TargetTalk

2650 Plus wrote:Bryan Zins also breaks mid 590s with AP, BE does not exclude high scores with ISSF type pistols. . Good Shooting Bill Horton

Great, there shouldn't be any confusion as to who he is then as we will all get to see him with an Olympic gold medal around his neck in a little under 2 weeks! Mid 590 will be hard to catch.

Bill where has Brian Zins shot mid 590's in a competition? You do realize that the world record is 593?

Brian Zins is a very talented shooter but I haven't heard of him nor anyone else shooting world record scores in North America.

I seem to remember him shooting a really good score at Ft Benning last year, Steve was there also if my memory hasn't failed me completely. Also Russ had a good run there even though he misunderstood the rules and entered as a collegiat class shooter, He corrected the entry as soon as he figured out what the rules really were. Those scores are listed somewhere in this forum. I havent been able to locate them as yet so I'm working strictly on a failing memory. Good Shooting Bill Horton

Ed Hall has agreed to let me post my content (diagrams, explanations, etc.) in some form on his web site. There are some issues but hopefully we can sort them out.

I suppose this thread can now sink into obscurity under the weight of its own controversy and variety!

Thanks again all it was a great discussion!

Some of the charts etc. will be modified based on feedback I have received (mostly off-line). Will post links at some point when it is revised and ready.

Tired of hearing ones one voice?

What a waste of space this thread is! Certain individuals certainly like to try and impress others with their jiberish!

Anonymous wrote:What a waste of space this thread is! Certain individuals certainly like to try and impress others with their jiberish!

why don't you log in?
chicken shit

Anonymous wrote:What a waste of space this thread is! Certain individuals certainly like to try and impress others with their jiberish!

Your comment is certainly a waste of space.

Personally I am glad Steve and others have spent so much time on this. Whether you agree with the methods proposed or not, the discussion has been interesting, to me at least.

Thanks to all who contributed.

No thanks to the anonymous trolls with nothing to add.

Steve Turner

SteveT wrote:Personally I am glad Steve and others have spent so much time on this. Whether you agree with the methods proposed or not, the discussion has been interesting, to me at least.

Thanks to all who contributed.

No thanks to the anonymous trolls with nothing to add.

Steve Turner

100%

Last night I tried the Steve Schwartz Shooting Metric system. I modified some of the metrics to better fit me, using the Schwartz method as a starting point. I have a few thoughts.

I prefer to use "Excellent" instead of "Perfect". When I think about a perfect shot that sets the bar too high in my mind. I feel like I have only delivered a few truly perfect shots in my life, however I have shot many excellent shots and even a few excellent matches. If I can achieve that level consistently, I will be very happy.

My mental focus was distracted by the act of observing. Steve - do you find that it becomes natural and part of the routine? That distraction may be an advantage for me, since I tend to have an over-active mind. My struggle is keeping focused on the task at hand and keeping stray unrelated thoughts out.

I was monitoring too many metrics. I have 7 things (Align, Settle, Sights, Trigger, Time, Call, Mental) plus overall shot quality, called value and direction and actual value and direction. While all 7 parameters are important to me and my shot process, I think for training purposes I should use this to focus on a small number of behaviors (1-3?) for individual training sessions.

By focusing so much on monitoring and recording, I aborted a lot more. I had a much lower threshold to abort.

It really slowed me down. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just an observation. I normally shoot fairly slowly, about 30 seconds a shot or so. Thinking about each metric and writing with the left hand probably took 30 seconds or more just for "data entry". Using clickers and just evaluating overall shot quality would be faster and probably not slow me down much if any.

I kept the gun in my hand and jotted notes with the left hand. I made the sheet so the individual parameters just needed a tick mark, but writing the shot value and direction looks like the scribbles of a 6 year old child. I wonder how long it would take me to learn to write left handed if I start in my 40's?

Finally, last night was not a good night. I was tired, had a lot of issues from work and home and I just wasn't on my game. My hold was bigger, my trigger was not there etc. After monitoring these 20 slow fire shots, I went into my regularly scheduled training plan and really struggled. After a while I had to stop the plan and just work on trigger pull. I called it a night early because I was not able to get things working and didn't want to just throw lead downrange. I don't think this had anything to do with this measurement, which I did at the beginning of the session, but it is something I will watch in the future.

End result:

Total 26 shots (6 dry and 20 live)
Excellent: 5
Nominal: 13
Poor: 8
Error: 0
Abort: 15

On 50' NRA Slow Fire Target
10's: 8
9's: 4
8's: 4
7's: 2
Dry: 6
unknown: 2 (target getting ragged so unable to score exactly, but were 9's or 10's)

And so the quest continues...

Steve Turner

Steve, I have also tried the SSSM system and have some comments similar to yours:

Excellent is a better descriptor than Perfect.

My ability to maintain mental focus was enhanced by the need to reflect on the quality of the shot and make an entry.

It slowed me down a bit, but not too much. My normal rep rate is 1 shot/min and I pretty much stayed with that.

I selected a limited number of metrics/issues I wanted to concentrate on for the session, in this case it was focus, alignment, and trigger. So I recorded five columns of data:
Quality (Excellent, Nominal, Error)
Abort
Focus (numeric 1-3)
Alignment (numeric 1-3)
Trigger (numeric 1-3)

I video record and compare the data with the shot at the end of the session. Still some bugs to work out, but I am going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes

Fred

It would be easy to dismiss the SSSM on two grounds, namely that they are too subjective and that they are too complicated. Either you would have to spend considerable time pondering each shot from memory after the fact, or there would have to be two of you, one to shoot and one to evaluate.

However SSSM is more than a system, it is a challenge to us as shooters to look critically and usefully at what we are doing when we shoot. Inspite of the difficulties mentionned, the only alternative to trying to measure our behaviors is to just say, "Keep working and it will all work out." And most of us think the human mind is capable of more than that.

Perhaps the evaluation proccess could be simplified by making it hierarchical.

At the top level would be sight alignment. We are all convinced that this is the most important thing to be aware of, and it is thus the first thing we should be able to clearly label as good or bad. In fact, just having the notion at the back of your mind that you will be evaluating it after the shot might tend to make you pay even more attention and shoot better.

In any case, if we know that our sight alignment was good when the shot broke, and if we were in the zone at that time, then the shot just has to be a good one. So instead of a vague question about the quality of the shot, which is not a behavior at all, but either a big clump of behaviors or just a look in the scope, we have a very pointed question about the sight alignment with three ready answers: A) Good, B)Bad, C)Don't Know.

In case a) we have the follow on question about our awareness of being in the zone. We could answer A) right in the zone b) out of the zone c|) don't know. Each of these in says things about specific items we were supposed to evaluate. Case a) is a good shot, and if we look in the scope and it is not good, then either we are very confused, or there is a mechanical problem. Case b) implies a bad hold, but not a bad trigger. There is also the question of whether we were aware of the out of zone status early enough to abort. Case c) raises interesting questions about our chosen aiming point and whether it allows us to concentrate on alignment, as we should and still know if we are on target.

In case b) (bad alignment) assuming that alignment was good before the gun went off, but we saw misalignment at detonation, we are first inclined to blame the trigger. Normally there is no reason for the gun to be out of alignment at discharge unless the act of firing, ie trigger, has pushed it out. Beyond this we have all the details of the grip and hold and stance in relation to a perfect line of shot, in which any defect can assert itself as an involuntary adjustment at the critical time. But that crisis is produced by whatever we do to pull the trigger, and trigger is rightly at the tip of this behavioral pyramid. So we have these two subquestions:trigger was bad because a) finger problem b)grip problem which makes clean trigger difficult.

Case C) (I don't know if my alignment was good at discharge) means follow through is bad. this means concentration was lost.

What I would like to explore, is whether we can, by asking a few questions, provide implicit answers to many more, and thus by checking a couple of boxes acheive the equivalent of going down the whole list. I don't pretend my description above is correct, it is a first draft off the top of my head and presented as a base of discussion. However lets look at how it could work as a tree.

Alignment?
-good
-in zone?
-yes: good shot
-no: bad shot
-hold?
-SHPTGD?
-don't know: probably bad shot
-paying attention?
-bad: bad shot
-bad trigger finger?
bad grip?

-don't know: bad follow through: lost concentration:maybe lucky enough to get a good shot and maybe not
-paying attention?
-flinch?

There are never more than three relevant questions for any shot. But those questions say quite a bit. Is this approach usefull? What branches are missing?

Best Regards,

Gordon

sorry. this looks clearer:

Alignment?

-good
-in zone?
-yes: good shot
-no: bad shot
-hold?
-SHPTGD?
-don't know: probably bad shot
-paying attention?

-bad: bad shot
-bad trigger finger?
bad grip?

-don't know: bad follow through: lost concentration:maybe lucky enough to get a good shot and maybe not
-paying attention?
-flinch?

Good natural alignment?

Good steady hold?

Good natural location on target?

Good concentration?

Good trigger?

Good followthrough?

Good process?

Good shot.

Sorry about the long delay but had to take a work-demanded hiatus.

In order then:

1. Mental focus decreases when you focus on these items? Hmmm- sounds a little counter-intuitive to me. The whole point of evaluating those elements is that it is forcing you to pay closer attention to them. It does get easier as you use the technique. And faster.

2. Yes it is always faster and easier to "just be cappin rounds." Training and practice and matches are three different environments with different characteristics.

3. Need to remind/re-state the idea that this is not (especially if you are unfamiliar with it) for evaluating all elements every single time! I think I mentioned this up front but you need to pick 2-3 of the elements (with some forethought as to how they are related) and specifically work on that group for about 5 shots then move to another group etc. One not so obvious pairing is to work "Approach" and "Follow Through" at the same time. This is called "the bridge" by some students because it forces you to heighten your awareness early- and keep it at a high level longer.

4. Your subjective rankings aren't really important in any objective sense. This isn't to evaluate progress over time- yoiur standards will change (go up!) so you will probably have average scores of "2.3" when shooting 540 initially- and scores of "2.2" when shooting 570. What happened was as your skills improved your threshold of what was considered "acceptable" got tighter.

5. The sheet is intended to be customized- you need to write your own descriptions of the different rankings etc. I would not recommend going to a deeper scale ("Scale of 1 to 10") however as you could easily turn this into a counting drill- that's not the intent.

Didn't mean to go on too long- gotta think about some of the other points raised.

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help; or ideas for improving the use of the chart. Also different variations of this sort of thing have been used by a variety of coaching organizations/coaches over the years. I have tweaked it very little from what a lot of teams and coaches are already using.

Steve, regarding your comments...

1. Perhaps I am not expressing myself well. During the act of each behavior I am more focussed on the activity, but as I move through the shot process a part of my mind is distracted by remembering what the raise looked like, what the sights looked like when the gun came up, what the settle looked like etc. As I moved forward in the shot process I had more stuff in my head.

As I type, it becomes obvious to me that this is neither good for delivering a shot nor is it the purpose of this exercise. I should have seen it at the time and monitored just a few items at a time.

2. Agreed

3. I guess I missed, or more likely forgot, your comments about picking 2-3 at a time. The bridge is interesting, I'll have to think about and try it.

4. Good to know. After struggling a bit thinking about what the thresholds should be I figured I was better to "just do it" and let it evolve.

5. I thought about using a 5 or 10 point scale but figured I'd start with 3 and see how it goes. Although there were times I wanted to mark midway between two ratings I figured if I am not sure if it is Excellent, then it is Nominal and if I am not sure if it is Nominal or Poor then it is Poor.

As I think about it, this is good because we really want to train ourself to us a binary scale during matches, "take the shot" and "abort the shot". Three seems to work well because it rewards us for a shot that is better than good enough.

Steve:

Good point on the "overload" (trying to remember what happened early in the shot in order to score it) issue. This will actually become easier as you get more comfortable with it. I forgot how hard it was for me initially to get used to it- yoiu have to "think harder" during the shot so yeah, I see how that can be a distraction.

Also good point about the "threshold" issue and relating it to the release/abort decision. I usually end up using either a 1 or a 2 (not acceptable/acceptable) and hardly ever rate anything as a 3. Threes are reserved for those "Oh man that was great" executions! Believe me, I have gone back and forth between 3, 5, up to 10 different "levels" and just figured the 1-3 was simplest and most useful. You do make a good point about tying it to the abort decision.

Didn't mention in the last posting but there is an initially bad- but long term good- side effect in your rating standards getting higher.

The bad news is you put the gun down more. The good news is you put the gun down more!