Greetings from the OSP trail across the country. I’m\u00a0looking forward to sharing some things I have learned from biting deep in my zone while teaching.<\/p>\n
I had\u00a0a lesson with Robert McClenagan and said something I have never said before.\u00a0Robert was having trouble with mounting his gun softly to his shoulder, learning to let the bird come to the lead. If\u00a0you don’t know what I’m\u00a0talking about, check out my mounts in the Knowledge Vault’s video section.<\/p>\n
The soft mount early with my nose on the bird well behind the gun is a little hard for some to grasp. The\u00a0reason is they have been shooting for so long playing so close to the bird that their initial move is\u00a0so<\/i>\u00a0fast. And\u00a0as a result, it’s\u00a0hard on their shoulder. By the way,\u00a0that’s why almost all shooters have such a fast move they have been behind every bird they have ever tried to hit so they are always behind and in a rush. They equate gaining more time with mounting faster when in reality they are losing time for this one basic reason that came out of my mouth in my lesson with Robert.<\/p>\n
When the mount is hard and fast, you must move the gun with the big muscles. But when it is soft,\u00a0you move the gun with the little muscles. We have always known that body movement was less efficient than the hands and arms, but I\u00a0had never said it that way.<\/p>\n
This\u00a0is why \u201ccheek weld\u201d is such a common misconception. The harder you grip and hold the gun against your shoulder and cheek,\u00a0the less you are moving the gun with the small muscles and the more you must move it with the big muscles. In the end,\u00a0the movement will be sluggish at best and totally controlled by your balance mechanism.<\/p>\n
I’m still amazed at the aiming perception and how prevalent it is among all shooters, even those who say they understand you are not supposed to look at the gun.<\/p>\n
The other “a-ha” that I had was when I was explaining the\u00a0cyclopean\u00a0effect in the brain. This\u00a0is when the brain takes the two retinal images and combines them into one image. For right-handed shooters, the left-to-right sight picture is the easiest for the brain to convert because they are so similar. Both eyes see the bird to the left of the barrel. The right-to-left, on the other hand, is not as simple. And\u00a0here is where I am beginning to feel that\u00a0the perception of dominance comes into the picture.<\/p>\n
The shooting (right) eye has an unobstructed view of the target to the right of the barrel, but the non-shooting (left) eye sees the target across the barrel. The barrel obstructs almost all of the bottom half of the image that the left eye sees,\u00a0so when the brain tries to combine the image, their lack of similarity is in some cases confusing to the brain. What is \u201cseen\u201d by the brain is not as clear as the left-to-right picture.<\/p>\n
Because\u00a0it’s not as clear, the perception of dominance is blamed and the shooter closes or occludes the non-shooting eye and the confusion goes away which is shot because it is the non-shooting eye image that’s creating the confusion in the first place!<\/p>\n
I’ve sent a message out to the scientists I know to see if what I’m talking about is real or perceived. Time will tell.<\/p>\n
What we’re looking to create in the brain is a \u201csuspended circuit\u201d where the brain has understood what we want to see and has changed the interpretation to seeing one blob as the barrel and eliminated the nonessential image of the double image of the barrel. In the beginning, we were coaching shooters to just try and not see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Greetings from the OSP trail across the country. I’m\u00a0looking forward to sharing some things I have learned from biting deep in my zone while teaching. I had\u00a0a lesson with Robert McClenagan and said something I have never said before.\u00a0Robert was having trouble with mounting his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gil"],"yoast_head":"\n