TargetTalk

Great topic and very interesting discussion. I have been watching this thread develop over time. I have stayed out of the discussion so far, but decided it was time to chime in what I have experienced.

Lanny Bassham and his books were mentioned a few posts back. 18 months ago my daughter began working with Lanny's son Troy. She had no prior experience with precision air rifle or 3P smallbore. In just 10 months she went from a total novice to winning the Jr National Championship in air rifle at Ft Benning last summer. As of now, (a 15yo 9th grader), she has firmly established herself as one of the top women air rifle and smallbore shooters in the country, not just Jr but open class. I'm not trying to brag here, just giving a little background.

When we began working with Troy as her coach he immediately placed significant importance on developing the mental side of the game from day 1. He has commented many times about how most shooters think they do not need to work on the mental aspect until they are are already a high level shooter. He, on the other hand believes the two are totally linked. It is never too early to devote time and effort to the mental side of the sport.

Obviously without the technical skills one cannot shoot high scores. However, the way to view this is not, one or the other..... The two are intertwined. Mental, technical. They should both be worked on developed in tandem rather than saying, "I'll work on mental when I get good at technical"

I think most people do not put much work into the mental side is because it is "work". Shooting, sending bullets down range is fun. The mental side is just work, and it is really easy to think the gains in score have nothing to do with the mental training. You think you got better because you have been shooting and your technique has improved. Maybe so.........

As far as what to do for mental training....... someone else commented there is way to much information for this type of discussion. Bill Pullam's book was referenced earlier as well as "With Winning In Mind" by Lanny Bassham. Lanny / The Mental Management company have many other resources, books / CDs that cover the topic. Ways of the Rifle also touches on the subject as well as several other books.

Is the mental aspect of training important? You decide.

In order to be mentally focused you need to have a solid position with a shot routine that does not change throughout the match. For me if something doesn't feel right, (mentally) I'm not focused and 99% of the time if I go ahead and take the shot it will be a 8. Personally I believe that being in good shape and being calm while shooting with the mind set that its just another practice and execute your shot routine, then you will find the best combo of your mental and physical ability.

I always look at my own shooting and wonder what will do the most for me regarding to shooting high scores.

For me it's my positions that restricts me the most. My hold isn't good enough and of course I can make my hold better if I can relax myself and get my pulse lower and it's is really useful in pressure situations and that is something I use. A shot plan is good in that it makes you do the same thing every time but it doesn't make you do exactly right if you don't know what exactly right is. But the biggest problems is still in the positions not giving me good enough hold to only score tens.

How do I get my positions and hold better? For me the answer is training, training and some more training at the shooting range or at home dry firing with and without my SCATT. Of course I must use my brain to analyze and so on but I call my restricting areas physical and not mental.

Johan_85 wrote:One thing that makes this harder to answer is that most probably have different definitions of what a mental problem is.

If I jerk the trigger and score an eight that is not a mental problem if you ask me. I think that is a technique fault.

When looking at shooters in training and competitions you often can spot the errors they make and I don't think that is because they had a mental problem but it is lack of training and maybe wrong type of training that makes their technique sensitive of pressure.

Regulating tension, pulse and mindset is mental but I feel that the biggest concern for me and others at lower levels isn't found there.

It is a grey area, but it comes down to how experienced you are, and I think for a lot of people it actually is mental.

A novice may jerk the trigger because they don't know any better and they're so worried about their sight picture that they forget the nice squeeze action you talked about earlier.

But if you've been shooting a couple of years, have a reasonably stable position capable of decent scores and you know not to jerk the trigger, and you know why not, but you do anyway, then why is that?

Well, it's because you allowed yourself to be distracted from what you were supposed to be doing, or flustered from a bad last shot, or excited because it's all going very well and you've started counting your score and are on for a PB (or were until you spannered your last 3 shots and ruined a great shoot).

A novice makes mistakes because they don't know how to do it correctly.
An experienced shooter (usually) makes mistakes because they lost concentration after half an hour.
If you fire a shot and think "damn, I snatched that", then why did you fire it?
It's not poor technique per se - you know not to snatch, and usually don't.
But on that shot you stopped concentrating. Mental.


As others have alluded to, there's some level of repetition required to developing muscle memory and making your technique second-nature which is necessary, but when it's cold, or gusty and you're running out of time, you need mental discipline to make sure you don't deviate from your technique when under stress.

I've found this training with a squad over the past few months, at the first session the coach picked up immediately on inconsistencies in my process. They were technical errors if you like, but usually there because I wasn't paying attention to them. We implemented a much stricter cycle and I basically gained a point per string, which took me from my plateau of high 570s over the past few years to mid 580s in a couple of months.
I'm also much more aware of what I'm doing on the firing point and am much more successful identifying errors before I make them.

I've also been reading With Winning in Mind. What I've read so far has mirrored and reinforced a lot of what I've worked on in the squad and has been very helpful.

It also makes the point that your score isn't important. I'm sure we all know club shooters who come down, work around a multi-bull card and go "excellent, better than last week", or the other way round. That's not training, it's just shooting. And it's not better than last week, it's exactly the same, but this week the winds of chance nudged the shots in, next week they'll probably nudge them out again and they're be grumbling about where their "improvement" went!

One thing that I've heard many times is that you shouldn't look at your score and so on but I mostly shoot on Megalink and there the score is shown all the time. For me it's impossible to not notice the score when I look at the monitor to see where I hit so my new approach to this is to always look at my score and if I'm on my way to a personal best I really think the thoughts that this is going to be a personal best if I just shoot a certain point. I do everything under my training sessions to stress myself just to get tougher. This new approach works much better because when I do it in training I'm used to it when competing.

I think this thought comes from that you should focus on your technique because this is what gives you the score and this is completely true and this is where your shoot plan comes in. You shouldn't think of anything else than what is necessary to give you a good shot under the shot process but between shots I have no problem to watch my score, of course my heart rate goes up when going really well or going really bad but I train for being good at competing and when shooting at my main competition for the year my heart rate is going to be higher than when being on my home range training.

If I put it this way, if you shoot on or near your average at competitions then there isn't mental aspects that hold you back it is your technique. If we take an example from my standing shooting at ISSF 50m target, in practice I shoot around 360-369 for 40 shots and at competition I'm pretty close to that. When I have so low level compared to the maximum point then it says for me that it is my technique that is at a to low level. I know that I must hold my rifle still in the ten ring to score a ten and make a good trigger manipulation, follow through and so on but I just can't do it because my technique isn't good enough and therefore the solution is to better my technique. To better my technique I need for an example make my balance better, my hold better and so on.

I think it's a little different when being at a level near the maximum score because then your technique must be pretty good and the mental aspects must have a greater impact on the end result.

If I can deliver consistent scores at 390-395 points in training in standing at the ISSF 50m target and you only reach around 360-370 points in competition then there is something wrong in your mental approach in competition.

One more thing that I hope that everyone understand is that this is my opinion on the matter and that this is a discussion and everyone can ventilate there own opinion.