Focus of concentration and automaticity - pistol disciplines

[longfellow]

I have been spending the past year while allowing my shoulder to heal, studying the fields of habbit (automaticity), motor learning, and the neuroscience of multitasking. The consensus is that one can not concentrate (directing attention to stimuli coming in to any of our five senses, PLUS internal concentration (thinking)) on more than one thing at a time. Top tier shooters concur that a correct shot process can only have you thinking about sight alignment. So how do you who have reached the top level within your specific disciplines (for Bullseye this would be Master and High Master shooters) explain how the trigger finger movement gets initiated as well as sustained if you do not divert your mental concentration (not your visual focus which stays on your sights) to that additional task? And how did you train to establish the neural pathways which made this start happening on its own?
Thanks for your input guys,
Ed

[SteveT]

You can't direct you conscious focus on more than one thing. The subconscious manages all the other stuff in the background.

I can't tell you how I pull the trigger. My focus is on the sights. When I see the sight picture developing, there is some conscious thought starting the trigger, but I don't think how I am building pressure or when the trip point is reached.

When I visualize the shot process I am focused on the sights and the gun just goes off as the dot moves into the center or as the front sight aligns perfectly with the rear notch.

I can say that my mental attitude and approach leading up to the trigger event is critical. If I approach the shot confidently and aggressively the majority of my shots fall within my hold and gun/ammo accuracy range. If I am tentative or worried or if my mind wanders then they do not.

[longfellow]

That's actually not a bad answer Steve. Just hearing that someone else also doesn't have the answer, helps me understand a bit more about the process. That it is difficult to explain is actually useful.
I get as far at to send a message to initiate squeeze and "most" of the time this gets a bit of movement out of the finger even after I switch over to sights but too often the finger stops before there is sufficient pressure to release the shot. After a few seconds this becomes obvious (no bang) and I then send a fresh message to the finger and of course this disturbs the sights as well as takes mental (not visual) attention off of the sights for the time that it takes to tell finger to start moving again which creates the added problem that if the gun happens to go off right then I wasn't looking at the sights and therefore can't call my shot. How does one get to where one needs only the initial message to start squeezing, to be sufficient for the entire trigger process all the way in to follow through? I have to think that this is very commom. A golfer initiates his swing consciously but then switches all of his concentration on the ball and the entire swing happens.

[Gwhite]

The best analogy I've come up with is tying your shoes. It's a complex action involving both hands, and for the vast majority of us, we apply NO conscious thought to the process. If you tried to think it through, you'd probably mess it up.

It's a "learned motor response", and it's mastered by repetition. If you practice too much with your trigger finger always freezing up, you will develop bad habits. You are best off dry firing A LOT to train your finger, without any "outcome" to worry about. If you really want to start from ground zero, don't even use a target. Try to master a smooth squeeze so the pistol fires without any additional motion before or after the shot breaks.

This takes a LOT of perseverance & patience. Everyone wants to just go and shoot, but if you want to shoot really well, it's not trivial for most shooters.

[longfellow]

Thank you guys.

[bootneckbob]

Interesting read. I liked the shoe lace anology. That was a really good explanation why dry firing is important and why I should do more. I bought the Evo e over the LP400 as the DF function was better (in my mind at the time). Havn't used it enough and now I've got another 400!

[andrew53]

I too am very interested in this.

Is it harder to develop automaticity as you age ?

Is it harder to develop automaticity as you gain more experience ?

[seamaster]

Consciously pulling trigger, 1st stage, 2nd stage, follow through. While leaving front sight focus to subconscious automaticity.

Is this what that coach in foresightshooting.com is talking about?

[Gwhite]

I think the general theory is that the trigger squeeze should be automatic, and the concentration should be on maintaining sight alignment.

It may also vary with the shooter. I always did best when my triggering was on auto-pilot, but my auto-pilot seems to have died of old age... YMMV

[JonPersson]

I think this subject is too complex to simplify down to “this or that part should be automatic”

What does automatic really mean? How does one draw the line between completely subconscious actions and actions that are initiated by thought but automatic in it’s sequence. I think it’s more about different sequences of the process that are more or less automatic in the sense that we don’t have to think about every step once that step is initiated. It’s a sliding scale that will be different for different people, even professionals.

Skanåker writes about trigger control in air pistol as being FUNDAMENTALLY different from other pistol events. The reason for this is the slower velocity of the pellet, which means the pellet stays in the barrel longer. Therefore any trigger error has a greater chance of moving the pistol while the pellet is still in the barrel.
The technique in air pistol is to allow more time for the trigger pull, at the expense of “arc of movement”. Pulling the trigger SLOWLY is more important that holding super still. From that I gather that Skanåkers approach is that trigger pull is a consciously initiated action. At least for the majority of shooters. However given years of training this might transform into something of an “automatic” nature.

So to sum it up:
Lock your wrist with sights aligned.
Hold as still as you can
Focus on front sight
100% mental focus on a slow smooth trigger pull

[Eaton Rifles]

Trigger pull is something that needs to be repeated with hours and hours of dry-fire until the action becomes completely automatic and detached from the conscious part of your shoot process. Just to give you an idea, it takes roughly 65k repetitions for an action to become without thought and totally controlled by your subconscious, so just a few dry-fire sessions aren't going to cut it if you want to improve.

In short, if you're thinking about 'pulling' the trigger then you're doing it wrong, the only thing that is important is concentrating on that fore-sight post in relation to your target picture. Everything else, stance, breathing etc, is just getting you to that final concentration point.

Your subconscious is infinitely more powerful than your conscious and has the power to both make and break your shooting. I went through a bad phase a few years ago where I would get trigger freeze and be totally unable to get a shot off without forcing the shot. Several sessions of hypno-theraphy later and I was cured and in the process I witnessed the power of my sub-conscious as I was taken back to a childhood trauma which was causing me the issues some 50 years later. Quite why this had decided to pop up at that point and cause me hassle with my shooting is anyone's guess, but it was identified and dealt with which is the main thing. In the meantime I gained a new appreciation of just how powerful this thing called your subconscious is, you just need to make peace and work with it, not against it as you will lose every time.

[seamaster]

Childhood trauma as genesis of chicken finger?
That is interesting knowledge. If you don’t mind, could you elaborate more? Expectation could lead to failure.

I am screwed in this childhood trauma leading to poor shooting regards. I shamefully lie, cheat, and steal, plunder and almost killed other people. Too many unresolved childhood issues. If these are the causes of my subconscious poor focus in shooting, I like to learn more, and resolve them.

Educate me on how childhood subconscious come into play in shooting focus. You must be a high level shooter to have access to sport hypnosis therapist.

[JonPersson]

Trigger pull is something that needs to be repeated with hours and hours of dry-fire until the action becomes completely automatic....

Ok, maybe the desired outcome of years of hard training is “an completely subconscious shot” in almost every step.

Problem is that very few people will ever get to that point.
So how should they approach the shot process?

My view is to do as most professionals tell it:
Start with the basic, stance, grip, lift, aiming area, front sight focus, squeeze the trigger without interruption.

So once the pistol settles in the area of aim and you do your best to lock the wrist and you look at the front sight, you will have two options (following the assumption that we can only truly focus at one thing at the time)

Option 1: all mental focus in front sight, but how do we then pull the trigger in one continuous motion? Chances are that we will do a start/stop/start motion with the trigger resulting in jerking the trigger.

Option 2: mental focus on the smooth trigger pull. If your grips is good and your wrist is able to “lock” the trigger pull should not induce any significant movement of the front sight in relation to the rear sight. The mental focus on the trigger pull will make it easier to allow you to accept the pistol movement as well as the tiny vibrations of the front sight that you often see.

This may with time develop into an automatic response, but it’s something you will develop gradually over time.

But for the majority of us, who is nowhere near a 580 score, we have to approach the shot process as honest as we can. We don’t have a completely subconscious shot, and most likely never will.

My PB in competition is 571 (loooong way from 580) and it was not an automated shot process. Same parts were, but not to a degree where I can say “this was induced by thought and this part was subconscious”

Train the fundamentals. And if you desire “subconscious shots” all the way, quit your day job and shoot for the Olympics...then maybe...

[Eaton Rifles]

Childhood trauma as genesis of chicken finger?
That is interesting knowledge. If you don’t mind, could you elaborate more? Expectation could lead to failure.

I am screwed in this childhood trauma leading to poor shooting regards. I shamefully lie, cheat, and steal, plunder and almost killed other people. Too many unresolved childhood issues. If these are the causes of my subconscious poor focus in shooting, I like to learn more, and resolve them.

Educate me on how childhood subconscious come into play in shooting focus. You must be a high level shooter to have access to sport hypnosis therapist.

No idea on the 'why' regarding the trauma, it's not the sort of thing that you can choose, it just happens.

Basically when I was 3 years old I was left in the back of a van for 24 hours during the winter of '63 and almost died of hypothermia.
I'm not going into the details of why I was left in a van under those conditions, you just need to understand the circumstances.

Obviously I couldn't remember it, but when I was put under hypnosis I suddenly started shivering uncontrollably, and it felt like I had been dumped in an ice bath, (I've had one of those as well, not nice).
Well, I was back in the van, I could see everything, the ice on the metal, but worse than that was the cold which was absolutely numbing, basically I was back there and experiencing everything again, running through it like some sort of waking nightmare. I was asked to describe everything which I did and that first session stretched into four hours until I was finally brought out as a total mess still shivering uncontrollably.

Quite how this manifested itself into being in a competition one day and suddenly finding that I simply couldn't pull the trigger, but according to the professional in this case it was that event that was causing the issue.

I had six sessions which weren't cheap and each time I could feel an improvement until finally I was deemed 'cured'. That was how I had access to a sports hypnotist, money, pure and simple.
Apparently I was her first shooter which surprised me. Apparently the majority of people she saw are either golfers or darts players.

Up until this I had always regarded hypnosis and the subconscious with the same completevdisdain, i.e. it's a fraud and of course the conscious is in charge, how I was so wrong.
Those six sessions were an eye opener and showed me just how powerful a tool hypnosis can be.

[andrew53]

Wow that's amazing - I believe you, Tks. for sharing.

[Two Shanks]

I have been shooting so long sometimes I'm thinking about something completely different when the shot breaks. If I really focus and concentrate it doesn't make any difference. To me it's all just automatic. It's not like it's some sort of zen thing. After about a hundred rounds sometimes I stop and try to take a rest and gather it up a little bit.

[Rudi]

My dad always told me to imagine when pulling the trigger, that you are pulling the front sight directly through the back sight.
Just that alone helped me get a smooth consistent pull and almost immediately keep things on target during the pull. After practice, it all became more natural to the point its now just a feeling, and 8s, 9s and 10s