak performance! Sleep is tied to: Reaction time Mental awareness Muscular recovery Converting what you just learned to memory! Only four hours of sleep a...
What is Your Choice?
Your optimism comes from your failures. Your determination comes from your attitude. Your confidence comes from your competence. Competence comes from your commitment. You become what you repeatedly d...
Evolving Gun Fits
At Drake Landing last week, the owner picked up my gun and was shocked at how easy it was to mount and how it was perfectly aligned every time he mounted it. “My gun will fit all five people in...
Sensory Shutdown
“Let’s look at an aspect of sensory shutdown we all have to deal with when performing in a pressure situation: making a decision when the adrenaline is flowing and your heart is pumping. A hea...
Pressure Increases … Awareness Decreases
“When the pressure we are under increases, it is natural for our awareness to decrease. This change might be almost imperceptible at first, but as the pressure increases, our peripheral vision narro...
“If you’re thinking, you’re stinking!”
“If you’re thinking, you’re stinking” Here is a perfect example. I have had eight to ten shooters call in the past weeks after Nationals who took lessons from shooters in their...
It’s Like Public Speaking
Learning to shoot at higher and higher levels is like public speaking. We can all talk, but how many of you could have a conversation about what we are discussing with 30 shooters? 100 shooters? 500 s...
Train with Prediction
Let’s say you’re approaching a shot under pressure. If you have trained it hundreds of times with prediction and execution of the prediction, it becomes easy to trust it. Hello! This is ...
Allow the Brain to Anticipate
The brain understands skill as a sequence of events. Through repetition, the brain allows it to see the sequence as one event rather than a series of events. This allows the brain to anticipate ahead ...
Greater Commitment
In the end, it takes a greater and greater commitment to train longer and at higher levels to achieve higher and higher successes. Sooner than later, that commitment is not met with the desire of shoo...
Skill-Building in the Brain
There is a lot of shooting advice out there. But few, if any have studied skill-building in the brain as much as we have. Focus is an evolving phenomenon from beginner to Master Class. The conundrum i...
Change Your Approach
To get a different result, you’ve got to change your approach. This requires the one thing that shooters will not do: put in the time and work to build the skill the right way so they can depend...
No Magic Bullet
I don’t know why shooters think there is a magic bullet that tournament winners know about. If they could just see what the pros see, then they, too, could shoot like them. I guess it fits their un...
Skill Building
For the last three years on our podcasts, we have been discussing how you can bring your game to new levels. It’s all there. And like this post, when you understand that you have to build your game ...
Shooting in the Automaticity Part of Your Brain
When what you do when you are actually shooting is in the automaticity part of the brain, you will be able to concentrate on the really important things that are in your control. Heart rate too fast? ...
Being in Control of Your Game – Shooting 100
Dean Olsen would shoot the corporate course at ASC over and over until finally one day he shot 100. There were lots of scores in the high 90s, but he kept at it. Eventually, you will go and shoot the...
Worrying Less About Hold Points
The more I am in the zone, the less I worry about hold points. That is unless the target is a really high tower shot or a shot delivered well below my feet....
What You Must Learn to Control
Things like your balance, tempo, pace, posture, adrenaline, and heart rate are things you must learn to control to win big. But you can’t think about them until what you do when you shoot becomes mo...
Automaticity and Awareness
Practice is about repeating everything enough for the brain to know what is going to happen before it happens. The more your anticipation occurs as an automatic circuit, the more it allows for concent...
The Vivid Preload
The goal in practice is to have the preload be so vivid that the brain knows what it is about to do before you close the gun and call “pull.” Binge watch the Kill Shot Reviews in the Knowledge Vau...
You Need a Preload of the Movie
Any kind of practice is futile without a preload of the movie of the shot coming together. Remember, you want the brain to anticipate the arrival of the target as well as where it will be in the futur...
It’s a First Bird Game
The game is really about the first bird of every pair. Eventually, if you can break every first bird of every pair where and how you want to, you will be in the mid-80s!...
Random and Varied Practice
When practicing random and varied shots on singles, if you find one that is a bit rough or hard to visualize, drop back to some blocked practice until it feels in control. Then resume random and varie...
We Recommend Random and Varied Practice
Random and varied practice on singles is what we recommend for most shooters, especially at the beginning of the year....
Repeatedly Training on One Specific Target
There is great benefit in shooting one single crossing or quartering target over and over with a preload the same way. And then shooting random targets the same way, only changing the timing of the mo...
What the Top Shooters Know
Top shooters not only know what it will look when they pull the trigger on each shot in the pair, but they also can vividly imagine how the shot will come together. They will not only break the pair b...
Recognizing Shots as Movies
Recognizing shots as movies allows the shooter to recognize where all the parts have a place. They are easy to recall and it becomes automatic. This is where patience and higher-level practice rapidly...
Knowledge vs. Skill
“It is not what you know that makes you better it is what you are willing to learn” – Vicki Ash. Knowledge is the presence of facts, and skill is knowing how and when to use them. You can...
A Shooter vs. a Coach
Please don’t go to a shooter for coaching. Go to an experienced coach who has had years and years of practicing coaching, not shooting!...
A Realistic Look at Your Game
Have a realistic look at your overall game, then determine what needs to improve and create practice specifically to improve that skill. Here is where an experienced coach (not a shooter) really shine...
Unlimited Memory
Long-term memory is almost unlimited. It is perfect for controlling large intricate circuits with a lot of different parts. Deliberate practice is the most effective and powerful form of practice....
Thinking on Game Day
Because you don’t practice correctly, you will think on game day. You’ve got to practice like it means everything. Never accept second best. If you are thinking, you are using short-term memor...
Building Trust in Your Game
If you are having to think about setup or don’t have an immediate clear mental picture of the representation you are about to execute, you are not in control. The real game within the game is stayin...
The First Three Stands
Your goal is to always see the first three stands as establishing your pace, balance, and rhythm and then adjust from there. Make clear decisive decisions, trusting your gut....
Bring Your Game to New Levels!
We have been discussing how you can bring your game to new levels in our podcasts for the last three years. It’s all there and like this post when you understand that you have to build your game and...
Your Natural Rhythm
Your goal is to always stay within your natural rhythm, being aware of your breathing, your gait, and your heart rate. Don’t be excited or fearful or judgmental. Leave the result on the last station...
When You See the Look Pair
The goal when you see the look pair is to have an immediate mental representation of what you are about to do in the shot. You should not be thinking. Everything you do in your setup should be automat...
Mental Representations
Practice is about building mental representations. You’re constantly chunking things together at higher levels so what you do when you perform happens with less thought....
Chasing the Target – Not Following the Plan
The overwhelming number of shooters who try to improve are calling “pull,” chasing the target down with the muzzle, and then trying frantically to fix the shot at the end. They judge improvement b...
Knowledge Vault Forum
Go to the forum and get involved with the discussion shooters are having about doing the things they hear in the Coaching Hours and lessons with Brian, Vicki, or me! Join the Knowledge Vault now and d...
Get Better Faster!
If you want to get better faster, then watch the Clay Kill Shot Reviews before you go to practice or before you go to the tournament. You can’t watch them too much. When watching them, don’t look ...
Practicing with a Preload
Practice is where the repetition occurs that allows you to build habits. Practice is the most powerful thing you have in your toolbox, but at the same time, it is the most wasted because of how people...
The Brain Can Anticipate Farther and Farther
When performing a skill at higher and higher levels, the brain can anticipate farther and farther out in front of where you are. You actually know more but are focusing on fewer and fewer things. Your...
The Brain Can Recognize the Exact Skill
If you practice deliberately and with a detailed preload of the movie of the shot coming together before you close the gun and call “pull,” the brain can recognize the exact skill you are planning...
Taking Your Game From 70 to 90
Check out the March 2017 Coaching Hour Podcast on the Knowledge Vault: “Taking your game from 70-90” The first of a six-part series. Check it out!...
Dropping Shots Video – Results!
After just watching the Dropping Shots video in the shot simulator in Knowledge Vault this is the result: Hi Gil, I went to my local club today and shot dropping shots after watching your dropping sho...
Focusing on Process with No Practice
Focusing on the process with no practice, working a shoot, and still shooting great! This just in from J. B: So, I really haven’t had a chance to do much more than practice a little, as we were ...
Watching Kill Shot Reviews Leads to Better Scores
Shooters who are watching the Clay Kill Shot Reviews before they practice and/or shoot tournaments are shooting better and more consistent scores. Vicki and Gil, Well, you did it for me again. First, ...
If You Are Thinking, You Are Stinking
If you are thinking, you are stinking. All thoughts have their origins in evaluating something. So when you find yourself evaluating anything, you are using short-term memory and the conversation will...
Deliberate Practice Turns Into Mental Representation
As you develop a skill through deliberate practice, you repeat the component parts of the skill enough times through repetition so that the brain chunks together all of the parts in the sequence. It e...
Your Judgments Come from Your Expectations
Typically, your judgment of whether something is good or bad comes from your expectations. This is especially true when shooting a tournament. Under emotional pressure, people tend to revert to past n...
Testimonial: “When you are a beginner everyone is an expert”
When you are a beginner, everyone is an expert. I just had to share this testimonial from Stephen with all of you: I bought a sporting shotgun back in February of this year to learn to shoot skeet,...
Humans have a 3:1 Negativity Bias
Psychological research has shown that humans have a 3:1 negativity bias as our default setting in storing memories. The brain naturally stores negative memories faster and stronger than positive ones....
Become Present with your Senses
Through an awareness of your senses, your goal is to become present with your senses before you close the gun and call “pull.” By trial and error in practice, you determine which senses you as an ...
Smiling Relaxes Tension!
Smiling relaxes tension in your jaw! Smiling with your shoulders back and stand-up posture releases DHEA into your system which is a good thing for performance. The idea is simple and powerful. When y...
Mastering Quartering Shots
Playing too close to the target will make you aware of how forgiving it really is to let it come. With our system, crossers are dead easy. It’s quartering targets you need to master. Spend some time...
Short-Term Memory Confuses the Brain
If you are thinking, you are in your short-term memory and confusing the brain. The more you can chunk the circuits, the more it allows you to shoot without thinking. This also allows the brain to kno...
Having a Growth Mindset
Shooters with a growth mindset don’t care about failing. They actually look forward to learning from all their failures and always look forward to training and getting better. The person with a grow...
Clear Mental Representation
Shooters who don’t have a clear Mental Representation (MR) of the shot at hand could flinch, slash the muzzle, stop the swing and lose focus for any number of other reasons! A football game is just ...
Playing the Game – Coaching Hour Podcast
If you have not listened to the June Coaching Hour podcast, do so and implement the new practice procedure called “Playing the Game!” Shooters who are using this practice technique are shooting in...
Attitude Plays a Big Role!
Attitude plays a big role in performances and practice. We see shooters who are practicing just trying to break the target. Closing the gun and chasing the target and trying to fix it at the end does ...
No Perfect Way to Practice the Move and Mount
Be aware that there is no perfect way to practice the move and mount. There’s no perfect sequence or order. We continue to be amazed at the number of people who refuse to give proper emphasis to lea...
Does Your Practice Do These Things?
Does your practice do these things? Push you out of your comfort zone? Constantly be improving and nit-picking your move in practice. On game day use what you got in the shape it’s in. Give you imme...
The Three Myths of Improved Performance
The three myths of improved performance are: Abilities are limited by genetics or surroundings. (There are obvious exceptions. For example, height is an advantage in sports like basketball and footbal...
Random Practice Drills: A Student’s Testimonial
“I have been doing the ‘one show bird’ random practice drill on singles at different clays course each week for the last month. I thought you would be interested in the results. I have had a ten...
A Testimonial from Youth Coach
Here’s a testimony to the effectiveness of the Knowledge Vault. It really works! “My 15-year-old son is rocking and rolling! He won A Class at Gamaliel and punched up to AA after our wi...
Shooting after Cataract Surgery
In the November 2017 Coaching Hour, Larry Peck, Max McCart, and others talked about their journey with cataract surgery and what they are experiencing in coming back to shooting. We have had several s...
Vividly Imagine the Shot
When practicing using single targets, always vividly imagine how the shot comes together. You tie both sides of the brain up with doing different things, thereby working together. This is a big deal b...
Balance and Focus
When you feel pressure on the course, have a heightened awareness of balance, tempo, and tension in your body, as they are non-cognitive. Focusing on them will move you to the right side of the brain ...
Committing to the Shot
Can you walk into the cage and, regardless of external or internal variables, hit the shot you have determined to hit in your plan and preload and become the shooter you have committed to being? Commi...
Spend More Time Simulating the Real Game
In “Be A Player,” Lynn Marriott and Pia Nilsson cite another study about trying to do the same thing over and over again: “’The nervous system was designed to be flexible, not to do the sa...
Create Synchronicity
Being perfect in the last 12-15 percent of the shot is what I am concentrating on. And I will engage both sides of the brain creating “synchronicity” throughout the shot. This stops the argument m...
Committed to your Decision
“Are you aware of how committed you stayed to your decision about your shot?” Many shooters have never really considered the idea of commitment to their shots. They enter the box without a plan, l...
Too Many Players Focus on Achieving “Consistency”
In “Be A Player” Marriot and Nilsson mention a study that proves the human brain is not wired to do the same repetition the exact same way over and over again which is why emphasizing perf...
Enhancing Awareness
To me, seeing the movie and my confidence in the movie gives me great awareness and confidence. Shooters who are watching the Clay Kill Shot ShotKam videos in Knowledge Vault are shooting better score...
More on Deliberate Practice
Last month we did an extra Coaching Hour on deliberate practice and we will be doing our fifth one next week on the topic! We have been learning even more about skill-building and the value of deliber...
Welcome to the Zone!
Now, read this sentence out loud over and over: “Better get to do to what know don’t but shot better a be could I wish I.” You got through the first four words fine because they began to make a ...
Pointing Your Nose at the Look Point
When I am the first shooter at a station, sometimes I have trouble seeing the target until it gets a way out. When I am scoring or pulling, I can see the target sooner. Is there any way I can see the ...
Long-Term Memory
All your skill is stored in your long-term memory and each skill circuit, due to repetition, creates a familiar picture in your brain each time it is fired. This allows your brain to anticipate ahead ...
Every Action with the Muzzles
In skeet, all but four targets are shot in the first third of their flight path, which means every action must be perfect. We have found one swing thought that has improved so many skeet shooters over...
An Experienced Coach
The most frequent mistake we see all shooters do is not practicing deliberately. Deliberate practice is designed by you to improve the exact part of your game that keeps you where you are score-wise. ...
Trying to Mount the Gun and Take the Shot
Trying to mount the gun and take the shot as you mount will result in inconsistencies that you cannot explain. You will never be consistently successful on longer shots that require a slower gun speed...
The Gun is Always in the Periphery
I don’t ever look down the barrel when I shoot, nor do any of our students. The gun is always in the periphery and the target is always in our primary vision, so we are always looking at the target ...
Eye a Little Higher Over the Rib
If I were a shooter that mounted the gun and looked down the barrel chasing the target trying to fix the shot at the end… Or if I shot pull-away, trying to fix the shot at the end… Or if I shot tr...
Consistent Transitions
Slight cheek pressure yields much more consistent transitions between the first and second target on a pair!...
Slight Cheek Pressure
Slight cheek pressure yields several things: A consistent 50/50 pattern at all distances. Easier and more consistent mount. Consistent results at close and distant targets, and Reciprocal sight pictur...
Cheek Pressure
The more cheek pressure you must apply to make the gun shoot where you look, the more perfect the gun mount must be. Also, the gun will be harder to mount consistently, and the more you will tend to l...
Mounting Pressure
Shooters rarely mount the gun while shooting it with as much pressure as they do when mounting the gun in the showroom or their garage....
Flat Shooting Gun
60/40 at 16 yards is much higher at 60 yards! 50/50 is 50/50 at all distances! 60/40 is great at skeet, but the average distance a skeet target is shot is 14-and-a-half yards. And a high shooting gun ...
The Game has Changed
I began my sporting career with a gun that shot 70/30 that I designed. It later became the Browning Special Sporting (crossover) and Lightning Sporting with a flat rib. But targets were rising or were...
Gun Fit and Cheek Pressure
We have learned a lot about gun fit and cheek pressure over the past 25 years as professional coaches, the previous 17 years as competitive skeet shooters, and then as sporting clays competitors since...
Deliberate Practice
The Coaching Hour is tonight and we will be beginning a discussion on “deliberate practice” and its effect on higher levels of performance. Last month we began this discussion and instead of an ho...
NSSF Shares OSP Tips on Social Media
We are just back from the National Shooting Sports Foundation where Brian, Vicki, and I did some tips that NSSF will be putting up on all mediums – Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some of them were the ...
Coaching Hour in Knowledge Vault
Perhaps the most overlooked section of the Knowledge Vault is Coaching Hours! We have been doing a one-hour conference call every month since November 2001 and they are all in the section. First, list...
Patterning Your Shotgun and Having a Quiet Eye
On our most recent Coaching Hour, we talked about patterning your shotgun first to make sure that the barrels are regulated correctly and then for the point of impact. We also talked about Hurricane H...
Vision Evolves as You Train
Be sure to check out the August 2017 Coaching Hour podcast where we talk about how your vision evolves as you train and your game progresses. We are just back from Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays in Penn...
Visualize in Detail
The top shooters never have to “check the beads” to see if they are lined up. Their mount is perfect every time, whether shooting gun up or down. Keeping their eyes on the target is a given and th...
Alter Human Behavior As It Is Happening!
As you become skillful, you enable the anticipation circuit in your brain to correct something in the shot you have done that will cause a miss while the shot is happening and before the shot is taken...
Anticipation
Your anticipation circuit in your brain can anticipate ahead of where you are. And it is in constant use while you are awake. The better you are at something, the farther in front of where you are the...
Consistency and Confidence
Consistency and confidence cannot be practiced; they are the residue of practice....
Turn Habit into Skill
Skill is what happens when you are not thinking. As a habit turns into a skill through repetition and evaluation and correction and repetition again, the more your skill improves. And the better your ...
You Can’t Think and Perform
It is so important to learn the fundamentals so well that they happen at 95 percent efficiency 100 percent of the time. You can’t be thinking while performing. As Vicki says, “thinking while perfo...
Better Habits
The better your habits, the more available focus there is for the target. Duh! Another breakthrough for me to explain available focus: Focus is a see-saw effect between the muzzle and the target. You ...
Attention: Knowledge Vault Members
Don’t forget to listen to the new Coaching Hour podcast, Thursday, July 20th! Topics include: – Encountering the Voice, Addressing the Ego – The Differences between Sub-Gauge and Mai...
Conquer Fear
Fear comes in because you are not yourself in a tournament. Your body does not know how to act and your brain doesn’t know how to control your body. The reason you are not yourself is that you are n...
Merely a Wish
When shooting well becomes a result, rather than something you can practice, it immediately eliminates the frustration of not shooting well. In turn, this kills the goal of just shooting well. It is s...
Determination to Conquer
The journey is moving through the threshold concepts with determination to conquer them, not to shoot well. Everything you seek is a result of what you have conquered, not something you can practice! ...
Stop Making Excuses
Being honest with yourself is the thing that opens the door to learning. Stop making excuses for not shooting as well as you think you should. “Excuses are the crutches of the untalented!”...
See the Bird Behind Where the Barrel is Pointing!
If we could just get shooters to stop trying to break the targets and focus on improving their move and seeing the bird behind where the barrel is pointing, they would instantly shoot better. When you...
Face the Facts!
Stop running away from failing and face the fact that you are responsible for the misses and the hits. Trying not to miss causes the learning to stop. You learn more from your misses than the hits. An...
Get the Gun out of the Way
We constantly see shooters who, for whatever reason, keep putting the gun too close to the target. And we spend 95 percent of our time getting the gun out of the way of the eyes. ...
Stop Chasing the Targets
When you finally stop chasing the targets and putting the gun in the way, you will begin to be able to slow the targets down. Two things will happen. First, you will begin to hit more targets. But mos...
The Frustration Comes to a Head
The frustration comes to a head in the journey when the corrections you use are not breaking the targets but it looks right....
The Solution is Simple
The solution is simple. But sometimes it’s a bitter pill because the first person you have to blame is yourself. The helping hand you are looking for is at the end of your own arm....
Not a Freeway!
Everyone is looking for a quick fix. Nobody said the road to consistently higher and higher scores was a freeway!...
Watch the Kill Shot Reviews and Do the Drills
I am consistently amazed at how shooters at all levels view what they are trying to do to break the target and where they look for consistency and improved performance. Simply watching the Clay Target...
“Problems” You Will Encounter along the Way
The apparent “problems” you encounter along the way in building your habits are less dependent on a certain target you are missing. This is important to note. The issue is more of a breakdown in a...
Trying Too Hard
Trying too hard encourages evaluation during performance…and nothing good will happen! Evaluation is a necessary step in getting better. But the evaluation process begins with the last shot you fire...
Determination to Conquer
The journey is moving through the habit, building concepts with determination to conquer them, not shoot well. Eventually, it’s more important to just go shoot and become yourself, regardless of whe...
Like Brushing Your Teeth
Everything you do on game day has got to become like brushing your teeth! In the beginning, you could not even find your mouth. Now you can stick your foot in it without even trying! Then you became f...
What Trying Too Hard Reveals
We see shooters becoming someone other than who they are when they try too hard on game day. That really reveals how much fear is present, which creates evaluation while performing. In turn, that crea...
Skill Needs to Become a Habit
Getting better is about building habits. Nothing is a skill until it is a habit. We see this in many different places along the journey as you complete the habit-building along the way. Each and every...
Shoot as Many Tournaments as You Can
Shooting as many tournaments as possible is so important, regardless of outcome. You just got to go shoot. You have to have shot so many tournaments that shooting another one is just like having a ham...
You Can’t Be Someone Else
You can’t be someone else. If you become someone else, you can no longer become you. This is where the struggle is. Imagine what your brain is thinking as you go to the shoot and through expectation...
How Much Have You Shot as Yourself?
It is not as much how well you can shoot, but how many times you have shot well while being yourself. That’s what really matters. This could be the greatest breakthrough I have had in coaching perfo...
Setbacks and Your Attitude
Your attitude in practice is so very important in building a game. And that is what you are doing: you are building a game. Setbacks are determined by your attitude about them, not what they really ar...
Building Your Competition Persona
It occurs to me today the reason why trying too hard or trying harder doesn’t work: You must build a persona of who you are in competition to have a peak performance. ...
No Quick Fix to Consistency
As we travel the country, we see over and over that the majority of shooters still think that getting the lead right will lead to more consistency. Then some say it’s “the six inches between their...
Neither Shock nor Relief
Rather than being shocked or relieved when the target breaks, the best shooters are shocked when it doesn’t break because they are so committed to a certain sight picture before they even close thei...
Another Satisfied Customer
“I did shoot my new Mossberg 930 sporting. It was hard for me to believe. I have a Benelli Super Sport custom shop, and a Beretta A 400 multi-target ACS. I took your 930 out, and on my first shoot...
The Three-Bullet Drill and Consistency
A giant step in the right direction to become more consistent is to do the three-bullet drill to train your brain to accept the muzzles in the periphery and get used to what the sight pictures really ...
Visualization Separates the Top Shooters from the Rest
There are two things we see that separate the top shooters in both skeet and sporting. First, the ability to visualize exactly what the shot is going to look like before they even load the gun. And se...
Concentration: The Art of Thinking About Nothing
Your focus improves as your habits improve. The amount you have used that specific habit in competition in turn determines how comfortable you are when you are competing. I was in a shoot-off with Oly...
Developing Your Skills into Habits
The beginning shooter must train themselves to develop good habits that they can depend on when they are performing. Nothing is a skill until it becomes a habit. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said, “W...
Knowledge Vault: Get More out of Your Practice
Before you go practice, always look in the Knowledge Vault and review companion videos in the sporting clays section of presentations you are about to practice. Then look at clay kill shot reviews of ...
The Mental Libraries of Top Shooters
Through purposeful practice, the top shooters have assembled a mental library of what it really looks like when they break a target, which allows them to send a detailed visual to their brains. When t...
The Brain Needs a Movie
Why are so many shooters so confused about why they can’t get the gun where they already know it is supposed to be? Well, our experience shows that top shooters can visualize exactly what they are a...
Don’t Short-Change Yourself!
Here’s what we learned from training and evaluating an eight-week skeet league in late summer and early fall of 2016… If you are not doing practice drills #102 and #102 from quick tips, watching t...
You Can’t Be Two Places at Once
On a recent Coaching Hour, our friend Dean Troutte said the following: “You are either in the cage thinking about what you are doing with the gun or you are downrange with the targets. You can’t b...
What Shooters Say It Looks Like
There are a lot of different perceptions about what really happens when you shoot at a moving target with a shotgun. And there are even more different approaches to getting the gun in front of the tar...
Sleep’s Effect on Performance
Check out the September 2016 Coaching Hour podcast! Sleep is really important. And not just the night before it starts; as much as a week before, and sometimes more than that. Things you do off the co...
Understanding Your Own Fear
The first and most critical step in dealing with fear is to be honest with yourself and understand yourself well enough to recognize a negative thought when it surfaces. The second step is to ask your...
Sticking with Your System
When we don’t perform well, we typically focus on our mechanical performance. But the mental mistake that may have contributed to the poor shots is too often overlooked. The game within the game is ...
Better Visualizations
After you miss, you can’t alter what has happened. But you can influence what will happen next. Get in the Knowledge Vault and watch the Kill Shot Reviews. You will better be able to visualize h...
Controlling Your Reactions to Your Mistakes
The key to success is not to eliminate mistakes. Mistakes are going to happen for everyone. The key is in controlling our reactions to those mistakes. The most destructive force you can unleash on the...
When Expectation Equals Ability
When expectation is equal to your ability, great things happen. That would be where confidence comes from. This begins with competence. And eventually, you become what you remember!...
It’s Not About Center Vision
It occurred to me today that it is not about training your center vision to stay on the target. It is about training your periphery to accept the gun and, through minimum movement, not switch primary ...
Training Your Competition Circuit
Your determination to do the same thing the same way every time you step into the stand, regardless of the situation, is the first step to training the competition circuit in the brain. What we are no...
Turning it Off
Being able to “turn it off and on” during a competition is critical for accessing the correct part of the brain to find the zone. Check out the last Coaching Hour for more about this topic...
Last Coaching Hour
In our Coaching Hour last Tuesday, we discussed several things: What happens to you physically and chemically when you react to pressure. Why coming out of the gun between shots of a pair is an advant...
When It’s Easier to Visualize
I am beginning to understand that when the shot is easier to visualize, the preload becomes more vivid. And it is easier to switch the subconscious on and the conscious off. Why? Because it’s easier...
On Our Way to Scarborough Fish and Game
Well, we are on our way to Maine to visit Scarborough Fish and Game. I am really excited about the next few days. It will be our first time at the facility, and from what I have heard, there are a lot...
Real Results from the Kill Shot Reviews
When you watch the Kill Shot Reviews with your mouse on the pause button, it makes them interactive. We now have scientific proof that viewing them will improve your score! Check out the video on the ...
Eye Takeover
I talked to a shooter yesterday who is complaining about missing right-to-left shots, claiming his right eye would take over and make him miss behind. He is a lefty and was trying dots with aperture i...
Phenomenal Results Incoming
Check out the forum for some great posts! We’re on our way to Ohio for a few days to coach and we’re looking forward to going to Maine in a few weeks. We continue to receive performance emails...
New Kill Shot Reviews Coming
In the coming month, we will be making more sporting clay Kill Shot Reviews. These will include a wider variety of shots, closer as well as farther, teal, and rabbits, to give tournament shooters a wi...
Why We Don’t Put the Distances in Our Kill Shot Reviews
What the research has shown in the past is listing the distance makes shooters concentrate on the lead, not how the shot comes together. Research further shows that how the shot comes together and gun...
Kill Shot Reviews: Performances are Soaring
Amazing things are happening to shooters who are watching the Kill Shot Reviews. Especially those who are viewing them interactively with the mouse on the pause button. It doesn’t matter whether...
More Kill Shot Reviews Coming
There have been some great forum topics, so check them out. If you are not looking at the clay kill shot reviews before you go practice or shoot a tournament, you should. Our skeet study shows that sh...
Now, That’s Significant!
I introduced the clay kill shot review to two shooters recently, and they could not stop watching it. It was as if they were instantly transformed into better shooters. Today we are going to do the KS...
Baffled by Some Shooters
I’m still baffled by the number of confused shooters who are trying to get the gun ahead of the bird and not see the barrel! When I ask them how they visualize that they are dumbfounded. So many sho...
Skeet Study
If you want to participate in our skeet study, email us and ask to be included. Be specific. You will be expected to go to the study site and do the drills, go shoot two rounds of skeet and report you...
The Difference between Good Practice and Great Practice
Vicki and I were practicing on a range in Montana in a pretty good shifting wind and were both shooting well. Targets were inkballing in the altitude with mod chokes. On a quick quartering bird from t...
Please Don’t Let the Rain Come Down!
Please don’t let the rain come down! Well, our field is still underwater at American and we are teaching at Greater Houston and Sealy at Super Dave’s place. Hopefully, the rain will slack off and ...
Exciting Developments with the Kill Shot Reviews
Hi all, We’ve been gone a lot over the last 40 days, and between traveling and the flood I’ve neglected my blog… but the “Pac is back!” I have some exciting news to share with all of you. Wh...
Exciting Preliminary Results – The OSP System Works!
We have completed the second eight-week study on skeet shooters. They were asked to watch the skeet Kill Shot Review and do the flashlight drill and three-bullet drill every time before going out to s...
The Need to Feel Competent
We have read several studies about why people do recreational sports and how many of them seek coaching. While the number of people seeking shooting instruction is definitely increasing, the reason wh...
Success and Competence
Success has everything to do with the frequency and duration of tasking. The quest for competency is really a driving force for why people do a sport. But competence alone is not the driver. There is ...
Shooting While Being Yourself
Here’s the reason why trying harder doesn’t work: you must build a persona of who you are in competition to have a peak performance. You can do this for 2.5 hours a week for five to eight year...
The Journey Begins: Training Wingshooters
Helping Wingshooters Improve We spent the last week training Texas Parks and Wildlife staff to use our Knowledge Vault videos and data to begin their journey of improving shooting proficiency in this ...
Being Stubborn with the Picture
There are just certain things that you must face and go through such as dropping the last bird on a station or letting fear get into your game in any number of ways. Watching the kill shot reviews whi...
What Your Shooting Can Cash…
Don’t let your mouth write a check your shooting can cash!...
Great Quote
“Shooting from behind the bird and looking at the bird down the barrel are both silly!” – Ignacio Rodriguez...
ShotKam
I spent the morning with David and Emily Stewart shooting spots for their ShotKam website and had a ball doing them. I got to tell the world about how just looking at the ShotKam shots will actually m...
Shooting Guns That Don’t Fit
At South Florida Shooting Club from March 17th through the 27th, and without exception, every gun I have picked up is too high to shoot anywhere close to where the shooters are looking. On top of that...
A Gun That’s Too High and Long
I saw a shooter with a Syren that was – you guessed it – too high and too long for her. If they would just leave the Monte Carlo off the stock and thin the comb, that gun would fit a lot m...
Advance School Thoughts
It’s the third week of our Advance School. Being surrounded by shooters who really want to advance their games is both invigorating and inspiring. Conclusions that I am drawing from these 21 day...
An Unusual Series of Shooters
Well, the first Advance Class is over, and what a success it was! We had great weather, and of course world-class targets. Again, shooters are continually amazed at how proficient the anticipation cir...
San Antonio Rodeo Update
I’m just back from the San Antonio rodeo junior shootout. Man, what an organized shoot, and what a privilege to be there and talk to the shooters. As usual, I saw young shooters in such contorted po...
Great Things
“Great things never came from comfort zones.” — Barry Sanders, who tweeted this during the Super Bowl...
Think About It…
If you are not willing to be seen as STUPID, nothing great will ever happen to you!...
If Only You Weren’t Worrying About Your Muzzle…
Think about how much focus you could put on the target if you did not have to worry about what you are doing with the gun when mounting it. I long for the day when your mounting process is automatic: ...
Press On
The anticipation circuit in the brain can alter behavior as it is happening. And the better your moves are, the easier you’re making it on the circuit to correct! When you give in to evaluation, how...
Knowledge Vault Updates and Florida
We’re back in Florida and looking forward to the next three weekends. South Florida Shooting Club today through Tuesday. Sarasota Gun Club Wednesday through Sunday, and OK Corral Monday through Sund...
Be Forgiving and Forgetful!
I had a conversation with Jeff Wolfe the other day and he made a comment that I want to share with you all. We were talking about being able to forget the bad shots, and he said “you have to be able...
Have You Done the Three-Bullet Drill?
I had a question today about mounting quickly and not inserting and stopping the gun. My answer is as follows: Have you done the three-bullet drill? What you are describing is symptomatic of looking d...
To Improve You Must Change
We find that to improve you must change something. And shooters who can move and mount the gun without thinking about it or looking at it can make changes so much more quickly than those who can’...
Dallas Safari Convention
We are at the Dallas Safari convention today and tomorrow doing seminars. And we’re excited to show the new HD ShotKam footage we have shot on clays, doves, and quail. We never know what we are ...
Not Too Late for the Perfect Gift
Christmas is just around the corner. It’s not too late to purchase a Knowledge Vault annual membership at a discounted rate on the 14-day test drive, so check it out. I’m sneaking away for a few d...
Amazed
Well, I wasn’t going to say anything about this but I just can’t keep it inside of me… I am still amazed at the people out there who are looking down the barrel while shooting a moving target wi...
Lots of Opportunities Coming Your Way
Our Carbon TV channel launches on December 22nd, so check it out. We will be doing some unique things in the quick tips section. It will be expanding on a regular basis as we have many tips planned to...
Returning from Florida
On Monday we returned from South Florida Shooting Club where we had a great time. And man, what a club. Holden has really done something here… 160+ machines on four courses, plus FITASC 5-stands, tr...
Mental Game
I said this earlier in my career as a professional coach: Learning to shoot is about learning how to move and mount the gun in front of the targets; learning how to perform is about learning how to th...
South Florida
We are in Florida through Sunday night teaching at Sarasota Gun Club on Wednesday and private lessons on Thursday. Then we have clinics at South Florida Shooting Club on Friday through Sunday. It’s ...
Nuisance Decisions
I was talking to Marcus Fielder at Greater Houston last Sunday, and nuisance decisions came up when we were talking about chokes. Our simple approach is “skeet or mod” and that is it. He had looke...
Great Day
Vicki and I did something Sunday that we don’t often get to do. We went to shoot by ourselves at Greater Houston Gun Club. The weather was unbelievable and we had such a great time. While shooti...
Great Things in the Works
At last, we are getting ready to come back to the States where the internet is immediate, the water is good, and we can sleep in our own bed. Shooting the new ShotKam II HD is a gas and the video it p...
Argentina – Wait until You See the Videos…
We are still in Argentina watching it drizzle, and we’re taking a day off. Yes, I said a day off. It’s hard work to shoot doves four days in a row! I realize there will be no sympathy from any of ...
Training in Cordoba
Well, I am sitting on the back porch of the lodge just east of Cordoba smelling the roses and watching the endless waves of doves fill the sky with the occasional pigeon and indigenous birds mixed in....
Clay Kill Shot Review
If you are not watching the Kill Shot Reviews twice the night before and once the morning of the practice or tournament, you are missing out on one of the newest and simplest ways to have high-level p...
Greeting Failure
The shooters who have the most filler in their brain are always the ones who learn the new concepts the quickest. They are able to shift the paradigms in their brains and fire the circuits in differen...
Threshold Concepts
It seems that the more we do this, the more we understand what really stands in the way of becoming proficient with a shotgun on a moving target. The threshold concept of the ability to correctly and ...
Tarleton U Kickoff Reflections
Monday and Tuesday we were at Tarleton University presenting our Knowledge Vault concepts and how they create perceptual-cognitive learning. For the next six weeks, the students will be doing the thre...
Seeing the Connection (Part Four)
If you feel like you are chasing the bird then you are behind it. You can’t chase it from in front. In our game, you can be in front and behind at the same time. This leads to flinching and horr...
Seeing the Connection (Part Three)
It’s what you do off the course that gets you there sooner. Brian said something in a clinic yesterday that stopped me in my tracks. “You must separate yourself from the gun.” Brilli...
Seeing the Connection (Part Two)
Your ability to focus is an evolutionary thing. The more of what you do that is automatic, the less you have to focus on what you are doing. The less you have to focus on what you are doing, the more ...
Seeing the Connection (Part One)
As I look back over our last few coaching sessions, I’m beginning to see a connection. It’s always been there, but I just didn’t recognize it or just now realized it differently. Fam...
Free Advice
I now know why there is so much free advice in our game…especially if you’re a woman! “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan!” I got that from Nike co-founder Phil...
Be a Puller
On a recent Coaching Hour, our friend Max talked about the things he’s observed while pulling at both corporate and registered events. And he discussed some of the conclusions he’s overhea...
It Pays Off!
“Thank you again for hosting a class in St Louis. Over the last two weeks, I have been watching the kill shots and working on what I learned with you. It all came together last weekend. I won my...
Being Honest with Yourself
The other day I had a lesson with a young female athlete the other day who wanted to really shoot great, but she had not committed to building the skills to do so. This was our first lesson together,...
Chunking
I am beginning to understand more and more about filler and this chunking thing and how all this evolves into having the capabilities to perform at higher and higher levels while at the same time bein...
The Jitters: Coaching Hour September 2015
The jitters are something you just have to go through. Most are caused by wanting to control what others think about you. But you can’t control that, so don’t even go there. But you are go...
Practice Every Day
Please, practice your gun mount every day. Don’t make your job and ours harder by not doing it. Saying or thinking that you’re eliminating risk by shooting a mounted gun means you need to ...
Touch Your Gun Every Day
If you are not touching your gun every day, you are not getting better. The more I shoot, the more I’m amazed at what the anticipation circuit can do, and the less I am focused on anything. The ...
Perceptions
It seems that the more we coach, the more we are dumbfounded by people’s concept of what they are trying to do. When we examine those concepts and translate them literally, they make absolutely ...
Stable Picture
I had a lesson with a multi-approach shooter who was so mixed up that he didn’t even know how to describe his shooting. Swing-through, pull away, and sustained lead all at once in the same targe...
Thought for the Day: Visualization First
You must have muzzle awareness before you can not have it. You cannot visualize not seeing the gun! The brain cannot do anything if it can’t first visualize what it’s about to do. The more...
Expectations
As you improve, it is easy for your expectation to keep getting in your way. Listen to more Coaching Hour podcasts. The answers are there. We will be talking about jitters and scoring on the next one....
Getting Upset at Missing
It seems that the very thing you should be looking for is the very thing shooters get so upset at. Missing the same presentation over and over again. If you will listen, the game will speak to you and...
Success
If at first, you don’t succeed… Try doing what your coach told you to do the first time!...
Lehigh Valley Group “A-Ha’s”
I continue to be amazed at how the Kill Shot Reviews imprint in our students’ brains the concept of the target coming to the lead as the gun matches the speed. A Trap Shooter and Rifle Shooter L...
Video Analysis
One of your annual membership benefits to the Knowledge Vault is video analysis of your move and mount. Click here for more info. (Must be a Knowledge Vault member)...
Knowledge Vault Membership
The Knowledge Vault continues to grow worldwide. It’s incredible how our members are getting so much better in such a short time. What’s also incredible is what we’re learning about ...
The Two C’s
Confidence and consistency cannot be practiced. They are what is left over after practice. They are both a byproduct of competence and will not occur without it. You can never be more confident or con...
ShotKam II HD
We will be shooting many more clay kill shot videos and making trajectory specific Kill Shot Reviews as soon as we get our new HD ShotKam. We will be doing some target-specific shots at measured diffe...
Excuses
Each time you come to see me I will change what you are doing. For some, it seems we spend the first half of the lesson with them telling me what they have not been practicing and trying to hit the bi...
Patience
Your expectation of doing it once and “getting it” continues to put shooters in the situation of “getting in their own way.” Most shooters wait until they get it right. But the...
“A-ha” Moment
The Subconscious Takes Over Here’s a comment from a student who finally realized this is not a gun/cartridge/glasses/lead game, but a brain game. He describes his “a-ha” moment when ...
Kill Shot Review/Perceptive Cognitive Learning
I just got an email from Driscoll after a practice session at Caney Creek. He said he had been watching the kill shot reviews over and over before the practice session. And he said he shot lights out ...
The Second Day In Ohio
Well, the two shooters who went to two eyes shot out of their minds on the second day! One of them was shooting a high-rib Guerini and his eyes were easily 3/4″ over the top of the already high ...
Learning to Shoot with Two Eyes
I had two shooters in a group yesterday in Ohio who exhibited cross-dominance problems. One was “right eyes and look at the gun.” He complained about being in E class for way too long. The...
“What” Is More Important
When competing… WHAT you’re doing is more important than HOW you’re doing....
Pushing Beyond the Limits
What Fear Does to You Just remember, fear in any non-life-threatening situation has never done you any good. When the fear emotion enters the computer, three things happen: Your trunk muscles freeze u...
Practice is Different to Different People
Here’s something you might want to consider. I will use our coaching experience as an example. We don’t need to practice coaching anymore. But that does not mean that we stop learning. You...
Observations on Blocked vs Random Practice
Blocked practice yields a high percentage of success during practice. But on game day it falls apart, the research shows. Random practice, while yielding fewer broken targets as you practice, will hol...
No One Just “Has It”
No one just “has it.” There is no “it.” Unless the “it” you’re talking about is hard work and time on targets, coupled with a passion to not accept anything l...
The Road to Greatness
Being great at anything is a lonely road. It evolves with a lot of time honing and re-honing your fundamentals until you can depend on them. You are really building a circuit in the brain. The more yo...
Overcoming Fear
Regardless of the arena, the one thing you must overcome is fear. The only way you overcome fear is to become competent. And when you become competent you become confident. When you are confident, you...
Competence Creates the Zone
Nothing creates the zone like competence. Competence first in shooting fundamentals and second in competing. Said another way, you must first learn to shoot. Then and only then can you learn how to co...
The Value of Practice
The most unused technique in this game is quality practice with a purpose and goal. Our research shows that the reason is that people don’t understand what practice is for. This is why they don&...
The Number One Reason for Missing!
The number one reason for missed targets is the aiming perception causing the target to be seen down the barrel or not far enough behind the barrel for any number of reasons. The more you understand t...
Commitment To A Plan and Why
The only experience that will benefit you is the successful or unsuccessful attempt of a specific plan. Indecision confuses the brain. When approaching targets you have never seen, make a plan and exe...
Argentina Dove and Pigeon Hunting: Lessons Learned
We’re leaving the La Zenaida lodge on our way to the pigeon lodge. Joe and Kate left to hunt today and go back to the US tonight. They said their goodbyes and we are making great time to the lod...
You’ve Just Got To Eventually KNOW
I’m now convinced more than ever of the importance of being able to move and mount the gun to the target. That is a precursor to improving a person’s ability to shoot moving targets with a...
Lessons Learned in Argentina (Part Three)
Last Pigeon Shoot No ShotKam this time. I’m just shooting. There’s an uncanny ability to see the bird and less and less of the barrel. It’s as if you must be aware of it when program...
Lessons Learned in Argentina (Part Two)
I’ve been shooting the ShotKam and struggled the first day with the weight. I had to rest every 10 or so shots at the dove lodge. I forced myself to keep shooting the Shotkam at the pigeon lodge...
Lessons Learned in Argentina (Part One)
We’re leaving La Zenaida dove lodge and going to pigeon lodge. Lessons Learned by Each Student Gerald: Expectation became his boundary which he overcame. Keith: Expanded his horizons. Richard: S...
Overview of the IHEA Conference
We’re leaving the IHEA conference with a few more states on our DNR program. I’ve realized that the hunting population in America is on the downhill slide and there’s not much that c...
Another Happy Customer
May 11, 2015 Denver, CO I had a great time on Friday following Gil around, making notes, and just observing and listening. It was great. And then, of course, I got to shoot with Vicki on Sunday. Man, ...
Teamwork In The Brain
“The difference between the top shooters and the rest of the pack is that we will not pull the trigger unless we know it is going to break.” -Scott Robertson Teamwork in the Brain In most ...
Confidence and Performance
Breakpoints create confidence. Transitions control performance! When you can shoot breakpoints at will, you become confident. And you must do this in practice. Once you achieve it, the quality of your...
It’s a Movie, Not a Snapshot!
I said something yesterday that I’ve never said before. We use the term “sight picture” to describe where our eyes are when we take the shot. This leads people to look for a snapshot...
What It Takes To Change Your Brain’s Pattern After Age 25
This is an interesting piece by Vivian Giang. “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” That quote was made famous by Harvard ...
How the Brain Anticipates
We’re coming back from Camanche Hills Sporting Clays after three days of coaching and we’re looking forward to going to the bay to fish for a couple of days. While in California, I read a ...
Revelation!
Accessing the Filler in Your Brain I just read a recent study about the brain is constantly anticipating ahead of where we are. It will compensate for tiny differences in timing input and output to ma...
Building Filler
This brings a new face to practice. Rather than trying to memorize the move, you train the move and build filler. So when you perform, if you are trying to remember what to do, you are not using fille...
The Subconscious Anticipation Circuit
A Lesson From the Moving Sidewalk We’re in the airport today leaving for Fort Myers, Florida. After we got through security and walked to the moving sidewalks, we were chatting away. And as we t...
After Advance School
Lessons from the Advance School Well, I have been resting for a week after four straight weeks at 74 Ranch. The Advance Classes were great this year. We got all to shoot targets at 80-100 yards. It...
The Filler Part of the Brain (Part Two)
Here’s why it eventually becomes so important to be honest with yourself. Your choice is to be constantly building filler – good filler, or some good and some bad. It’s not how well ...
The Filler Part of the Brain (Part One)
In the first Advance Class last week, I began to understand more about the brain’s ability to fill in the stuff that is filed in its automaticity part. This is how the brain is deceived. It̵...
Welcome Aboard to Brian
Welcome, Brian! Our son Brian will begin his tenure with us next Monday. He’ll be in Florida with Bill Cline, looking at some ranges in anticipation of helping Bill produce a range owner manual ...
Keeping the Bird and Barrel Separate
Back from San Antonio and the 4-H Rodeo shoot-out. What a pleasure to be surrounded by so many young people with manners and respect. I got to look at a Dry Fire unit and watch shooters play with it. ...
Not Looking at the Gun
Become a Knowledge Vault Member! We’re about to have a new image tagline: LOL: Learning Online for our Knowledge Vault. We currently have more than 800 video lessons with over 1200 being added o...
Where Confidence is Born
Fitting Guns in Sunny Florida We spent a week in Florida, and the weather was incredible this time of year. That’s why we go there every year. We shot with quite a few students, both private les...
The Knowledge Vault Craze
What fun we had in Vegas talking to our readers of Safari Magazine. We had two great sessions of standing-room-only seminars with lots of interaction. The kill shot reviews were amazing and people jus...
Thinking is Seeing
“It is a trait of an educated and seasoned shooter that he can entertain a thought and not succumb to it.” – Steve Brown This is in essence what has to be done to achieve higher and ...
Confirmation
We were in Florida this past week for a series of lessons. First, we had two private lessons with a couple for a day. Vicki and I each had one person for the day. What a great opportunity to first dis...
More Observations from Phoenix
On Friday in Phoenix, I could not hit anything when shooting other shooters’ guns. I was just having one of those days. I took this as a signal that I needed to train and shoot about 1000 target...
Looking Back on Phoenix Clinic
We’re leaving Phoenix after two days of coaching, and man, has Dan Twitchell done some amazing things with that complex. What a relief to see a real businessman in the shooting business. A Uniqu...
Working with 4-H This Year
Using the Knowledge Vault as a Training Tool We will be at the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo Junior Shoot-Out at the national headquarters this year showing the Knowledge Vault. They have agreed to...
Back to the Blog
Well, it’s been a while since I have communicated with you, but I am not sorry. Vicki’s mom passed away on December 31st after a long battle with dementia and cancer. I learned a few thing...
Until Next Year
Happy New Year to all. We will be back in the saddle next year!...
A Hunting Visit to The 74 Ranch
Doves and Quail at the 74 Ranch We found ourselves at the 74 Ranch for quail hunting this past weekend with sponsors. It was exciting and fun, and man, is it a pleasure to watch the dogs work. We deci...
Synopsis of a Gun Fit
Just another satisfied customer who had the courage to let me cut on his stock. Storm, along with Dan Paxon in Carolina have both recently begun to shoot guns with the OSP stock dimension on them. Bot...
Beginner to Advanced Criteria
Are coaches effective when they tell athletes to be more like superstars such as Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, or Wayne Gretzky? On one hand, the stories of these superstars are not very useful because...
Learn to Mount the Gun
A Shooter’s Transformation Just returned from a quail hunt at the 74 Ranch and discussed with other hunters what they saw and what went through their heads when they were shooting. As you might ...
The Kill Shot Review Really Works
I talked to Doss yesterday, who had called to let me know just how lethal he’s been on game birds from looking at the kill shot review on ducks. He also shared with me that he had shot the Brist...
Comments Overheard at Tournaments
Thanks to Jeff Wolfe for these two comments he has overheard at tournaments. “You’ve got the correct lead, now try putting it on the other side of the target.” “If that target ...
Sporting Clays Journey
It’s About How You Handle Failure The road to success is not a freeway. It’s always under construction, full of setbacks and holes to fall into. And the paradox is you never really get the...
Back from Quail Hunting
Headed back to Fulshear after the morning hunt with Rachel and Gary. Man, were the birds on these past few hunts strong flyers. They were perhaps the strongest flyers I have ever seen on pen-raised bi...
ShotKam: What a Difference!
Vicki and I had invited Gary and Rachel down to the 74 Ranch to celebrate their fifth anniversary. With all experienced hunters in the group, we decided that we would hunt no more than three per hunt...
Nuisance Decisions!
Well, I got trapped in the nuisance decision vortex today. I’m doing a lot of planning and just totally forgot that we were supposed to hunt quail with Dr. Charlie Rockwood and Dr. Larry Trick ...
74 Ranch Quail Hunt
Hunting Quail at the 74 Ranch I got a call from Milo at the 74 Ranch, who wanted to know if I was going to make it for lunch. I told him we would be there tomorrow for lunch, no problem. He said I w...
More from Nationals
Learning from Long Targets Well, it’s been an interesting few days for me. I’ve been missing a lot of targets in front and finding it hard to let the target close. Perplexed, I’ve b...
Shooting at Nationals
Lots of people and a lot going on. I’m still mystified at the number of people who are looking down the gun when they mount the gun! We shot the orange course, which was set by Neil Chadwick....
Before You Call “Pull”
I published this on Shotgun World and thought you should read it: We find the biggest single factor in missing targets and perceived eye problems is the shooter mounting the gun too close to the targ...
More on Moving and Mounting the Gun
If you are going to ever shoot a shotgun at any level of consistency, you are going to have to learn to move and mount the gun. I’m still amazed at the number of shooters who think they will be ...
Smash, Smash: Shooting with Both Eyes Open
I shot with a father and son who both had been closing an eye and aiming the shotgun. The son was getting into SCTP and his father asked our advice about guns and what to do to give him an edge. I su...
Good Time Shooting at Our Home Base
Last weekend we had a clinic in Houston. And man, what a time everyone had. Again, the concept of moving the same speed as the target was huge. Once accepted, it proved to be lethal for all concer...
A Shooter’s Story
Just had to share this email from Doug Mellen. This stuff is really amazing. *** Gil, Just thought I would drop you a line to relate a story that is too true to pass up. You spent a couple of days h...
Teaching in South Carolina
We’re on our way back from Live Oaks Sportsman’s Club in South Carolina. During our last visit, we shot with the manager Steve Bolt, who listened to the introduction of the sight pictures...
Teaching Preload in Oregon
Knowledge Vault Updates Well, it’s about time for us to be able to add more material to the Knowledge Vault. We do apologize for not adding video material, but the web designer we recently fired...
Shooting a Moving Target
I shot today in Grants Pass, Oregon, and was amazed again at how lethal it is to move the same speed as the bird. It’s not so much the shooter’s ability to get the gun in front on lon...
Teaching in Beaumont: How Quickly the Brain Can Respond
Last week I shot in both Beaumont and Houston with several different shooters, and most of them were confused and trying not to see the barrel. It’s becoming more and more evident to me that...
Establishing the Rhythm
“You won’t win a golf tournament on Thursdays. But you can lose it on Thursdays. Therefore, the first three holes are not about score. They are about establishing the rhythm of your routine with a...
Iowa Training Session
Well, we are leaving the Iowa training session. And what a great session it was. We had 12 shooters and 12 observers. The first afternoon was in the classroom. We went over the basic toolbox animat...