Originally Posted by
Clobbersaurus
I feel weird talking about this stuff. I’m not the best shooter on this board, but I really do believe that the mental game is responsible for any progress I have made in the shooting sports. Committting to shot calling or “match mode” as Steve Anderson calls it, almost feels like cheating, or a secret that everyone should already know. The fact is though, and I have seen this happen with other shooters I have exposed this concept to, is that it requires mental toughness and not everyone can do it successfully. It feels slow, and you have to commit to it for an entire match. So basically you are committing to feeling slow (but not being slow) in a sport that requires speed at the limit of human function to be competitive.
Now to answer your question, as best as I can:
The way I understand it, and the way I try to train, is that when you give your total attention to a task, in this case the target you are shooting, all the other stuff has to be run in the background, or subconscious. You are basically focussing on shooting the targets to the best of your visual capabilities and observing the gun firing and calling the shot, which is not about speed, it’s about attention to what you need to see to make an acceptable hit. If you train that way, all the time, you are forgetting about the other most important part of practical shooting, which is speed.
So the way I prefer to train, and I really do subscribe to this as a method of continuous improvement, is to train those aspects of the game in isolation. I would say 90% of my time is spent training for pure speed. Getting faster at movement, at draws, at reloads, at transitions, etc, etc. Faster, faster, faster......always. Training to focus attention on every target, or shot calling, or match mode (whatever you want to call it) is done in dry fire and sprainingly in live fire practice. It is then employed as close to 100% as possible at the match.
My experience is that speed gains become ingrained subconsciously through all the speed training, and the attention to targets or committing to shot calling, pushes all that speed into the subconscious so that I don’t have to think about it during a match. I just have to call my shots and my speed will be there, subconsciously. It’s an incredibly calming way to shoot a match, and also incredibly tiring mentally, and you have to really work at committing to paying attention to the targets and calling your shots.
I believe if you train in dry practice and live fire with only pure attention to the targets you will limit your speed gains, as you can’t train both modes at the same time. I hope that makes sense?