Human Factors

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for all your messages about this series. In part one, we looked at how food and sleep can affect the way you shoot, and in part two, how medication can affect your shooting. This month, we are looking at the brain as a whole, and some of the traps that we can all fall into. 

The first thing we need to do is work out is what sort of shooter/person you are. Are you the kind of person who looks out of the window, sees a windy and rainy day and says, ‘Stuff that, I’m staying home, watching Wheeler Dealers and having a bacon sandwich’? This sort of person we will call ‘a Gary’ – yes, that is 100% me. The second type of shooter will look at the same conditions and think, ‘Now is the time to shoot’, and this is the sort of person that we need to be. 

So, there is a reason that we all like to shoot on a warm and windless day – it’s because we know we will do well because it’s nice and easy, and it’s also why some shooters favour clubs that put on easier courses, or stick to the same type of ground. Now, there is nothing wrong with that; if you get enjoyment from shooting in the warm and dry then more power to your elbow. As long as you are shooting and happy, that’s all that matters, but if we want to improve our shooting, we must challenge ourselves. 

TAKING IT EASY 

The reason we like to shoot a nice easy course and get a good score is dopamine, the chemical that the brain produces when we do something that makes us feel good. It is also the chemical that controls sleep, memory, mood and concentration, and when we are doing something we enjoy, the brain gets flooded with it. However, when we rock up at an event and we see the high wind, when we are getting cold and wet and we start to miss targets, then the brain starts to produce cortisol – the stress hormone. This can cause the brain and the body to produce adrenalin, and muscles to tighten up, and when you start to get angry, you will definitely start to miss targets. 

So, is there trick to prevent this, and why is it important to train when we don’t want to train? Well, it all comes down to a matter of will. We mainly want to shoot for pleasure, but I am well aware that many shooters out there have permissions and have to shoot to clear rats and rabbits for farmers, and you guys don’t have a choice, but for the competition shooter and the hobby shooter, we can choose when and where, so I have recently been planning my days around the wind. I check the BBC weather, pick a day that has a decent wind forecast and then plan my day. I know it will be a hard day to shoot, but I go with a plan to learn something and this is where preparation comes in. 

VITAL PREP 

There is absolutely no point in training if you are not 100% sure that your gun is zeroed and ready to go, if you turn up on a windy day, you will not be able to trust the information you get. So, this is what I am doing this week. Yesterday was a virtually windless day, so I checked my zero, checked left and right from 8 to 45 yards and the rifle was bang on; then I checked all my aim points and these were slightly out, so one click of elevation and everything was good; I checked my power and the rifle was running at 785fps, so I now knew that all my kit was correct and ready to go. 

Tomorrow, there will be a windy day at Maldon and my plan is to shoot targets low, medium and high and see how elevation with the same wind direction affects the pellet. To do this, I need either to find a clean target, or get one sprayed, so I have got permission to spray some targets in the woods, and I’ll be shooting each target multiple times until I can kill it consistently. 

My plan on something like a elevated 40-yard, 25mm target is approach, check the trees, drop some leaves and try to find consistency that I can recognise. Look for branches that are a certain thickness and see how much they bend, then shoot and see where my pellet lands and write it down. This is the most important thing, keep track of what you are doing, shoot, shoot, and shoot again and write down what you learn. 

If you kill the target, did you hit it in the centre of the kill zone? Were you on the left or the right, up or down? You might kill a 35mm by aiming at the centre, but you can miss by 17mm left or right and still get a kill. 

PRACTICE IS KEY 

I know that I’m a total hypocrite sometimes. I sit here and tell you, to practise the things you are bad at and I am the world’s worst at doing that, but I have found a small trick that is starting to help me, especially with my free-standers and free-kneelers. I hate practising those because I’m rubbish at them; I shoot, miss, get annoyed and want to give up – that’s the cortisol – so I have got myself a 35mm target. In competition, the odds on me killing that as a free-stander is about 1 in 5, and the kneeler is about 1 in 3, so I’ve been training by shooting it at 20 yards and I can now kill it kneeling almost all the time – standing it’s now about 1 in 4. This makes me want to practise more. So, when I have got to the point where I can almost always kill the targets at 20 yards, I will push it out to 23 yards then 26 and so on. 

ONE STEP AT A TIME 

Taking small steps is important. Don’t just bung a small target out at long distance and think that’s a good way to train – it’s not. You need to build up muscle memory between the brain and the trigger finger so that when you see the crosshairs in the correct position on the target, the instinct to pull the trigger is almost automatic 

Part three of this human factors series is boiled down to this – practise what you are bad at and expect to miss, but adjust the way you shoot until you are killing the target consistently and then drill that until it becomes second nature. Learn to enjoy the journey, shoot hard courses and most importantly, keep a note of what you miss and what you kill. Look for patterns, and when you find one, work on that.