TargetTalk

Mr. Lurker wrote:In other words, can you be aware of some aspect of the sights, trigger, etc. without conciously attempting to control it?

Of course you can. For example, just pay attention to your driving the next time you go somewhere. If you want to understand the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, just try explaining to someone how to operate the clutch on a manual transmission (assuming you know how to use one yourself) in such a way that he can do it correctly the first time that he tries it -- you can't do it. Saying things like, "Let the clutch out smoothly while applying gas with the accelerator" just doesn't mean anything to the novice. And you can only describe what you can conciously observe.

Nevertheless, it's possible to teach someone who to use a clutch in less than 5 minutes -- I taught my wife and son this way, and I learned this way myself:

"Find a hill in a residential neighborhood. Drive partway up the hill. Practice holding the car stationary on the hill, using only the accelerator and the clutch. You will learn the 'feel' of the clutch in a matter of seconds, and then you will be able to use it without any further problems."

Choking occurs when 'tacit' knowledge suddenly becomes 'explicit'. I don't know of anybody who drives a manual transmission who didn't experience an attack of 'clutch-foot' the first time they drove a manual transmission in heavy traffic, i.e., your left foot starts shaking uncontrollably, and you can't put the car in gear.. The same kind of thing happens when you try to 'force' a shot. When this happens, it's best to put the gun down and start over (unless you happen to be in the middle of a string of rapid fire -- then you're screwed).

When Bill and David talk about concentrating on sight alignment or trigger operation, what they are doing is conciously monitoring what they each feel is the most critical aspect of the shot process for them, i.e., the part of the shot process that's most likely to go wrong. But neither one of them can force a 10 any better than you or I can. The best they can do is to realize when to abort the shot, or perhaps to observe something that they need to refine with practice.

Also, as Bill pointed out, focusing on one aspect of the shot process helps to block out negative thoughts as well preparing mentally to execute the process correctly.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any drills, comparable to the clutch drill, that communicate the feel of the entire shot process. Dry-firing comes close, but it doesn't include recoil. Perhaps someone else can suggest a drill that will turn me into an instant high-master -- but I doubt it.

For pistol shooting, Scatt gives you a way, after the fact, to observe things that you can't conciously observe kinesthetically. Unfortunately, I've never seen a description of how to use it effectively for training.

Regards,

Al B.

alb wrote:

Mr. Lurker wrote:In other words, can you be aware of some aspect of the sights, trigger, etc. without conciously attempting to control it?

Nevertheless, it's possible to teach someone who to use a clutch in less than 5 minutes -- I taught my wife and son this way, and I learned this way myself:

"Find a hill in a residential neighborhood. Drive partway up the hill. Practice holding the car stationary on the hill, using only the accelerator and the clutch. You will learn the 'feel' of the clutch in a matter of seconds, and then you will be able to use it without any further problems."

(Material deleted)

Unfortunately, I don't know of any drills, comparable to the clutch drill, that communicate the feel of the entire shot process. Dry-firing comes close, but it doesn't include recoil.

I think I am getting a feel for the landscape.

It is odd that you should have mentioned manual transmission as an example. I used to be a teacher of that to girlfriends of my contemporaries and later, some of their children. I used something very similar. I would take them to an empty parking lot and just sit in the middle of it, engine off, and ask them to just coordinate the movements of the accelerator, clutch, and lever. (Dry fire?) Push one, release the other, etc. After getting a feel for that, we would just start the engine and practice a bit, moving over to a gradual upward incline, where I told them they would get an even better feel for it. I made suggestions on what to notice, but mostly used two key phrases:

"Don't think about it too much, just feel what is going on with your feet"

"It's not important (some reving or stalling), everyone does that. Don't worry about it. "

I think part of my modest success was that I was not judgemental, just encouraging them to learn by feeling. (I am sure my not being a parent did not hurt.)

Getting back to shooting, you (alb) are suggesting that getting a feel for what you are doing, rather than detailed analysis, can be more productive? And, for an equivalent shooting exercise, what about just feeling how the shot proceeds and calling and checking where it hits? Don't make fixing the process the goal, per se; make the goal to observe and then call the shot? Is that it, to divorce judgement and criticism from observation? (That also seems to be related to David Levene's automatic style.)

Some of he most useful technical input I ever got, was from Tim Strickland, an elite archer from USA. I was lucky to get some one-to-one instruction from him during a coache's seminar in Germany many years ago. I see some parallels in the previous posts, and also in the chapters about systematic use of SCATT in the MEC books:

Tim's recipy was to accept sight movement within a small area around the target centre. He described it as the sight doing a clover leaf or figure of eigth movement around the centre. The task then would be to release the shot without doing anything else, and let the body react to recoil or whatever else might happen as if you didn't know that the shot was fired.
In AP this would mean establishing and maintaining the "acceptable wobble" mentioned in previous posts, and gently squeezing the trigger while it lasts.

This is in accordance with most textbooks that prescribe a timing sequence where the best time window can be predicted. THe rest is a matter of confidence and establishing a routine through disciplined training. In the long run the wobble will decrease, and scores will improve. So will confidence.....

Tim Strickland regularly shot perfect 300s in archery competition while his sight was doing its little dance around the centre. This was about twenty years ago,...

Mr. Lurker wrote:Getting back to shooting, you (alb) are suggesting that getting a feel for what you are doing, rather than detailed analysis, can be more productive? And, for an equivalent shooting exercise, what about just feeling how the shot proceeds and calling and checking where it hits? Don't make fixing the process the goal, per se; make the goal to observe and then call the shot? Is that it, to divorce judgement and criticism from observation? (That also seems to be related to David Levene's automatic style.)

I wish it were that simple. Shooting is certainly a motor skill, like using a clutch, and as such, the thing that needs to be learned is an unconsious sequence of behaviors. We can describe it in infinite detail, but the student must still ingrain that sequence of behaviors in a portion of his brain that controls motor processes.

Unlike using a clutch, however, in shooting we keep score. Not only must the sequence become learned, it must become very refined and very reliable. No one notices a less-than-perfect shift, but we all notice when we shoot a 5. Refining the process is absolutely the goal, but trying to conciously correct the process during a match just doesn't work.

Scatt tells us certain things about individual shots as well as strings of shots. It tells us how fast the muzzle is moving relative to the target face, both on average (length of trace) and at any point during the shot sequence. It tells us whether or not this rate of movement is accelerating, particularly during the last 0.3 seconds, when we are pressing the trigger. You might think that someone would provide some kind of writeup for Scatt that says things like, "When you see this pattern, it means you're doing this, so try doing this other thing instead, or try doing this drill to learn how to overcome the problem." So far, though, I haven't seen anything like that.

For example, Scatt tells us what our score would be if the shot broke sooner. Some people interpret this to mean that we need to time the start of the trigger operation to occur before we reach our optimum sight picture. Does that make sense? Well, when we look at the muzzle velocity chart and we see that the muzzle starts to accelerate when we start to press the trigger, we realize that causing this to happen when we are pointing at the 8- or 9-ring rhather than the 10-ring is not going to produce a better result. Instead, we need to learn to operate the trigger in such a way that the acceleration doesn't occur. Since I personally have never produced a Scatt trace where this acceleration wasn't present, I don't know what it feels like, or what technique is required to produce it.

I kow that a high-master who has never shot my brand of pistol can pick it up ad shoot better with it than I can, so it isn't just a matter of refining your grip to match the geometry of the gun. It might possibly be a reaction to anticipated recoil, in which case it should get worse with live ammunition -- but I'm not about to fire live ammunition at my Scatt sensor to find out! It might be caused by the sympathetic action of muscles that I'm not even aware of using. If I knew what to concentrate my attention on, I could learn to do it better, even though I still couldn't do it better by conciously controlling it.

Regards,

Al B.

My son can pick up any of my guns and give me a run for the money :-)
He's doing well in competitions, mostly shooting rapid fire "practical events" with multiple targets, short barreled guns and lots of recoil.
While I do slow fire AP......

But he has always adhered to the "squeeze slowly while trying to hold still" method. Even while shooting fast! It works for him, and he's quite clear about "snatching" being wrong. He also quotes some top US extreme rapid fire authoroties that say the same: "rapid fire is just a slow even squeeze done faster".

So I guess slow fire match AP shooters should benefit from the same method. Just squeeze slowly inside the time window when you're able to hold reasonably still. Most champion archers do the same as well.