First of all, Bravo Steve! Congratulations on a lot of hard work, and a standard of acheivement which is excellent for any normal human being. (If you don't believe me, just put any one of your targets over your chest and tell me who had the last word!)
Now, A little while back we had this from a "guest" with which
I quite agree:
Anonymous wrote:Take a step back and look at the larger picture. ...Think in terms of group. If you have to think about math try calculating a percentage of tens. make 50% your base line. Or maybe 35-40% at your level.
But I think that if your tens are less than fifty percent, then you should be counting nines, or even eights if that is what it takes. The idea is first to identify honestly your level, and not to define success so narrowly that you are always bound to fail. First and foremost in building a mental edge is confidence and feeling good about your shooting. There should always be more praise than criticism.
In my case, I almost always have (some days just barely) most of my shots inside the nine. This is normal for me. Therefore the feeling of what it is to shoot a nine or ten is also normal. This is another reason why one should measure at one's true level. You get lots of chances to reinforce
something that is happenning more than half the time. Often I have the impression, "that shot went off ok, I have no idea where it went, but it went off right." I don't even look to see.
Results of individual shots just confuse the issue. There is no point in wondering or reinforcing why an individual shot hit the middle, particularly at lower skill levels. What is much more promising is looking to identify which class of your regular normal shots is producing that reliable percentage of three or four tens per target. But focus on the tens is unnessecarily stressful for those for us in "development".
It should be obvious that one more shot in the nine ring will increase also the numvber of tens, and dramatically raise the score of a whole match. Therefore I favor reinforcing those behaviors you know you can reliably acheive, not the odd super performance, and that this method will bring
the super performance more often.
I also have a point about the bad shots. People talk about ignoring them and focusing only on the good. I can't subscribe to that, because to improve, you have to identify what you are doing wrong. And this also is
going to be a case of identifying what you do wrong regularly, not occaisionally. In my notebook, for each target, I record the percentage of nines, and I record each shot outside, giving its clock position. I also record its distance, but that is much less important. As it turns out, I have
something like 30-40% of my errors at 1:30. It is obviously a good thing if I know exactly what it feels like to make that shot. In the short term it is great to recognize and abort. (Hat's off here to Mark Briggs eating raw meat with the dogs in his canadian igloo:).
In the long term, hopefully I can learn to always make the subtle little changes to muscle pressure which normally (already now) make that particular wrist flip impossible. In any case, I can't see how just ignoring
something in my grip which is regularly producing snow bunnies can be a good idea.
Putting these two things together, the positive and the negative, I think Steve is aborting way too many shots. There is no point in aborting normal shots. And normal shots are by definition over 50%. Let's give the benefit of the doubt, that a shot is normal (which seems essential to avoid a paralyzing hesitation). Then it would seem reasonable to exercise the veto only two or at most three times per target.
On a sixty shot match, this would be twelve to eighteen aborts. And once again, what happens at any particular taget is irrelevant. It is only over time that you can say what percent you are aborting. At some point you might feel your scores are going up or down because you are aborting more or less. And then you could adjust. But like the knob on the telescope, the best adjustment is minimal. Overcompesation is the enemy of meaningful adjustment (did your mother ever figure out how to use a thermostat?)
Anyway, I would streamline Steve's system as follows:
Perfect becomes normal/good And is defined as at least 50%
Abort is still abort and the number of times is significant, but
should not exceed three in ten
errors, by definition once again (reflecting higher standards as
time goes on) will always be 30-40%. Identify their position
for later pattern analysis.
Therefore, a regular day at the range firing sixty shots should
look like this: Normal 36 Abort 15 Bad 24 Total 75
When the normal number rises consistently, it is time to
change your definition of what is normal for you.
Score (preaching to the choir here) is not particularly helpful, because the variations in score with percentage of good and bad shots give only a rough correspondence. On the other hand, improving percentages and standards of good/bad will clearly be accompanied by higher scores.
So, Steve (and others) what do you say of this streamlined
and realisticaly normalized approach?
Best Regards,
Gordon