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Follow through is the momentum the gun has as the trigger is pulled--nothing more. Any conscious, excessive, follow through after the shot is taken is wasted and creates risk. We see people on a weekly basis that have been brain washed into thinking that they must continuously keep the gun moving after the shot. In our experience, this creates risk in several ways. 1. Conscious follow through is a forced push or pull with the front hand and typically is faster than the birds speed. This causes the eyes to want to go to the gun and if the target has been broken there is nothing for the eyes to focus on but the gun. Now the eyes must come off the gun, find the 2nd target and the gun races to it to try to break it! 2. The amount of conscious follow through will vary greatly even on the same targets. This means that where the gun finishes after each shot will be a different place each time. This causes a different move to the 2nd target each time, which creates anything BUT consistency in the moves on each pair and also irregular BREAK points on each pair. 3. After observing many competitors with conscious follow through, one common thread has developed. As the pressure mounts due to difficulty of presentation or because of the pressure of competition, the conscious follow through begins to occur BEFORE the shot is taken and a miss will always occur. Once it begins it is difficult if not impossible to overcome. Before all you arm chair instructors blow a head gasket, let me explain. We are not advocating consciously stopping the gun after the shot. There must be follow through in every successful shot. Somewhere between 2 to 12 depending on the speed of the target. Different target speeds create different amounts of momentum in the gun thereby creating different amounts of follow through. Any conscious excess will create risk. We have found without exception, that when a person stops their gun their eyes have come off the target and have looked at the gun or the lead. When a shooters eyes come off the target for whatever reason a multitude of things happen and none of them are good. Defining Success Have you ever stopped to think where you are going with your shooting game? How do you define success? Getting out of C class? Winning your way into A-AA-Master? Winning the club championship? Being able to fit in with the group regardless of who is in the group? Being able to beat Billy Bob. Your own definition of success is not nearly as important as having one. Without a definition of success how can you ever expect to reach any goal? How do you ever expect to feel good about yourself or your game? How can you measure improvement? We see people, as customers as well as fellow shooters, everyday that through their reactions about themselves or their performance make us wonder why they ever shoot a shotgun. In fact I had a lesson a few weeks ago with a man who was one of the most negative people I've ever met. Take the shotgun out of his hands and he is as nice and polite as anyone you would want to meet or know. Put that shotgun in his hands and it was one negative phrase after another--talked to himself constantly. I hit all of these yesterday, why cant I hit them toady? That's not how I shoot a dropping shot. The fact that I cant hit a dropping shot consistently has nothing to do with my technique, it is the fact that I haven't been able to practice enough. Why cant I ever beat so and so? This guy was eaten up with negativity. He had no definition of success. He was consumed with only his failure. He could never come up to an ever changing mythical level of performance that changed like the mood swings of an 8 1/2 month pregnant woman with either ice cream or pickles in the fridge. This guy was so negative he would shoot 6 pair in a row and instead of saying, that felt great the first thing out of his mouth would be --why couldn't I do that yesterday? OR Ill never be able to do that again! I began to talk to him about the conscious and subconscious mind and how they worked. He interrupted me and said I don't know whether this psychological junk you talk about is real or just a bunch of BS. At that point in time, the lesson was over and I explained to him that I could not help him until he made up his mind as to whether the psychological junk was real or not. I didn't care whether he thought it was real or not, I could only help him if and only if he made a decision and not until then. Defining success is a simple thing that leads to better performance and a change in attitude about failure. Winston Churchill defined success as going from one failure to another failure with no loss of enthusiasm. He, like all great performers, realized that without failure there is no success. Only through learning from failure does one achieve success regardless of ones definition. Ultimately success and failure are more a result of attitude than anything else. How Your Eyes Work One of the most surprising things students learn in our clinics is how their eyes work. The eyes feed the information of how to hit the target to the brain. If they receive incorrect information, then the shot becomes, more often then you want it to be, a miss. How to prevent this? Lets go over how your eyes work. The eyes focus back from the object you are looking at to your body more efficiently than if they have to go from a short distance and find the target. They then have to do 2 functions--they must locate the target, then focus on it. If your eyes are beyond the flight line of the target, and focused on something so that they are still, they will pick up any movement that they see. That is how they work. In one function, they will immediately go to the object that is moving the fastest in the picture and focus on it. How often have you thought, if I could see the target faster, I could hit it quicker. True, but only if you can see the target clearly will you be able to hit it faster. If you focus between the machine and you, your eyes will have to locate the target, then focus on it. The better way to find the target quicker, therefore hit it quicker, is to focus on something beyond the flight path and let the eyes go to the movement and focus immediately. This way you are allowing the eyes to give the computer (brain) the correct information and make the correct picture happen. Another surprising thing for people in our lessons is, that the eyes will go to the object in the picture(in you vision) that is moving the fastest. If the target gets ahead of your gun and you have to play catch up to it, the gun will be the fastest object in the picture, therefore, your eyes will automatically go to the barrel. When this happens, your focus is no longer on the target and a miss will usually occur. I say usually, because even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while. Use your eyes the most efficient way. Keep your eyes focused on something when calling pull. Let the target come into your vision, move to the front of the target, pull the gun to your face and pull the trigger. What Should I Practice After a Lesson? The best thing to do after a lesson is to go and shoot easy targets and shoot singles. If you will do this for 3 weeks you will be making the move subconscious, therefore you will not have to think about it again. What we did in the lesson was to give you the data to build on, now you must make it subconscious and a part of the shot. Most people after a lesson, want to go shoot a tournament. What they don't realize is that everything they have learned in their lesson, is not subconscious and they will be thinking about it and therefore, their mind will not be totally focused on hitting the target. You must have 100% conscious mind focusing on the target to be successful. If your mind is thinking about the move you have just learned, or how the picture looks, you will not be concentrating on the target. Go and shoot targets that are within 25 yards that are easy. Make every target between you and 25 yards dead. Go and shoot just singles and practice the correct move or the correct focal point or whatever you and your coach have decided is the best thing. Another good thing to do is change the break point. Still shooting singles, break the target 5 times in a row at one break point, then find another break point and hit 5 targets in a row there, then find another break point. Feel comfortable breaking targets in several different places. At some point in your shooting, you will need to break the targets in a lot of different places, so get confident that you can do it. Don't just go for the sweet spot get where you control the break point. Hit the target 5 times in a row to get you practicing like you are in a tournament. You will need to be able to shoot 5 pairs and be able to stay focused on hitting the targets for that length of time. Sometimes, you only have to do 3 or 4 pairs then you are ahead of the game, because you can do 5 pairs in a row. Once you are comfortable with hitting the singles, then go to report pairs. Remember, that when you start adding another target, you must still think of it as hitting one then the other. Don't let your mind wonder, hit the first one, then the second one. Then go to true pairs. Because you are comfortable and confident with your break points, you can hit the targets wherever you want to and make the shots easier. Hitting one at a time-pairs are just 2 singles, so hit one then the other. Start easy and work your way to more difficult shots. Let your learning curve happen, don't try to make it happen faster than it can. Enjoy.
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