TargetTalk

What are the favourite 'Shaolin' techniques that you (head abbots of shooting) advocate to improve one's hold?
Some of us hold up a half brick, a 2 kg dumbell for 30 secs (repeat ten times) or hold up an air pistol. Or does doing light weights for the shoulder, lat and tricep work faster?


Warm Regards,

Dev

Imo, leight weights, or AP, for endurance for arm strength. You dont have to be able to lift 100k for 5 sec, you'll need more endurance.
Additional excersizes, for the wrist; strength, and to train to keep it locked.

Don't forget excercises for the core muscles to enable you to stand still.

Weight training as well as a few of these interesting drills:
http://www.pistolnz.org.nz/pdf/traindrills.pdf

David Levene wrote:Don't forget excercises for the core muscles to enable you to stand still.

This is so true.

But one question I'd ask is, are you trying to improve your hold or your stability?

Realistically anyone who averages 540 or better can hold the 9 ring comfortably. But with increased stability, the perception of movement in your arm will be much lower.

I found that by increasing stability my arms started to be still when holding. Strength of the core muscles and the bodies natural stabilising muscles will make your natural movement much smaller.

But if you're simply looking to increase your hold. I find the best way is to hold out your pistol in your aiming area for and increasing amount of time

I.e. 1x1 min then 1x2 min then 1x3 min and back down so 1x2 min and 1x1 min and repeat. You can make this quite intense by really focusing on your sight alignment too.

Good luck

Thank you Yana and V76 for all of your replies. David and Lastman really made me rethink on my objective. I now think it is a stability issue. I will go through the exercises outlined by V76, Lastman had been very kind by guiding me to a practice routine last year. Really helped me to improve.


Warm Regards,

Dev

lastman wrote:

David Levene wrote:Don't forget excercises for the core muscles to enable you to stand still.

This is so true.

But one question I'd ask is, are you trying to improve your hold or your stability?

Realistically anyone who averages 540 or better can hold the 9 ring comfortably. But with increased stability, the perception of movement in your arm will be much lower.
<snip>

I don't think that's quite true. Your hold can be in the 8 ring and you can still shoot 9's and 10's. I know one shooter with a fairly poor hold on scatt, and yet he's amongst the top shooters in the squad I coach with. His shot release timing is obviously much better than some of the others with a better hold.

Overall hold will be a combination of inner and outer positions and the stability of those. To train one in isolation is missing a trick (although I suspect most of us neglect the inner).

Rob.

I talked to Skanåker today during a training match, and he thought I should do 15000 lifts with my free pistol during a month, and see where that took me..

So he's basically suggesting to 'toughen up'? I've been working on that lately, building trunk strength and trying to harden my shoulders, as an injury to the shooting arm shoulder last summer was a serious set-back. 500 pistol lifts per day... I wonder how long he means to hold it, if at all. Any hint as to hold duration, if any?

Dev wrote:What are the favourite 'Shaolin' techniques that you (head abbots of shooting) advocate to improve one's hold?
Some of us hold up a half brick, a 2 kg dumbell for 30 secs (repeat ten times) or hold up an air pistol. Or does doing light weights for the shoulder, lat and tricep work faster?


Warm Regards,

Dev

Hi Dev, Forget the weights and watch this video by Keith Sanderson on Dry
Fire and Holding drills.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfARgCqWCvQ

I tried it; His method produced an AMAZING steadiness in my hold.

Tony

Hi paw080,

Very inspiring film. Just put me out of the misery of trying to find the time to go to a range.

Thank you.

Dev

Gerard: I think he meant just lift and get a clear sight picture. We talked about what it would do for all pistol events and how to do the lifts differently for the different events.
sorry for hijacking thread, here goes some offtopic:
He is an amazing person(-ality). I wanted some training tips and what did he gave me? Gives tips on olympic-level training.
Do 15000 lifts in a month. As soon as you have a break at work, do lifts or dryfire. Make sure to train atleast a couple hours everyday.

In terms of advice for making the national team; Just be the best, then everyone will want to follow you.
Its that easy :)

And perhaps my favorite: Listen to coaches for the fundamentals, but find what suits you and master it. You have to do your thing the best of all!

Thank you DanielSwe, that's good to hear. I'll give a try at lifting ~500 times a day and establishing a good sight alignment, see how long I last and what it does for my shooting. And I've read this again and again, that the best in any given field tend usually, if not always, to be the most generous with their knowledge. I try to emulate that in my work, sharing information with my clients where most others in my field tend towards secrecy and mystery. The best workers, athletes, whatever, have nothing to fear from sharing their knowledge. Skanåker is obviously in a class by himself, a legend among shooters, and it's good to see he further proves this with his healthy attitude about sharing.

Daniel SWE,

Thank you for sharing your wonderful experience. 1500 lifts in a month? PSHEW :-). Will have to carry my air pistol to work to do that.


Regards,

Dev

Dev wrote:1500 lifts in a month? PSHEW :-). Will have to carry my air pistol to work to do that.

50 lifts a day? I wouldn't describe that as onerous, far from it.

That should have been 500/day, if 15,000/month. Bit of a typo on Dev's part I think.

Gerard wrote:That should have been 500/day, if 15,000/month. Bit of a typo on Dev's part I think.

That's more reasonable.

Yes that was a typo on my part. Though a hundred to two hundred lifts a day are within the doable area.

Warm Regards,

Dev

P.S. I really would like to do five hundred lifts in a day, just to know how it feels, will do it next month when I have spare hours.

Dev wrote:Yes that was a typo on my part. Though a hundred to two hundred lifts a day are within the doable area.

Warm Regards,

Dev

P.S. I really would like to do five hundred lifts in a day, just to know how it feels, will do it next month when I have spare hours.

1 it doesn't have to be all in one session - 5 to 10 sessions
2 what ever you do with one arm (i.e. lifts), you should also do with the other arm
3 next month? what's stopping you from starting tomorrow with 50 lifts and working up from there?

500 lifts in a day doesn't sound to bad if you just remember to do them.
When I was more active a couple of years ago, I often shot more than 150 shots in an evening sesson. Normally not much more than an hour.
That's about two shots a minute. If you're in good shape, that's no big thing. It may invite sloppy shooting, but that's another discussion.

Triple that and spread it over the day, it just takes a bit of time.........

Who says?
A 62 year old office clerk who used to be in much better shape twenty years ago.

No, I'll admit I probably won't bother.
Other things are more fun, I'll rather try to figure out how to train smart.
I realize that may mean I won't become a champion.
I'll just put the blame on my age :-)

And BTW my bad shots have something to do with psychology.
If I get them sorted out, it will raise my score quite a bit!
More dry fire might help here.........