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Turtle necking


1911builder

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1 hour ago, 1911builder said:

How do you break the habit of turtle necking? I happen to have a bad bad case of the turtles. I dry fire normal and then as soon as I get to a match it comes back.

I have the same problem. I know I am not doing it in dry fire but I notice it in my videos everytime. Not as bad as it used to be but I do still do it. 

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Just need to dry fire / practice more...if there's something you are trying to change in terms of your actions/grip/stance, I find that it usually takes me about 3 weeks of daily practice to replace out my body's old way of doing it...

 

In practice, pick your point of aim, take a "perfect" stance with the gun presented on target how you intend to do it in matches...then, without moving anything other than your arms, place the gun back in your holster and practice drawing into the position.  This should help in developing the correct pressures and forces to put the gun out into shooting position where it SHOULD be when you aren't tucking your head down.  Once you have your head where you want it, then just work on bringing the gun up to your eyes, and force yourself not to move your head.

 

You'll eventually get it built in and it won't be something you have to consciously remind yourself of in the match.

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Good posture & a strong core/shoulders in daily life translate to good posture & shoulder position during a match i have found.  Reducing shoulder slouch in everyday life pay dividends quickly.  Just an opinion, but one that has worked significantly well for me.

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Breath, and allow your eye to ride the front sight. Keep that triangle of arms and shoulders together, and keep that gun up. Often just keeping the gun up at all times in dry firing will help with this.
Stand up and look in the mirror. Get in your stance either with or without a pistol. Are you really raising up your head, or dropping the gun?
Are you losing trust in calling your shots?


Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

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Stare at your first target whenever the starting position allows it. Consciously bring the gun up in front of your eyes on the draw and don't bring your eyes down to the gun. Move only your arms.

 

Classifers are a golden opportunity to practice this.

Edited by MemphisMechanic
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  • 8 months later...
On 6/25/2017 at 10:00 PM, aandabooks said:

You're not relaxed.  It is a conscience thing that you need to remind yourself not to do.  Stand up straight and breath.  My bet is your also holing your breath while your actually shooting.  

 

This^^^, and the rest is all good advice as well.  If you really want to break a habit, you have to practice it under stress, or you will simply go back to it when stress is introduced.  Remember it usually takes 30 days to solidify a change, and that is with honest effort.  I have offered my opinion before, and stand by a technique I actually modified from a Travis Haley video on the draw.  ESPECIALLY if something is to be changed.  10 draws at 10 second par time, taking the entire 10 seconds to slowly draw.  VERY slowly.  Focus intently on every aspect of what you are doing including breathing and relaxing.  Good tell tale for not being relaxed is if you find your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth (weird, but so true, not mine, but forgot where I got it).  After 10 seconds, do 10 draws at 9 seconds, then 10 at 8 seconds, etc, etc, etc, each time taking the entire time to reach a sight picture and break the shot.  Once down to 10 draws at 3 seconds or so (maybe 2 seconds if more experienced), go down in half second times until the wheels completely fall off.  Focus on what you are trying to change under this stress/pressure.  Go back and finish with 10 draws at 10 seconds.  You will feel a bit of a change after just one session.  Do it once a day for a week, and it will take hold.  Likely other things will improve as well.  If it doesn't work, come back for a refund. :)

Edited by Hammer002
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On 6/25/2017 at 10:08 PM, GorillaTactical said:

Just need to dry fire / practice more...if there's something you are trying to change in terms of your actions/grip/stance, I find that it usually takes me about 3 weeks of daily practice to replace out my body's old way of doing it...

 

In practice, pick your point of aim, take a "perfect" stance with the gun presented on target how you intend to do it in matches...then, without moving anything other than your arms, place the gun back in your holster and practice drawing into the position.  This should help in developing the correct pressures and forces to put the gun out into shooting position where it SHOULD be when you aren't tucking your head down.  Once you have your head where you want it, then just work on bringing the gun up to your eyes, and force yourself not to move your head.

 

You'll eventually get it built in and it won't be something you have to consciously remind yourself of in the match.

 

I disagree with this a bit.  You can relax all you want in practice, but if you aren't getting match experience, you may resort to tensing up under pressure.

 

OP, the only tension should be in your forearms during a stage.  You need to practice this at your next match.  For the first couple seconds of the stage, consciously think about relaxing and it should flow into the rest of the stage.

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1 hour ago, bluedevil008 said:

OP, the only tension should be in your forearms during a stage.

 

I don't agree at all. The reason I disagree is that I think a well developed stance should be geared towards directing as much of the energy from recoil into the ground at possible. Energy does not move through relaxed musculature nearly as well as it moves through tensed musculature. Forearms do a lot to apply pressure directly on the gun, but we also need upper arm and shoulder tension to keep consistent arm position.  Behind that shoulder tension, we also use the muscles of our hips and torso to stabilize our bodies and further stabilize the position of the gun. This doesn't work if your muscles are relaxed. If I had to put a number to it, I'm contracting the majority of my body at about 50% of maximum for the entire duration that I'm shooting a stage.

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2 hours ago, Jake Di Vita said:

 

I don't agree at all. The reason I disagree is that I think a well developed stance should be geared towards directing as much of the energy from recoil into the ground at possible. Energy does not move through relaxed musculature nearly as well as it moves through tensed musculature. Forearms do a lot to apply pressure directly on the gun, but we also need upper arm and shoulder tension to keep consistent arm position.  Behind that shoulder tension, we also use the muscles of our hips and torso to stabilize our bodies and further stabilize the position of the gun. This doesn't work if your muscles are relaxed. If I had to put a number to it, I'm contracting the majority of my body at about 50% of maximum for the entire duration that I'm shooting a stage.

We will have to disagree on that one.  I have studied a lot of great shooters and never heard any of them claim to tense any part of the body except for the forearms as we grip the gun.  When I started incorporating a conscious relaxation into my shooting, everything improved.  It is now programmed into my subconscious execution.

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2 hours ago, bluedevil008 said:

We will have to disagree on that one.  I have studied a lot of great shooters and never heard any of them claim to tense any part of the body except for the forearms as we grip the gun.  When I started incorporating a conscious relaxation into my shooting, everything improved.  It is now programmed into my subconscious execution.

 

Can you actually refute the mechanics of what I said beyond never hearing other shooters talk about it? I told you why I disagree and briefly explained the mechanics behind it. Can you explain why you think it is better to relax from a bio mechanical perspective? What do you think is physically going on that makes your method more effective than what I'm saying? What exactly is your stance trying to achieve and how did you set your body up to achieve it? These are important questions that you should be able to answer conclusively. If you cannot, I highly suggest you take some time to have a deeper look into what you're doing and why. It needs to be more than "when I started incorporating a conscious relaxation into my shooting, everything improved". I have a rule that I use as a coach. If I can't explain to someone why they should do what I tell them to do, I should not be telling anyone to do it.

 

You've studied great shooters....ok.....If that's how you want to approach this, I've been a gm and have studied great shooters for more than a decade before you joined USPSA. 

 

I didn't come to this conclusion lightly. 20 years of athletics, research, teaching, experimenting, and shooting has led me to what I use now and I'm perfectly willing to defend my methodology in depth to anyone. If you want to tell me I'm wrong that's fine, I'm perfectly open to being wrong, but you're gonna have to make a good case for it.

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33 minutes ago, Jake Di Vita said:

 

Can you actually refute the mechanics of what I said beyond never hearing other shooters talk about it? I told you why I disagree and briefly explained the mechanics behind it. Can you explain why you think it is better to relax from a bio mechanical perspective? What do you think is physically going on that makes your method more effective than what I'm saying? What exactly is your stance trying to achieve and how did you set your body up to achieve it? These are important questions that you should be able to answer conclusively. If you cannot, I highly suggest you take some time to have a deeper look into what you're doing and why. It needs to be more than "when I started incorporating a conscious relaxation into my shooting, everything improved". I have a rule that I use as a coach. If I can't explain to someone why they should do what I tell them to do, I should not be telling anyone to do it.

 

You've studied great shooters....ok.....If that's how you want to approach this, I've been a gm and have studied great shooters for more than a decade before you joined USPSA. 

 

I didn't come to this conclusion lightly. 20 years of athletics, research, teaching, experimenting, and shooting has led me to what I use now and I'm perfectly willing to defend my methodology in depth to anyone. If you want to tell me I'm wrong that's fine, I'm perfectly open to being wrong, but you're gonna have to make a good case for it.

 

I just said we will have to disagree, no need to get defensive.

 

Well I'll do my best to describe it.  The more rigid the body, the more the recoil of the gun pushes it off balance.  If you've ever seen the demo of someone hitting a shooters wrist acting as recoil of the gun (usually to get them to flinch), that same drill can be applied to a tense shooter and a relaxed shooter.  The tense shooter gets knocked off balance more and has a much harder time returning the gun back on target quickly because the whole body is still recovering from the recoil impulse.  If the body is relaxed, the arms dissipate most of the recoil before it hits the body.  The body is less affected by recoil and the shooter can drive the gun back on target faster.  

 

Since this is an action sport, inevitably some muscle activation is required to keep the body balanced while moving, but I do not apply tension anywhere in my body other than the forearms and hands.

 

Depending on who you talk to, there are slightly differing thoughts on the shooting process.  Most of the time it's minor, and I think if we were to talk in person, this 50% tension would be less of an issue than we are making it out to be.  That said, my philosophy and process is to be as relaxed as possible.  The body reacts quicker when reacted and allows recoil to be absorbed quicker as well as drive the gun back on target quicker.

 

OP,  if you have access to a training partner, have him or her put their hands on your shoulders as you draw and begin shooting.  Use a timer to add pressure.  The hands will force you to keep your shoulders down and relaxed, if you tense up and start turtling, you will notice it before the gun even gets on target.

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Just now, bluedevil008 said:

 

I just said we will have to disagree, no need to get defensive. gun even gets on target.

 

I'm not getting defensive at all. I'm asking you direct questions.

 

1 minute ago, bluedevil008 said:

Well I'll do my best to describe it.  The more rigid the body, the more the recoil of the gun pushes it off balance.  If you've ever seen the demo of someone hitting a shooters wrist acting as recoil of the gun (usually to get them to flinch), that same drill can be applied to a tense shooter and a relaxed shooter.  The tense shooter gets knocked off balance more and has a much harder time returning the gun back on target quickly because the whole body is still recovering from the recoil impulse.  If the body is relaxed, the arms dissipate most of the recoil before it hits the body.  The body is less affected by recoil and the shooter can drive the gun back on target faster.  

 

This might be true if the shooter is standing rigidly straight up. If the shooter has shifted their center of gravity forward and down and maintains good body tension they are not pushed around at all. Having relaxed arms doesn't just magically dissipate energy into thin air.

 

12 minutes ago, bluedevil008 said:

Since this is an action sport, inevitably some muscle activation is required to keep the body balanced while moving, but I do not apply tension anywhere in my body other than the forearms and hands.

 

There's more to it than that. When we are talking about how the body generates stability there are general rules that apply. I won't get into all of them at the moment as it would make for a very long post, but when you execute these rules you get something that looks like good posture. IE, the hips and spine are neutral, and the spine's position is supported by the musculature of the core. Actively stabilizing your spine by contracting the muscles that make up the core is a general rule for all humans. This is a large part of the fundamental function of these muscles. If we could teach everyone in the world to squeeze their belly while maintaining a neutral spine during all activity, back injuries would instantly plummet. There is no debate that this is the safest position for the spine to occupy both unloaded and under load. It just so happens that the safest position for the body to occupy is also the strongest position the body can occupy. My default posture is contracting those muscles at roughly 10% of max. If I am awake, I keep my belly just a little tight. If I'm weightlifting I'm squeezing that musculature as tight as possible for maximum stabilization. Shooting is somewhere between the two, which is where I came up with 50%. 50% isn't a hard rule, it's a reflection of being tighter than I would be if we were talking having a beer and less tight than I would be with a difficult lift. 

 

29 minutes ago, bluedevil008 said:

The body reacts quicker when reacted and allows recoil to be absorbed quicker as well as drive the gun back on target quicker.

 

I do not accept the premise of this statement. You can't just say this without explaining what's physically going on behind it. How is the speed the recoil is absorbed effected by being relaxed or by being tense? The speed of the impulse from recoil is what it is regardless of what you do. It doesn't even make sense from a logic perspective that relaxing would cause you to drive the gun back to the target quicker. If you're driving the gun anywhere you are very explicitly not relaxing. Most people I know that talk about being relaxed believe you should just let the gun recoil and come back on it's own accord. I don't get how you can mentally justify driving the gun to target without contracting musculature to do it.

 

I'm not trying to absorb recoil. I'm trying to create the best conditions I can to efficiently transfer that energy from the gun into the ground. Those conditions look like a grip as high on the gun as possible to minimize rotational leverage of the gun, tight arms to both bolster the strength of the grip and allow for effective transmission of energy, a tight core for primary stabilization of the shoulders and efficient transmission of energy from the arms to the legs, and a slight forward lean to create a more efficient line for the energy to travel from my arms to my legs and prevent the energy from going straight out the back of my shoulders which would push me around as you suggested earlier.

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  • 3 months later...

I feel your pain have the same Issue been getting better but notice I look over my sights when I keep the correct posture however I only seem to turtle neck with my limited fun posture is much better with my open Gun but what people are saying makes sense because the more I relax the less I do it 

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  • 4 weeks later...

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