All sports have three training components that need to be developed if you want to be successful: technical training, fitness training, and mental training. Of the three, the latter is the least understood and the least practiced in spite of the fact that at the upper levels of any sport, mental toughness is an absolute.
Mental training is not that hard to understand. In fact of the three essential types of training, mental training is the most familiar to most of us. We just don’t realize it most of the time because, frankly, it is treated as an arcane fraternity secret instead of the common sense that it really is. The primary purpose of mental training is to help the shooter deal with match stress, but it also has components of analysis and planning which help guide the other two training modes. In the beginning it uses everyday tools such as daydreaming (visualization), relaxation, and self talk to help the shooter improve his or her skills and to deal with the always present match stress. There is a strong theoretical and practical database of techniques backed by hard science available to everyone who is willing to work hard and listen.
Like the other two basic types of training, mental techniques only work if practiced and incorporated into a shooting regimen. None of these methods work automatically and, while some shooters are more talented than others, they have to be repeated both in practice and on the range. You can’t expect to be able to deal with match pressure by reading a book (or this wiki) any more than you are able to shoot tens by just watching a shooting video. Even the most talented shooters will never be able to advance unless they put in the work. All shooters are not created equal and all shooters advance according to their innate gifts (talent) and the amount of work they can put in. As each shooter improves, the demands of mental training change. Elite level shooters are more than capable of determining what needs to be done in order to combat match stress. Beginners are more worried about the technical aspects of shooting and need to develop all three training components. As you advance up the ladder, you become more efficient and more consistent. This means that mental training and mental toughness become more important. At the highest levels the ability to score tens is taken for granted and perfection becomes the goal. This is especially true of shoot-off situations when the stress reaches immense proportions. Let’s look at some basic concepts:
Match Stress
Everyone, and I mean everyone, is subject to match stress. It is a natural state for anyone who is a perfectionist and a workaholic (which describes 100 percent of elite shooters) who is in a situation in which perfection is expected and the means for determining that perfection is public. Psychologists call it “Performance Anxiety” but it is just the well known “Fight or Flight” reaction to danger. It is hard wired into us. The events are well known: when danger is perceived, the body gears up to either run or fight. A whole series of physiological events occur including increased muscle tension, sharper sight, heightened alertness, a general flexing of the body, increased heart rate, and a massive outpouring of adrenaline. The result is that the body becomes literally “up tight” and ready to go.
The problem for shooters (and many other athletes) is that shooting is an extension sport that requires total relaxation of all muscles not involved in shooting, a slow heart rate, concentration on one spot, and absolute stillness (or at least a minimum of excessive motion.) If you add in a sense of foreboding and anxiety generated by the fight or flight response when you really need confidence and calm, you can see the problem. Match stress also has a strong psychological component which automatically causes thoughts of failure and fear. These are natural consequences of the situation and for the most part are useful. If a large creature is bearing down on you, you should be worried but if the fear is more social in nature, the way performance anxiety is, then you are justified in finding ways to counteract the normal response. That is what mental training is all about.
Basic Techniques
Relaxation
There is over seventy years of scientific research into the subject of relaxation and probably thousands of years of practice. Relaxation is the basic tool for mental training. If you don’t have the capacity to relax, you will never be a good shooter. It is as simple as that. Relaxation techniques vary, but the most practical are all muscle and breathing related. The most common is Progressive Muscle Relaxation which not only gives you an efficient way to relax but also allows you to analyze the state of your relaxation. If you are able to master this technique (and it is not very hard, you just have to practice it) you will be able to give yourself early warning if you start to tense up before or during a match. As you develop, you will become more aware of how match stress is affecting you physically and mentally because you will recognize the early signs and apply countermeasures.
Relaxation is also the first step in many of the visualization methods you will employ on practice and in matches that will allow you to shoot to your practice scores and possibly better. Relaxed muscles mean that you are quicker and more precise since the tremor that occurs when opposite muscle groups are tense at the same time is not present or at a minimum. Relaxation can also induce a feeling of well being, possibly due to endorphins, that boosts confidence and can lead to a Flow State or “Being in the Zone.”.
Visualization
There are actually several types of visualization, but most sports psychologists tend to lump them together. The most common type is Mental Rehearsal which is mentally going over the shooting action incorporating all the senses and adding as much detail as possible. Shooters use this to prime themselves for a shot and as an aid to concentration. There is some evidence that visualization helps a shooter who already has good technique become more efficient when it is used off range while relaxing at home or in the office. Visualization does not help as much if you don’t have good technique and it is not a substitute for practicing your shooting. You still have to put rounds downrange but the more experience you have, the more likely it will help you improve that technique using mental rehearsal.
Mental rehearsal is always preceded by relaxation. First you relax with a deep breath in and out and then you visualize. After a while it becomes part of your shooting routine and adds to the consistency you are striving for.
Another technique is Imagery. Imagery is using your imagination to evoke a positive image to help you combat the emotional aspects of match stress. In this case the images don’t have to be a literal rehearsal of the shot, all they have to do is be something that allows you to have a positive emotion that takes the place of anxiety or fear for the short period of time that you need it. As a result, most images are very personal and don’t transfer very well from one shooter to the other the way mental rehearsal does. As you develop an arsenal of images, you will find that they come in very handy when you start to recognize the effects of match stress.
Self Talk
Cognitive techniques are well known in the mental health field where they are used to counteract automatic Self Defeating Thoughts that come with such conditions as depression and anxiety. Match stress can also cause these types of thoughts (“Can I do it today?”) and learning to recognize and deal with this predictable problem is the bailiwick of Self Talk. Basically you are lying to yourself for a minute or so in order to avoid the often disastrous consequences of anxiety and error. The idea is to let you live in the moment and not in the future or the past so you can deal with what is right in front of you instead of letting the worry induced by these negative thoughts get to you. If you are able to recognize that you are having negative thoughts (which is the first step in self talk) then you will have already developed in practice a way to deal with them. Again, relaxation is essential to help lower the effect of anxiety and to make you feel better physically and mentally allowing the self talk to work.
Intermediate Techiques
Plan B
Anxiety can still get to you no matter how hard you practice and no matter how much you anticipate it. As a result, you need to develop an arsenal of Plan B alternatives which help you isolate those near overwhelming feelings and just shoot in the moment.. One of the best is called the One Shot Match.
The One Shot Match is a way of looking at your shooting as a series of single shots instead of a series of related shots. The idea is to try and eliminate all the past and future shots and concentrate only on the one shot facing you as if it were a single match. You might think that this would put even more pressure on you, but by telling yourself that you are eliminating the past and future, you give yourself permission to shoot and forget. At least that is the theory.
Another common Plan B is the Technical Shot. Match stress tends to get shooters out of rhythm and when that happens, doubts about ability come up. At this point you can revert back to what you do in practice, work on technique alone and forget about the pace and flow of the match. This means concentrating on the technical aspects of the shot rather than letting it just occur as you concentrate on the front sight. It helps to refocus a little and forces you to concentrate more and worry less.
You have to practice these techniques in order to make them work. Basically they are alternatives to your normal ritual and are to be used when the usual doesn’t work well. Most of the time you only have to make a few shots that way until you calm down again and the likelihood is that you will shoot within your practice average.
Learning to Concentrate
You would think that all shooters should be able to concentrate right off the bat, but you would be wrong. Novice shooters have enough on their plate learning the techniques, rules and how to act in a match. Focused concentration in a match is a learned skill and one best tackled after you have some basic techniques under your belt.
The reason for this is simple, if you don’t have any technique, what do you concentrate on? Shooting skills can be broken down into a number of connected actions. But as most of you know, if you try to keep them all together and in sequence, you will lose your place and your match performance will suffer. This is what happens to beginners.
I attended a Class A school in Germany a number of years ago in which a researcher stated that most shooters can only keep three thoughts in their head at one time while shooting (seven for elite shooters) and that any more than that caused shots to go astray. His reasoning from his research was that a shooter should try to develop only one thought, concentrating on the front sight while the training took over and made the shot. While this is usually hard to do (a lot of people concentrate on trigger technique at the same time) it is something you can develop in practice. This may sound like a technical skill, but it is really a mental skill since you already know what you have to do to make a good shot, the doing is the hard part. No matter what shooting game you try, there is a prime sight focus. Shotgunners look at the target, rifle and pistol shooters look at the front sight, combat shooters often focus on the target at short ranges. Your body, used to hours of technical training, should make the shot as you focus down on the sight picture. At least that is the hope. If you don’t have the technical hours in, you will not have the ability to concentrate well because you will have to guide your body at the same time as you work on the front sights.
Developing Rhythm
All shooting matches have rhythm. In fact there are several rhythms present including the Shot Cycle and Concentration Cycle. The first is a short term internal skill and the other is more of a management skill that preserves your fitness and allows you to relax and focus alternatively throughout a match.
The shot cycle is well known to most shooters. It consists of gathering all of your skills to take a shot and usually begins with taking a deep breath and releasing it to relax, positioning yourself for the shot, and visualizing what you will do. More breaths are taken in order for you to relax into your most efficient position and as you concentrate on your front sight a number of physiological changes take place including your heart rate slowing down. The shot cycle has a limited time in which to work and if that time is exceeded, your shot will not be good (even if it is a ten, your performance will not be good.) Technical skill and mental skill meld at this point as you are trying to make a good shot within your capabilities and if you don’t have the mental capacity to know when to pull out of the cycle, you will not perform well. You have to practice your shooting cycle with all the technical and mental elements in place. This is not the same thing as developing a good technique. They are two different things.
The concentration cycle is more of a management issue. Matches take place over a specific period and most people cannot stay in a concentrated mode the entire time. In addition most shooters don’t have the fitness levels to be in a shooting mode that long. You have to develop a sense of how much you can do and still be performing well. Good performance and not good scores is the secret to successful shooting. If you are able to develop a way of only shooting when your performance skills are there, you will continue to improve, especially when your technical and fitness level rise. Various studies show that most shooters tend to go in and out of concentration modes. Some of this specific to the shooter’s talent level and some of this is developed in practice. Learning to concentrate when you need it and to relax away from the intensity is a good way to help defeat match stress.
Shooting the Critical Shots
Most of the time the two hardest shots are the first shot and the final shot. The first shot is hard because you have not shown yourself what you can do at that given time even though you know your match average and your capabilities. If you have good basic mental skills, you can start developing a more advance technique to help you with the first shot. This is another time when what helps one person may not help another because of the varied responses people have to stress. A common way to work on the first shot is to use your sighting shots as a method of relaxation. If you can call your shots and get into your shooting rhythm before the first shot, you should be able to overcome the initial apprehension. Match pressure is usually at its worst at this point. You need to make sure that you have all the advantages you can muster and the way to do this is to develop your own method using all three of the basic mental techniques.
The last shot is often very hard because of the tendency to keep score in your head. We all know that we are not supposed to do this, but as we get better, it is easier to keep score in your head by counting the misses. Ideally you should just shoot until you run out of targets and be surprised at the end. Of course this is a rare event at the intermediate level so you have to work on making the last shot “just one more shot.” Again, there are ways to deal with this particular stress. If you are able to establish a good shooting cycle, you can learn to abort it according to your regular standards (too much time, increased tremor, etc.) and not just take a last shot to get rid of it or to use prayer as a method of getting tens. Your shooting cycle should deal with this and if not, try Plan B. If you have a consistent problem with the last shot, you need to practice shooting it and using all of your mental skills to work on the problem.
Advanced Skills
Dealing with Shoot-offs
At advanced levels, shoot-offs are an occupational hazard. They are nasty little events that some shooters love and others loathe. They can make you or break you. But to be successful you have to learn to embrace the shoot-off.
Each person has a specific response to shoot-offs. Some shooters are very aggressive naturally and want to dive into the challenge. Since at this level it is not a matter of knowing how to shoot tens, it becomes more of a emotional management issue. The trick is to minimize your weak points and stress your strong points. By that I mean you really have to know yourself and how your respond it these situations. This is where a shooting diary and a coach really come in handy. If you are unable to tolerate shoot-offs you will do poorly. In this case, you need as much help as you can get until you are mentally tough enough to win a shoot-off.
At the elite level high technical skill and fitness are taken as a given. You have to have develop confidence in yourself and your abilities to be a winner and winning is what it is all about. The best way to win shoot-offs is to lose a few at first and then figure out what you have to do. Any shooter capable of getting to a shoot-off should be able to shoot a maximum score. The rest is up to the capabilities of the other shooters.
Perfection
Being an elite shooter is all about being perfect. The technical and fitness skills are there but the shooter also has to be consistent, accurate and precise. If any of those qualities are missing, then perfection is not reachable. A perfect performance does not mean a perfect score, but it can come close. At this level any error can cause havoc with score and more importantly with performance. Learning to live in the moment while keeping perfection as a standard is hard to do but can be achieved by a highly talented motivated shooter who puts in the time. Only a few are able to achieve this level. Achieving perfection requires developing efficient technical skills, having great specific fitness and having bullet-proof mental toughness. You have to be able to concentrate fully, have absolute confidence in your skills, and an encyclopedic knowledge of what your are doing. Shooters at this level usually have an average of fifteen to twenty years of development often starting in early adolescence or childhood. The difference is in the application of mental skills.
Final Word
Practice
All mental training techniques have to be practiced or they will not work. You can practice them at home, on the practice range, and in matches. The latter is very important because you are more likely to run into the problems you want to deal with in a match than anywhere else. While your life may be a soap opera leading to a lot of anxiety, most people try to avoid living like that. Matches are the best place to try out the methods you have been practicing and the best place to see if they work.
If you have a coach, he or she can help by guiding your performance and applying pressure in practice to help you adapt to the match situation. Most match situations are very predictable and you should be able to develop a set of basic tools by combining the three techniques mentioned above and applying a little common sense. You should never be in a situation that you did not anticipate and if you are, you should prepare to deal with it the next time.
