What is the one thing I should work on to get a more steady hand ?

[sal6781]

Maybe it's my age. However, if there is anything I can do to improve this, I will do it. I need a more steady hand.

[Gwhite]

How do you know you are less steady than anyone else? Nobody is totally steady. If your shots are all over the place, how do you know it isn't triggering problems and/or anticipation? Even if you have a fairly steady hold initially, if you wait for all the wobble to go away, you are fooling yourself and at some point it will get worse.

An electronic trainer will tell you a lot about your "hold"; how small/large it is, how long it is stable, and whether you are sabotaging your hold with other issues. If someone chimes in with one of more techniques to improve your steadiness, you can also use a trainer to monitor your progress.

There are plenty of exercises to strengthen your muscles (use the Search feature), and any sort of cardio fitness program is a good idea.

[Ade C]

While it's important to accept that your hold will never be totally steady I find that shooting towards the end of the day means I'm more relaxed which helps. Also avoid too much caffeine which will give you the shakes!
You may also want to experiment with your stance. You shouldn't need much muscle power if you're in a natural, comfortable position

[stephen_maly]

If you are seeking one exercise to help, then I suggest dry firing. Focus on the front sight, concentrate on keeping the rear sight aligned with the front, and aim at an empty background. That way, your attention will not wander back and forth from the front to the target etc. While aiming; squeeze the trigger until you hear a click. If the sights didn't move too far, your shot would have been good. It takes some practice to improve by this method, but it works. If you are brave, set aside one hour each day, put some nice music on in the background, and do this dry firing. It will take many repetitions of this exercise. Some of us have done it many thousands of times. You learn to lock your wrist. That is where the greatest unsteadiness occurs. Your shoulder will become stronger also. So will your endurance. As for music; the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto enabled J K Rowling write the Harry Potter stories. It is perfectly suitable for shooting training also.

[william]

"As for music; the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto enabled J K Rowling write the Harry Potter stories. It is perfectly suitable for shooting training also." No, never!

Violin Concerto - Beethoven or Mendelssohn
Symphony - Beethoven 4th or 8th
Chamber Music - Schubert Octet, Mozart Clarinet Quintet, any Haydn String Quartet.

Those should suffice. No J S Bach under any circumstances; his music requires too much attention to be paid to it instead of the task at hand. And nothing composed after about 1890; that stuff will turn your frontal lobe to mush.

[atomicgale]

Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G-Major - all day long . . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsYdeSqqyd4&t=2750s

[Rover]

Pay no attention to these peasants. What you want is Beethoven's 7th Symphony 2nd movement. It soothes, yet edifies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xeuqbi-CPU

The advice on dry firing is good. It builds you up while concentrating on what you need; trigger squeeze and sight alignment.
Ideally, the only thing you should see is that nothing has happened except the click of the hammer.

[deadeyedick]

The best remedy may be to stop thinking about movement and withdraw into the world of technical execution where 10’s live.

Often being aware of, and thinking about what appears to be a problem simply makes it worse.

At the end of the day scoring well is no more difficult than aligning the sights and making sure that you do not disturbed this alignment while releasing the trigger.

If the sights remain aligned at trigger release the amount of wobble that can be tolerated to hold a 8 or 9 is quite large.

[gimgim]

John Cage's 4'33" does it for me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4&t=60s

[jetpoweredchicken]

Steady hand is one thing... Steady arm is another...You need both.

If by steady hand, you mean that your arm floats around a lot making it difficult to hold in one place long enough to fire the shot, then your answer is probably increasing arm strength. I suggest 2 or 3 times a week with a 3 to 5 lb weight and doing both static holds (like you were shooting) as well as slow full range of motion raises and lowers. Paint fence. Everything you do to increase arm strength gives several advantages. You hold better, but this also means that you have confidence that the gun will sit there and this allows your concentration to be on the front sight instead of busy fighting your arm position. For this problem, shooting a lot helps BUT... weights is a much faster way to get there.

If you are having true difficulty holding your hand still, I would suggest building wrist and grip strength. There are wrist rollers, grip exercisers, gyro balls, etc available to help with this. More strength means less effort to hold still. Dry fire is the way to train hand steadiness, but wrist and grip exercises are also needed.

By the way... trigger control is actually another type of sight alignment. Think about that one.

[thirdwheel]

All joking aside it is good to get used to shooting with loud music playing so that you get used to it being there as we are now competing with loud music at all major competitions - it's an ISSF thing!
Some very good advice above, core strength and cardio, no caffeine, resistance training, dry fire onto empty background, withdraw into own world of perfect release, get to know where the 10's live.
My bit - don't over do it with holding big weights out too long as you can banjax your forearm (got that T shirt), use the pistol and just hold it for 60 seconds and increase that time - don't look at the sights. Adjust stance to produce perfect point of aim - this can take a while and changes as you develop and also during a comp. If you can produce a still picture and release during dry fire but it all goes to hell in a handcart as soon as you point at a target you are not looking at the sights but a combination of sights and black blob - really work on looking at the sights and ignoring the back blob and rely on you point of aim. Think process at the gun end not what holes are in the target, don't time travel in your mind thinking about the last shot or the next shot, just perfect shot process over and over again. Sort out your shooting glasses to bring the front sight into focus and fuzz out the black so it is not dominant in your sight picture.

[Elmas]

Maybe it's my age. However, if there is anything I can do to improve this, I will do it. I need a more steady hand.

More steady is a relative thing . How steady are you in the first place ?

We all shoot through movement.

Rover ; the second movement.

[Ricardo]

Stockhausen.

[GaryN]

As much as I hate it, cuz I am NOT a morning person, I found that I shoot better in the morning than late afternoon/evening.
Maybe it is because I am tired and worn out later in the day.
So you also need to find the time of the day when your body is able to shoot well.

[Fortitudo Dei]

Eno...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dikWB6wm0A