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Not thinking about shooting while shooting


bird

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I find that  humming my favorite tune helps me not to analzye my shooting while I live fire.

Once I begin to think about my stance, grip, trigger control etc I shoot alot worse.

It is hard to live fire and just empty my mind and enjoy the experience.

Any tips on how to "meditate while I shoot"??

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You might want to look at some of the posts in the 'Miscellaneous Questions' under 'Zen' Brian has posted some exercises for working on focus.

One that Pat taught me is to watch you bullets going down range and through the target.  You can look for it; you just have to except that it there and that you can see it.  I find that it put you in a relaxed state.  It prevents you from over thinking because if you think about it, you wont see it.

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That's a good, and fun one Michael.

One way to eliminate wasted energy due to excess concern over basics is to orient yourself to SEE everything that happens while shooting a string. Imagine the entire string in your head, like if you were watching the stage on a video camera and the lense was your eyes. When the buzzer goes off, just play the movie.

be

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I was at a club match about to shoot my second stage, the classifier Bang and Clang. (Two poppers on the left, paper in the middle, two poppers on the right. Fast!) In the box I took a few practice draws and a whole bunch of sight picture engagements, moving the gun to each target. I could feel people getting peeved about me taking so long. It just didn't feel right and I did it again and again, bearing down trying to make myself see and feel what I needed to see and feel while shooting. Finally, I realized I was too nervous and hyped up. When I realized this, I laughed out loud, shook my head, and quickly loaded my gun, thinking que sera, sera, this wasn't my day and I'll get another chance. About two and a half seconds after the beep, the first popper hit the ground while the others were still falling and the IPSC target had two Alphas in it. It turned out to be a 96% classifier.

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A friend wears this Indiana Jones looking hat while shooting Sporting Clays. One day, following a not-so-good round, I told him the problem was the hat. If he would take the hat off, he would shoot better.

He and some other guys then went out on the 5 stand course. I watched as he loaded the gun on the first stand. He started to get into position, stopped, took off the hat & hung it on a post. Five birds, five puffs of dust. Next station, same thing. Only on the last station did he wear the hat. He missed 3 out of 5.

Being distracted on the first stand by having his thoughts focused on not wearing the hat seemed to allow his unconscious to take over and let his body do what it had to do.

By the second stand he was able to continue the string because he now believed he could. Once he put the hat back on, he then believed he could not. And he did not.

What you believe, you become.

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All good advice guys, believe it or not I shoot my best when I get the attitude- I don't care if I hit the target or miss it completly, I am just at the range to have fun and enjoy myself.

All my shots seem to fall into the "x-ring" when I have this sort of attitude..

Go figure...

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It's not so much and attitude as it is a state of mind.  Your mind is no longer cluttered with the thought of what could be and what should I do.  You have relaxed your self into focusing on what is.  I had that same problem when I started.  If you relax and watch what is happening you will shoot better.

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I shot a match last Sunday with my production gun and my open gun.  The production gun shooting went terrible and when it started to rain a little my open crapped out(as usual).  After driving 100miles to get to the match I was once again racked with tension after investing so much and performing so badly.  Right before leaving I decided to shoot the classifier for a lim10 score. On it my open gun quite and with both my open and production gun I had misses from pulling off the targets.  At the time I need one really good classifier to get into lim 10 A class and anything less that an 80+% would have set me back.  As you know normally this is receipe for disaster and up to recently it would have.  But I wound up shooting one of my best classifiers ever.  Why, because I just obseserved what I needed to see and let my subconsious do the shooting.  Easier said than done right?  Of course, for me learning to shoot in the zone took over a year of practice and I still can't quite do it on command.  I'm almost there, that classifier was a test and I passed.  I still make mistakes in matches and get up set etc.. But I've noticed that even though I still have misses and brain farts like I always have I'm steadily moving up the match results list(I haven't finished lower than seventh overall on any matches with significant shooters this year).  Sometimes seeing improvement in the mental game is knowing what to look for.

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  • 2 months later...

I also think that all the practice and dry firing will give you the subconscious you need to just pay attention to the shooting and seeing what you need to see instead of thinking about the grip, arm position, feet position, etc.

After you have gotten to the point where the indexing and mechanics have become second nature, you then can focus your attention on shootintg and seeing more.

Kevin/IPSC Supercop

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