Muscle Memory II -- Position

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  • #31
    You can see what works and what doesn't with new shooters. During BoomerShoot in 2011, I had a young girl student to coach who had never shot past 100yds before, and had very limited shooting experience. I had talked with LR1955 about how I could make the shooting fundamentals into a type of acronym that would be easy to use and sequence, and he asked me how many things can you focus on at once? He asked what's going on with your position when you have a perfect sight picture. What's going on with your breathing when you have a perfect sight picture? Trigger squeeze?

    As he explained that, I realized that what he was describing was what was going on with me when I had my best performance...I was only focused on as perfect a sight picture as possible when the shot broke. If I was worrying about anything else, my performance deteriorated, and this goes for pistols, carbine, long-range rifles, or bows.

    So this is what I passed on to the teenage girl during the rifle clinic, who then proceeded to swing the 10" plate with flag at 700yds repeatedly like it was fun or something. She was using an old Swedish Mauser, that had been turned into a target rifle with a heavy barrel. She was shooting some old, corroded Swedish military ammo, where you could literally see the corrosion on the cases and projectiles.

    This year, I coached another teenage kid who wanted to join the Marines. By the half-time of the first day, he was hitting the 10" plate with the swinging flag at 700yds repeatedly, like it was easy and boring. He literally got bored of making hit after hit, and looked at me like I was some kind of idiot when I was trying to get on steel at 600yds (using 500yd dope mistakenly). I think he literally thought that I was a blithering moron for not being able to mirror what he was doing.

    There is definitely something to be said for "...maintaining a good sight picture throughout the process of taking the shot". I'm sold on it. It was what I had done since I was a kid when I had as exact POI to POA as possible, but I just had never heard it discussed in this manner in any formal training. The muscle memory exercise to take away from this is the muscle in your head.

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