honeybadger wrote:rmarsh wrote:I have developed many drills to work on specific parts of the shot process and use the scatt to monitor and focus on improving things one step at a time.
I think I am not the only person who would appreciate your sharing some of these drills. Would you be willing to post them to the forum?
LOL! Honeybadger, (love your screen name by the way!) 10 seconds after I posted my comments, I thought, "how long will it be until someone wants me to post my drills"!
The really short answer is "no". I have tried to write down some of the drills we do and found that while it is easy to talk to someone and describe them, it is a much different task to write them down. By the time I describe the background of why you want to accomplish a certain thing, what to look for on the scatt, how to do the drill.... etc. A simple drill turns into several pages.
However, I am not unwilling to help. I am not one to "protect" my information or knowledge. If someone wants to know how we train, who builds our guns, etc., I am always happy to help with any knowledge I have or describe things that have worked for us. So, the approach I will take is more the "teach a man to fish" rather than "give him a fish". I will describe the process I go through to develop a "drill" and hopefully from that you will be able to develop your own.
To do this I will take one simple example and expand on it. You can then use that to build other specific drills. The example I will use is shot approach. (We are rifle shooters so this is rifle specific. I don't how much this applies to pistol shooters). Also keep in mind I am dealing with general / common techniques. Not everyone does it this way.....
Shot Approach: In air rifle the approach to the target (bull) should be to come down at 12:00. On scatt this should be shown as a straight line (ideal) at exactly 12:00 and take 2 to 4 seconds. The approach should then stop at the center of the "10" to no more than 1/2 ring above the center (never below).
(OK, that is what we are trying to accomplish)
Drill: Once in position, get NPA set so you are on the 10 ring, both horizontal and vertical.
Let your breath out slowly and allow the sights to "sink" to the 10 ring. Your entire focus should be on this function only.... Control your breath to smoothly sink, keep the line in the center.
When you get to the 10, establish a hold for just a second or two, take a breath and approach again. Over and over and over and......... you get it.
After a few sessions of this, you will begin to see your approach begin to be much more smooth and more centered. Make this a part of your training routine until you have a really good approach. Then you can move on to something else. You will notice now if your approach starts to get sloppy and you need to go back for a refresher.
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Ok, that was a very simplified version of that drill, but I hope you get the idea.
To develop a drill, you have to break a part of the shot process down to as small a part as possible and work on THAT. Doing the drill I just described, in 30 minutes a person do can dozens, even a hundred or more "approaches". In addition, all your attention is focused on the approach which is training your subconscious. If you just try to improve your approach as part of a normal "shot" it is fairly ineffective. Too few repetitions and it is difficult to focus on a specific thing when you are shooting (even scatt). Our ego is too worried about where that shot is going to give full attention to just the approach.
One other quick example; we do a follow through drill. The goal is to keep the red line (follow through trace) completely inside the hold area. The focus of the shot is not score, but simply follow through. Amazingly, (or not really) the score takes care of itself.
If you will just look at some really good scatt files and start trying to break them down into individual parts, approach, hold, shot time, trigger release, follow through.... I'm sure you can figure out drills that fit you and the way you train.
The problem with drills is not figuring out how to do one that is effective. The problem is DOING them. Drills are boring repetitions of a small part of the process. There is often no "shot" to give you satisfaction of pulling the trigger. You can have drills for everything, but if you don't spend time doing them, they don't do you much good.
Sorry this is still pretty long, and may not have been what you were looking for, but I hope it helps. If you are at a match and see my daughter Elizabeth on the roster, look me up. I will be happy to sit down over a cup of coffee (or bottle of water if you are a shooter!) and describe more of the training drills we use for scatt.
