Shorting the practice/match performance gap.

[Luke]

I've been struggling with this my whole time shooting competitively. At home im awesome (in my own mind) At a match I suck.

The better I get at home, the better I do at matches, but the gap is still there! On bens last practical pistol podcast he talked about this and had some awesome points. One thing he mentioned was when your practicing, there's no pressure. No ones watching, if you sling a D or a M it's not as big of a deal because you can run the drill again, unlike a match, what ever you run you run..

I've tried to maintain the same mental focus, but no matter how hard I try I can't convince my brain that when I practice it's the same as a match.

Possible solution!? Punish yourself! Could you come up with some way to make it actually bad to screw up in practice? IE: you throw a mike on a drill, practice is over? Run laps? Eat broccoli? At a match I really don't want to screw up, and when I do I hate that I did that.. So could making practice the same way help?


Possible pros:

More match like pressure to perform.
Do better at matches because you train under the same desire to do good.

Possible cons:
Less time spent practicing?
Now your even more mad because you have two things you hate to suck at?
PF secretly things your an idiot and you should just go train..


I don't really know of a way to simulate the same desire to do good with the same amount of pressure. I'm not really sure this would help either, but it's a thought I had while listening and I wanted to get yalls opinion before I start spanking myself during practice sessions lol.

[BN]

I love broccoli.

Shoot practice at 110% and shoot matches at 90% of your ability. Go into a match with no expectations. Let your subconscious shoot the match. Zen.

I like to shoot a clean match with no mistakes and let everybody else screw up. A win is a win.

[taadski]

What Bill said...

I'd spend some time really embracing the different "modes" of shooting.

My take, looking at some of the numbers you put up in practice, is that some of those are pushing it a bit. Meaning shooting faster than you can guarantee your results (I call that "the gray zone"). I think that's great. Practicing there is important to building speed and getting faster. But developing a consistent (see every sight picture/call every shot) match mode is equally important to having consistent performance on game day.

You have to learn to TRUST that the speed will be there even though the shooting might FEEL slow. Part of match work up for me, in particular if I've been pushing speed hard in practice, is spending some time really overemphasizing vision.

I suspect some of the discrepancy you're seeing is because perhaps you're comparing your speed mode practice with your match mode. Those two SHOULDN'T be the same.

[Appalachained]

I shoot better at matches than I do alone. Go figure.

[Luke]

I shoot better at matches than I do alone. Go figure.

I hate you

[GJM]

Here is something Robbie Leatham told me. In practice, before you shoot each drill, declare whether you are shooting match pace, or in "the gray," and then have the discipline to shoot that way.

I have spent the last two years mostly not increasing my peak speed, but rather being able to consistently shoot a high percentage of my peak speed, on demand. That has helped my match consistency a lot. So much so, that I am now starting to focus again on increasingly peak speed.

[ST911]

I found that my starting, cold practice performance more accurately reflects my match results. I started using those metrics and setting objectives based on them, striving especially for consistency. This is true even if I've warmed up before a match, or in later stages.

[Smitty79]

I'm a fat old guy who will probably never win Production, even at a local match. I regularly win Senior, from among the 3 of us who show up. In matches, I'm really competing against myself. I care how I place against the local hot dogs. Since stages are different every month, it's the best metric I have.

When I shoot "match mode" in practice, I'm still competing against myself. For me, the fact that I document everything I do in practice, and stress over screw ups, keeps the stress in the 2 venues about the same.

[Luke]

i receiced a "like" for a post I made on this thread.

So, here we are almost 5 months later. My practice still usually goes a little better by myself, but my match performance has gone waaaaaaay up from when I posted this.

My mental game has increased and I have been able to trust that the skill I have will be there. I'm in a good place now.




So, for those struggling with this, keep practicing like a hero. Trust in the skills you develop in live and dry fire. Also, go listen to Steve Andersons podcast.

[John_bud]

First post!

As a recovering newbie, one thing learned from a class was the dry fire time should be the same as live fire. I "fail" because I don't hold sight picture long enough. (Fail =miss) guess what? I dry fire and pull off the target too soon too....duh! In the class (Ben Stoeger) the whole class dry fired a drill faster than Ben. But he live fired it faster than us....AT THE SAME EXACT SPEED he dry fired it. Maybe that's why he hits so many Alphas?