Rediscovering what is shooting and... shooting from a bubble?

[Pierruiggi]

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted here, so, nice to see you guys again.

I warn you, this is going to be a long post, but please read it carefully, as I want to believe I wrote it, trying to break the barrier that language and writing places on us.

Lately I've taken a more philosophical approach to shooting wondering about the value of such important and often mentioned concepts as neutrality, shot-calling, relaxation, awareness, and everything we consider is necesary for good performance, so it led me to the root question of what is good performance?

"What is shooting well?"

After some introspection, I concluded (at least for now) that shooting well is the continuous flow of the 3 fundamentals multiplied times whatever number of shots you must make. That means that anything that doesn't contribute to (1) find the target, (2) orient the gun to the target, (3) keep the gun oriented to the target until the shot breaks, or promote the seamless flow or merge between these 3, simply shouldn't be there. It's not shooting and it's keeping you away from where the shooting is.

The 3 fundamentals, as Brian so "eye openingly" describes them, were not unknown to me, but the realization that they are parts of a unity (shooting) hit me like a pile of bricks. I believe I didn't realized this earlier because of the human tendency to separate things in blocks when truth is things overlap, merge, or fuse constantly.

I would describe the flow of the 3 fundamentals by asking you to stop seeing them as 3. If they were colors, they wouldn't be red (1), yellow (2) and blue (3), they would be a gradient of red, yellow and blue, and placing limits on where the red stops and the blue starts is just that, placing limits (on yourself).

Think of a continuous line (better yet, a circle) where the 3 repeat themselves one after the other (and into each other) seamlessly, the limits of this line dictated by the number of shots you need to make. instead of a series of segments represented by 1, 2 and 3.

I remember reading Brian (in his book, here, or maybe both) recalling good performances as multiple inputs happening together and continuously instead of a series of events happening as this, then this, then this, then...

So, surprise surprise, what I just wrote is nothing new that good shooters haven't known and preached for almost 30 years. Myself, I already knew this. But then again, I knew it, read it, even understood it. Now I've experienced it. Now it's mine. It's new because it happened to me. It passed from the realm of knowledge to the realm of experience.

So, that ends (or begins?) the philosophical introspection.

Measuring things (concepts, techniques) with this new-to-me yardstick, here's some things I noticed. I'll try to enumerate them as concisely as possible, but keep in mind this is nowhere near a complete list, it will never be.

Awareness enables you to monitor and discover. It goes beyond the fundamentals of shooting. I believe it is a fundamental of learning.

Relaxation permits you to control your shooting through awareness. You are aware of things happening, you have the thoughtless intention or desire for such and such to happen, relaxation is what will make it happen.

Awareness and relaxation are what allows the previously mentioned seamless (and potentially endless) flow of the 3 fundamentals.

Calling a shot confirms the execution (correct/incorrect, right/wrong don't matter, it goes deeper than that) of the fundamentals, and thus bridges the "gap" from 3 to 1 again. It closes the circle, allowing the cycle to be. It is the simultaneus completion and beginning of the fundamentals.

Neutrality fuses the gun with the shooter. The lack of a conflict promotes relaxation but at the same time neutrality is the physical manifestation of relaxation.

I even noticed things that would seem counter-intuitive, even opposite of what other (good) shooters describe. An example that pops to mind is grip pressure. I often read people employ a stronger (to them) grip when shooting close targets because (for them) it minimizes sight movement, so the sights never leave the A and this permits a faster split; and a lighter (to them) grip for longer/tighter shots because... I don't know. This is not the case for me. To me, as long as I remain neutral, a firm grip gives me more input, more "feel". Therefore, in longer/tighter shots I'm more likely to increase grip pressure. It makes me feel more connected to the gun, more aware of it. More like a unit between it and me, a part of me. It also gives me a feeling of stillness, of quietness. Remembering a description from Brian, it makes me feel as if the gun no longer oscillates, or sways, but instead as if the gun is motionless and the target moves behind it. On the other hand, on a close, "easy" shot, I'm more likely to "let go" more of the gun, because I no longer need as precise a notion of where the gun is oriented (2) at any given time, but I do need the more speedy (if perhaps less precise) operation of the trigger promoted by a lighter grip.

I've also looked at my shooting problems from this new "3 fundamentals centric" vision of things. Allow me to present you the latest ones I've encountered, and how I'm overcoming them with the concept of "the shooter's bubble".

Coming from a perceived stall in my growth as a shooter, the first problem I noticed was vagueness. Vagueness as in seeing the target (whole) instead of "the" target (spot), that is, sloppily performing fundamental 1, which caused the succeeding orientation of the gun and keeping it there to be sloppy as well.

I proceeded to "brute force solve" the problem and make myself pick a spot in each target as soon as I possibly could, but then I encountered a new problem. As I drove the gun to that spot... I would lose the spot.

Even when shooting a group, I'd pick a spot and try to burn it in my vision so much that I'd be unable to come back to the sights. And when I finally got to the sights... Where was that spot?

So, I was finding the target and I may or may not be orienting the gun to it, and I would definitely have a hard time keeping it there, because I wouldn't be sure of where "there" was. I would call the shot and thus I would know where the shot went, but I couldn't "choose" where to hit. I couldn't "aim". I was experiencing the 3 fundamentals as separate events, with much doubt and "trying" in between.

Going to the root of the problem, I noticed that I'd have a feeling of the target being "there" and my sights "here". I felt I had to bring the sights to the target literally, that I had to touch that spot to make them interact. I had lost the concept of aligning or orienting the gun to the target and replaced it with a need to feel I was extending the sights and touching the target. I felt sights and target existed on different planes and couldn't be aware of both at the same time, it had to be one or the other. This "wanting to pay attention here or there" caused confusion and doubt as to where my focus (visual and mental) was, and, eventually to no focus at all. Real soon double-vision would start to creep in, and even if I closed an eye (something that when I shoot well I never do) the "fixing on only one thing" was still there.

Out of frustration I'd say, an idea burst into my head. "All this wouldn't happen if the sights and target coexisted in the same spot!"

This made me click and I decided I'll try to visualize a bubble around me. I'm in a bubble, which has an infinite number of coordinates. The boundary of this bubble is right at the extension of my arms, I can touch it with the sights. From now on, no matter at what distance the target is, if I can see it I can assign it a spot or coordinate in my bubble, and that coordinate becomes my target, while the real target is simply behind it.

This way:

Finding the target (fundamental 1) is assigning it a coordinate in my bubble.

Orienting the gun to the target (fundamental 2) is touching that coordinate-spot with my sights.

Keeping the gun oriented until it fires (fundamental 3) is simply monitoring that my sights keep touching my coordinate until the front sight jumps.

I'm happy to say I've had great success with this and I'm just beginning to explore it! I love the sense of unity it gives me. Makes me feel the target is there waiting for the sights to come blend with it.

And it surprised me the speed at which as soon as I see a target, the assignment of coordinate and refocus to that coordinate happens. It's instantaneous. I see the target in clear focus just for an instant but it's enough to pick a spot/assign coordinate. After that, the target is just there, behind my spot, waiting for the bullet to arrive.

Of course, I'm more than eager to see what else I experience.

Thanks for reading, I hope what I've shared was useful, or at least entertaining.

Edited April 17, 2009 by Duane Thomas

[Flexmoney]

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted here, so, nice to see you guys again.

I warn you, this is going to be a long post, but please read it carefully, as I want to believe I wrote it, trying to break the barrier that language and writing places on us.

Lately I've taken a more philosophical aproach to shooting wondering about the value of such important and often mentioned concepts as neutrality, shot-calling, relaxation, awareness, and everything we consider is necesary for good performance, so it led me to the root question of what is good performance?

"What is shooting well?"

After some introspection, I concluded (at least for now) that shooting well is the continuous flow of the 3 fundamentals multiplied times whatever number of shots you must make. That means that anything that doesn't contribute to (1) find the target, (2) orient the gun to the target, (3) keep the gun oriented to the target until the shot breaks, or promote the seamless flow or merge between these 3, simply shouldn't be there. It's not shooting and it's keeping you away from where the shooting is.

The 3 fundamentals, as Brian so "eye openingly" describes them, were not unknown to me, but the realization that they are parts of a unity (shooting) hit me like a pile of bricks. I believe I didn't realized this earlier because of the human tendency to separate things in blocks when truth is things overlap, merge, or fuse constantly.

I would describe the flow of the 3 fundamentals by asking you to stop seeing them as 3. If they were colors, they wouldn't be red (1), yellow (2) and blue (3), they would be a gradient of red, yellow and blue, and placing limits on where the red stops and the blue starts is just that, placing limits (on yourself).

Think of a continuous line (better yet, a circle) where the 3 repeat themselves one after the other (and into each other) seamlessly, the limits of this line dictated by the number of shots you need to make. instead of a series of segments represented by 1, 2 and 3.

I remember reading Brian (in his book, here, or maybe both) recalling good performances as multiple inputs happening together and continuously instead of a series of events happening as this, then this, then this, then...

So, surprise surprise, what I just wrote is nothing new that good shooters haven't known and preached for almost 30 years. Myself, I already knew this. But then again, I knew it, read it, even understood it. Now I've experienced it. Now it's mine. It's new because it happened to me. It passed from the realm of knowledge to the realm of experience.

So, that ends (or begins?) the philosophical introspection.

I got this far in my reading...

Nicely said. And, timely!

[Flexmoney]

(finished it)

Wow. That might be the single best post that I have read in a loooong time.

!!!

Thanks for sharing.

[kevin c]

Great observations. Something for me to explore.

Thanks, P!

[short_round]

I noticed that I'd have a feeling of the target being "there" and my sights "here".

I know this feeling.

I shot my first match in a year's time this past Feburary. For the last two months I've been consistenly having my a$$ handed to me in the overall standings. I could see the gun, see the target, see the gun go off not aligned to the target, see the gun go off AGAIN not aligned to the same target, try a make up shot and see the gun AGAIN go off not aligned to that same F*(&^ing target. It was frustrating and hurt the feelings of my fragile big ego.

My friends told me to relax and they were right.

I don't know if it's insecurity or laziness but at my worst I always seem to stray away from the fundamentals.

I wish they made a "hydroxycut" for shooting like they do for losing weight. Pop a pill and get instant results in 2 weeks. Chasing the trick of the day makes you feel like you are doing something but in the end you realize (hopefully) that you spent way too much time watching QVC and wonder how you will pay the credit card bill.

So I went to my shooting logs and started reading all the notes I kept. Shot groups, timing drills, and started to trust myself and let the shots, arrays, and stages play out like I know they should.

It's a rough road back ... I'm on my way ... but enough about me.

As far as the bubble is concerned, rather than points on a sphere surrounding me, I envision cones projecting from the end of my gun to the targets. The further and tighter the shot the more narrow the funnel of the cone. So on your sphere, rather than points, they would look like circles varying in size depending on the type of shot. If the gun is in the circle it goes off. There's no added gain to tune to a smaller circle than necessary which would be less efficient. I think of it as a cone (connecting the tip of the gun to the acceptable hit area) since for that shot that is where I want my focus (on the target), but I have to do other things so I want to pull my awareness back (from the target) and extend another larger cone around the shooting cone to include the array. If I'm really feeling good the awareness is pulled back to include the whole stage. Maybe in the sphere case it would be extending a larger awareness sphere to include the whole array then if you're really feeling good being able to extend the sphere to include the whole stage. If the line between focus and awareness starts to breakdown then focus must rule and awareness has to be divided into smaller pieces.

Thinking about your bubble some more, I bet you're not shooting open. Which is why the sphere works better (radius = distance from your eye to the front sight). I'm shooting open so my radius = distance from gun to target, hence the cones.

Also, since you're running the sphere maybe you don't extend an awareness bubble around it, maybe you just add more circles for the other targets and the circles move into place as you get to the engagement points of the targets in the stage.

I'll have to think about that some more ... anyway ...

Welcome back to both of us!

[benos]

What a great post Pierruiggi - thank you for putting it up here so everyone can benefit from it.

Out of frustration I'd say, an idea burst into my head. "All this wouldn't happen if the sights and target coexisted in the same spot!"

You hit it right there.

In learning to anything well, in the first phase, it can be helpful to break what is actually one continuous activity down into multiple acts, each with a specific beginning and end. But in the end, ultimately, you are just always doing one thing - paying attention to or "shifting" your attention to the most important realm, at each moment.

What was initially felt as "find the target," "point the gun at the target," and "keep the gun pointed at the target until if fires," is eventually experinced as one activity. So your sentence makes perfect sense.

Or in other words what in the beginning is three things, eventually becomes two - find the target, shoot the target. And in the end becomes one - shoot the target. Because you have to find and aim at the target to shoot it.

I wrote the "3-fundamental" thing quite some time ago. Nowadays, I feel I should add this to it.

Thanks again,

be

[Pierruiggi]

Thank you for reading and replying guys! Great stuff short_round! You're right, I shoot iron sights (production). I'd like to grab a scoped gun and try that "cones" idea!

I just read the thread (including my own post), and I want to make it very clear to everyone (including myself, the next time I read this) that the "shooter's bubble" is not the "be all, end all" of shooting. It is simply shooting. Or, one of the many faces of shooting. It is a concept that I visualize, a mental technique that I (currently) use, to put myself in a state of mind that allows me to shoot and just shoot without distraction. Said more poetically, it is a river that I navigate that merges into the ocean of shooting. But I won't fall into the trap of thinking it is the only way, the only river. That's closing myself, deluding myself.

In fact, I think many times we find a "something", trick of the day, or maybe something more profound, that gives us great results for a while, but then that improvement flatlines or even falls. I think that's because that "something" became dogma. The most valuable part of that "something" was its novelty, its purity, its "what you see is what you get" quality, its "there's nothing more to it" sensation. But we want there to be something more to it. In our (futile) search for (perceived, idealized) perfection we analyze that "something" so hard ("the key to this is...") that we taint it, pervert it. We have an obsession with wanting things to be fixed, frozen, defined, rigid, separate.

I can't count how many times I've fallen into that spiral of "Well, I made a sub-second reload... (I have to keep reloading fast) but now I'm getting Ds... (I have to hit the target) I'm getting As again...! but now I'm shooting a 7 second El Pres... (I have to do X, I have to do Y, I have to do Z)." Wouldn't it be simpler if that was replaced with: "Shoot"?

How many times have you found yourselves hitting a sub-second draw (for example) 5 or 10 times in a row, and thinking, "Oooooooohhhhhhh so the key was having the elbow outwards!" (for example). So you dryfire and livefire over and over and over with that elbow outwards, some time passes, and, suddenly you are below that second mark there, but you start hitting Cs, or when you don't have that elbow outwards you get a 1.5 second draw, or whatever. Wasn't getting better just learning "proper" technique and burning it into your muscle memory (or subconscious)? Well no, you just started giving importance and priority to something that was, in essence, irrelevant to shooting. Its sole function was allowing you to "tap" into the shooting. Once you think the goal is having that elbow outwards (or whatever), you lose sight of the real goal, shooting. What I believe getting better is, is (re)discovering things constantly. [EDIT to add a phrase and more accurately describe my line of thought... I hope!]

In my experience, when the idea of "So, THIS is what I have to do to shoot well" appears, it's an indicator that a stall in growing/learning is about to occur, if you don't avoid falling into the "now-I-know-everything-I-needed-to-know" trap.

When I sense that idea solidifying, I bombard myself with concepts that differs from whatever it is I consider holy-grail-of-shooting-of-the-moment, and see what happens. In other words, I try something "new" and see what happens. I think this whole "constantly try new things to see shooting from a different perspective" concept gives place to the realization that shooting is a unity, and allows you to feel or sense that unity.

This is closely related with the trick of the day concept, I think, but my whole point is that tricks of the day can become dangerous if made to be more than that, tricks of the day.

If you fix yourself with the idea of only being one way into shooting, you'll close all the entrances.

Brian, thank you for once again reminding me that shooting is shooting, no matter into how many parts/steps we want to split it. Isn't it ironic that in our quest for completion we end up dividing stuff?

Edited April 17, 2009 by Duane Thomas

[VegasOPM]

I like the way you bring up the seamless loop concept. Fighter Pilots in WWII used a concept called the OODA loop in a dogfight. Observe, Orient, Decide and Act- repeat until the threat is neutralized. I have applied the OODA loop to many aspects of my life, like Martial Arts and Motorcycling. It works in shooting too. The key is that it is a loop. After you have acted, it is time to observe again. There doesn't need to be a discernable pause between stages of the loop and that observation (or seeing) is always happening.

Edited April 3, 2009 by VegasOPM

[short_round]

the "shooter's bubble" is not the "be all, end all" of shooting

Niether are cones ... they're just tools that work today to help us establish frames of reference that eventually melt away to leave behind a single shot efficient from beginning to end done over and over again.

Isn't it ironic that in our quest for completion we end up dividing stuff?

How many times have I taken something apart to see how it works and not been able to put it back together agian?

[little_kahuna]

epic thread. really, thank you for posting this, i'm going to just keep re-reading it lol

[Duane Thomas]

Pierruiggi,

Wonderful and thought provoking posts. Thank you.

[SIE107]

I look at being in the "bubble" as being in a state of concentration that nothing around you, you will notice.. Just as in like when I shoot prone matches or national match type rifle matches.. the person next to me.. When it is time to focus, I am aware of the fact that I am not the only one on the line.. but those others, they are lost in my mist of concetration. A person could be shooting a 338 Lapua Mag next to me, I will not notice that they are there till it is all over. My bubble is: me, the target and my scorer. My focus zone, is me and the target. Notice that I have not mentioned the firearm.. that is because, in part, my way of thinking is that you must become part of the weapon that You using. In essence " Be the Bullet".

I do a lot of "imaging", going through everything in my mind. Position, sight alignment, calling the shot. See everything in your mind. Over and over again.

Always remembering the basics, building upon them.. when I come into a problem, I start over from the foundation.

[SIE107]

There was a word that I was trying to think of while I was writting my previous post, well .. while at work last night, it hit me.

Equanimity

[benos]

Isn't it ironic that in our quest for completion we end up dividing stuff?

Good one.

[ThreadDrift]

And a perfect analogy to life itself. The divisive nature of our perceptual mechanisms blinds us from experiencing life totally, so we spend the majority of our lives struggling to feel "complete."

Or as Keizan put it perfectly, "Indeed, since people lack nothing, it is a pity that they wander so much in illusion once they have been deluded by their perception."

[/td]

be

[Mooney]

This was said before, but I wish to restate it.

Epic thread.

Thank you for your thoughts and insight- and this will be re-read by myself (and others, I am sure) many times, such as only a few other posts have been.

The quick reload and draw section of one of your above posts really has hit home with me this Winter, I found myself living in the previous motion (thinking "Wow, I did THAT well") without realiging my focus onto the NOW of what I needed to see happening. I have been trying different things, and the bubble visualization will be incorporated (along with re-reading a certain book ).

-Greg

Gracias.