March/April 2009 - New Zealand Clay Target Association

MENTAL TRAINING
PractiSe
by Michael J. Keyes, M.D.
I was listening to a musician talk about practise on the radio
the other day and he brought up a good point: “When you
practise, you have to face yourself and deal with the pain.”
What he meant, of course, is if you want your practise to mean
anything, you have to be honest and realistic. Practise is not
meant to be fun.
There are plenty of reasons to practise. Most shooters have a
natural ability to hit targets. We call this the “talent level,” but
shooting in competition is not a natural endeavour. Shotgun
shooting is a distillation of the normal ability to hit a moving
target that places demands on the shooter hunting or plinking
do not. One of these is the need to be perfect.
On the hunting field, we don’t usually count the number of
shots we take to down birds (unless there is money involved,
of course, and then it becomes a competition). We are there
to have a good time, be outdoors and commune with nature,
which is the essence of hunting. It is different when we pay
money to shoot clay targets in order to win a prize.
We practise so we can win, and to win we have to have a plan
and a direction to travel. Practise is serious business.
To practise well, you have to determine what is the most efficient
way to go about the task and then have to do the practise.
Every elite-level shooter practises that way, while the rest of us
tend to not really practise. Instead, we want to have fun.
There is nothing wrong with having fun. If you ask those elite
shooters if they are enjoying their practise rounds, they will
tell you they are having fun. The reason they are having fun
is they are convinced they are going to win, and one of the
reasons they think that is they practise harder and better than
99% of all the other shooters.
“Easy” Ed Macauley used to say, “When you are not practising,
remember, someone somewhere is practising and, when you
meet him, he will win.” Elite-level shooters know talent is
trumped by hard work. And that hard work involves a large
dose of reality.
The problem with having fun at practise is, while you are
having fun, you are not looking at your weak spots. Instead,
you are ignoring anything that might cause you to feel bad
about yourself or your game. In this case, having fun is a
recipe for disaster if you intend to improve. You don’t really
want to look at what your problems are and then fix them. You
would rather shoot a round of (insert shotgun game) with your
friends and enjoy the day.
If you have been reading this column on a regular basis, you
will know I advocate an organised approach to shooting, and
especially to practise. Each practise session should have an
immediate goal based on a recent analysis of your game and
should fit in with your overall goals, resulting in improvement.
Every time you shoot in practise, you should attempt to solve a
problem in your game. You have to have a ruthlessly accurate
idea of where you stand and where you are going to do this.
That means looking at your failures and admitting to yourself
you are not perfect. A lot of us have a very hard time with
this.
Elite-level shooters analyze their faults on a regular basis.
They are aware perfection is a moving target, and they have
to keep at a peak when they shoot in important matches if
they want to win. Part of this focus is to acknowledge there
are weak areas in their game that have to be improved and
strong areas that can be exploited. Any problems have to be
solved by eliminating them. At this level, it usually only takes
a short time to resolve the issue because they have done it so
many times in the past.
Beginning and intermediate shooters have a different set of
problems. They are not perfect, not even close, and have
multiple technical, physical and mental issues, most they are
not even aware of. Technical skills are usually the focus of
their practise.
One advantage a beginning or intermediate shooter has is
they know they need improvement and can follow standard
and obvious practise patterns, such as shooting so many
shots at each station of a ‘skeet field’ while learning the proper
setup, lead and follow-through. Coaches, books and friends
can guide them (meaning, they can point out the mistakes
and prescribe cures) and usually put the shooter on the right
path. All the shooter has to do is accept they need this kind of
help and practise to minimize the bad stuff while enhancing
the good stuff.
Of course, that is a lot harder than it sounds. It is hard to
accept you are not perfect. It hurts to realise you are a failure
in any respect if you are the typical perfectionist workaholic
that tends to become a competitor. But it is necessary if you
want to advance to the top. Accepting this is Step One in
practising.
Step Two is to practise well. Learning to practise is an art in
itself. You would think just going out and shooting 200 rounds
focusing on some aspect of your shooting would be enough.
But practise is about information processing. You have to take
a number of related concepts and form them into a functioning
whole that will prove itself in a match.
There are some things about a match you cannot duplicate in
practise (match stress, for one), yet you have to devise a way
to overcome the obstacles anyway. Fortunately, your brain
is capable of making the connections in a way that allows
you to improve even with incomplete information. Ideally,
you should be able to go to a tournament, deal with match
pressure and automatically shoot your shots to the best of
your current ability. You should shoot with confidence and
not be surprised by anything that occurs at the match. Your
performance should be a reflection of your performance in
practise. If it isn’t, you are not practising as well as you can.
We all know shooters who shoot much better in practise than
matches. Something is clearly wrong with this picture, but the
shooter usually can’t tell you what is wrong. I will venture to
say anyone who is finding himself with this problem is not
practising to overcome it. Instead, they are expecting to do
well because they have the technical skill or talent and believe
they will succeed without having to put in the work required
to perform well in a match. They refuse to look at their
deficiencies, especially those aspects of mental toughness
lacking in their game. It is not that they cannot develop
these qualities, they are just not willing to do the mental and
emotional work needed to make sure they have the confidence
to succeed under match pressure.
The brain is capable of overcoming any of these obstacles. All
it takes is making the right choices and hard work. The work
part is essential because you have to push yourself in order to
change. Most of us can’t do something once and be an expert
at it forever after; we have to dissect it mentally, put in the
time doing the physical part and then sleep on it.
Practise demands hard work, but it also requires rest time for
the brain to process and integrate the information to make it
a complete concept that can be brought into use in a match.
Gunshot 44