Re: 2 basic questions
From some years back:
<span style="font-weight: bold">Out of the Black and into the Grey Area</span>
By Greg Langelius
Black and white, cut and dried, numerically demonstrable fact; lots of things are like that. They tend to be straightforward; simple matters, not complex matters.
Not matters like precision rifle accuracy.
Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the goals we seek are dependent upon consistency, yet the means of achieving them are based on the complex interaction of a large number of factors?
So how is all this achievable with any degree of consistency?
Achieving consistency of the whole is dependent upon maintaining the consistency of the parts. Where parts are beyond control, an understanding of the consequences of their change permits compensation for their variations.
The tangible components of accuracy, the firearm, the ammunition, these are all matters which can be controlled with a satisfactory results.
The environmental components, the atmosphere, the light conditions, are factors over which we exercise no control; ones we must understand as much as possible in order to adjust for their variances.
The other factor, the operator, the <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-style: italic">Thinking Component</span></span>, is both capable of making those compensations, and probably the least reliable component of the system.
Where goals are missed, it is most likely to be the thinking component that failed.
So where do we fail?
The failures will most likely stem from failure to observe or failure to concentrate, or both.
When I was learning to shoot rifles accurately at short to middle ranges; I was actually relearning it for real after several less serious applications of the training. I had learned it as a youth from my older brothers. I had learned it as a Marine Recruit from my Drill Instructors and Primary Marksmanship Instructor. My goals had been to hit that squirrel or ‘Chuck, or to render an enemy combatant a casualty. For this, moderately good marksmanship was required; precision was desirable, but not mandatory.
For the most part, I’d get a reasonable sight picture, pull the trigger and wait for the smoke to clear. If I missed, I'd shoot again.
The consequences of the miss were not significant so long as I remained healthy and there was another round in the magazine. Or, another target would come along soon enough.
Then I began getting involved in shooting competition with other shooters whose skills and equipment were far superior to mine. Now, there was a cost associated with less than stellar performance.
I began to learn and practice positions, breathing, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger control, follow-through, and all those physical and mental factors that make a difference. I began to learn how to make ammunition and test loads for accuracy. I began to learn what made firearms work well and work poorly, and how to tweak them to help my effort.
It’s an awfully large amount of things to pay attention to, most of them all at the same time.
If you try to concentrate on all these things at once, you’ll fail; it’s not humanly possible. I’ll guarantee it. The human mind is incapable of concentrating on many things at once; some will tell you one thing is the limit, some will tell you they can do better than that. Regardless of where that truth lies, is does not encompass concentrating on all of it at once.
Yet we need to use all the skills to reach our goals.
So how can we do this?
We can do it by making most of it learned knowledge, that we apply be means of habit, rather than conscious thought.
When we have it down to the necessary minimums, we can limit or conscious concentration to sight picture and trigger squeeze, and let the trigger squeeze even be a matter for the automatic pilot as well.
The automatic pilot; what a concept!.
The shooter’s autopilot is the mass of learned skills.
It is built one skill at a time, practiced over and over, one skill at a time until it becomes utterly boring, utterly reliable.
My mentor is a great guy named Bill Miller. Bill was a very early Vietnam Marine, a Sea Bee, and recently retired as a CWO4 from the Army Reserves. He has participated at Perry as a service team armorer and as a shooter, and has at least one National Pistol Championship to his credit. He coached our MCL Shooting Team, building its collection of skills up from scratch.
Bill’s methods are sound and simple.
Start from nothing, assume there is nothing there. Teach range safety. Enforce range safety with swift and reliable ferocity. Place targets and tell the shooters to hit them; no training.
Let the shooters get frustrated. Ask them if they want to quit. Let the quitters leave.
Take the rest and ask them if they want to hit those targets after all. Start teaching the basic skills one at a time. Team the shooters in pairs, one shoots, the other observes and coaches, back and forth. Don’t move on until everyone shows some form of improvement in the particular skill. Advancement to the next lesson is dependent on everyone showing improvement. This cements the team, and reinforces the shooter/coach relationship.
One of the key values to this shooter/coach team concept is that by teaching a skill, by having to phrase it and describe it so another can understand it fully, the coach is also forced to understand it fully. At that point, their own learning becomes complete.
Work through the skills until all are taught at least once.
Establish the concept that everyone on the team is an instructor, the Team Coach’s job is to make sure someone in the team knows a particular skill, then direct interested individuals in that direction. The coach is interested in the whole team, the members handle individual cases.
Encourage individual practice. Concentrate on practicing only one skill per practice session.
I’m a wiseguy. I always assume I know better. I’m always wrong.
I assume I can think better than the next guy, that there’s really some secret that the others are missing, and all I need to do is figure it out and do it. Wrong! All that has ever led to has been mounting frustration, wasted ammunition, and wasted time.
There is no substitute for learning and religiously applying the basics. The positions, the skills, the knowledge about ballistics and the roles played by the system’s components; these are all valuable to any shooting discipline.
The thing that makes precision shooting different is that it is all carried to another level; in exactly the same manner as I went through when I started taking competition shooting seriously.
The equipment is refined. The skills are honed. The outside variables are studied and their effects are learned as an integrated factor in the practice process.
The hardest part to perfect is the self discipline. It is the one factor that can defeat a shooter. It is the one reason why some good shooters won’t become precision shooters. They can’t; they are incapable. Not everyone has the proper degree of self-discipline, and those who don’t won’t make it as precision shooters.
What do you do about that? You treat them with kindness, and gently help them on to more rewarding avocations. It’s not as if the thing we do is the only thing there is to do in the entire world; there are other things as well, equally rewarding to some. Where it is easier to quit, those who remain are fewer, but more committed. The others can often constitute an inexpensive source of excellent used gear, assuming they haven’t trashed it in their frustration.
When one commits to the narrow path that leads to excellence, one would do well to pause from time to time and ask oneself if it’s still worth it. This is a totally personal question; only we can decide what works and doesn’t work for ourselves. There’s a lot of stress involved in this discipline. One learns to cope with it, or in failing to do so; one compromises one’s own efforts, and those of others. It’s not just ourselves that succeed or fail by our efforts; there are others depending just as completely on our performance.
The other side of the coin is that we need to understand that perfection; though tempting, is an unrealistic goal. Seeking it simply results in constant frustration. We need to recognize that our goals must be attainable; constant frustration serves no positive purpose.
In everything I do, my goal is to leave the world a little better in my wake. This means that all that is required is some form of improvement resulting from my participation. It need be neither major, nor solely due to my participation. It is the improvement that counts, not the authorship.
It is the selection of attainable goals that sustains the effort to reach that ultimate performance of which we are capable. Is improvement possible? Usually, it is. Is it mandatory? It is, but only if the current performance is unsatisfactory. We improve by our own conscious decision to do so. We find the way. There is nothing wrong with a sustained good performance. Improvement over that is a good thing, but is it beneficial to mandate it? Forcing the adoption of unattainable goals is an inherently destructive policy; regardless of where the demand originates.
Before one demands improvement of oneself or others; it would behoove one to determine whether the goal is attainable. Making a mistake here is not something without serious consequences.
But enough of these esoteric ramblings; we want to know the how, as well as the why.
Well; what’s a basic, and what lends itself to inclusion in the autopilot program?
The things that need to incorporated are the things that are taking place in the moment when the shot is actually being fired. The things that lead to that point don’t need to be in there. They need to be developed to a high level, but once they are applied, the autopilot is what gets the shot on target.
Position stays out of the box; but needs to be understood in order for it to be a positive factor in the good shot. It can be otherwise all too easily.
The good position is based on the natural point of aim; the steady state the body settles into when properly arranged and completely relaxed. On occasion, I have actually gotten into position on the line, and fallen asleep while waiting for the line to be called to attention This is the degree of relaxation I’m talking about. The way we find it is by trial and error. We assume our position down to and including the proper sight picture , breath control and, the start of the trigger take-up. We then close our eyes and take at least three deep breaths, and then totally relax. We release the breath to the natural respiratory pause, and open our eye again. We check the sight picture without moving, and see if we are still exactly on-target, If not we adjust our body toward a better position and try again. It usually takes several tries, but once attained, it can be maintained indefinitely; for hours, if necessary. It helps us to relax and still be fresh and competent when the order finally comes to take the shot. Failing to do this results in fatigue, stress, and discomfort, and impairs our ability to take the shot effectively when the order comes. It does not matter what the target is, it matters mainly that we be able to defeat it whenever the moment comes to do so.
Breathing also stays out of the box. There was mention of the natural respiratory pause. This is part of the natural breathing process. It is the point in the exhalation where the body pauses; air goes neither in nor out for a moment. Further exhalation would require conscious effort. When we pay no attention to our breathing in the natural progress of our daily actions, there often come a short period where this status is achieved and held naturally for some considerable time. We simply forget to breathe.
This is different from intentionally holding one’s breath. When we do that, we fill the lungs, slam our throat shut and hold on for dear life. Soon the pulse is pounding and it’s impossible to hold a steady reticle.
The way to make this work right is to understand the body’s need for breathing; the concept of oxygen debt. The body needs a balance between the amount of oxygen taken in against the demands the current state of activity requires to sustain a metabolic equilibrium. When we exert ourselves, the demand increases. The body takes care of regulating the breathing rate by utilizing the Vegus nerve, located in the neck area, for monitoring the carbon dioxide level in our blood. The system breathes harder when the level rises. It usually lags behind demand. If we don’t breathe enough our muscles weaken, and we get shocky, we tend to want to faint. If we breathe too much, we also tend to get light headed. There is a fair amount of room for error. When we get behind, we are in oxygen debt; when we get ahead, we get a little credit.
We can use this to our advantage. The amount of time the body can remain at respiratory pause, before that voice inside our heads starts screaming, “Gimme some air”, depends on how far we are into either debt or credit. The longer we can, the longer we can forget about breathing and concentrate on taking the shot. Depending on your cardiopulmonary health and aerobic capacity, you may even be able to stretch that pause to a full minute, maybe several minutes. If we start by doing a limited amount of hyperventilation, we get the credit. We learn to limit it to the point just before where we get light-headed. Once done, the natural respiratory pause can be stretched to a useful limit.
So what’s part of the autopilot?
First, the ability to exclude external distractions. Properly done, the mind turns off the external inputs; the hearing, the sense of feeling, of pain. The vision narrows to a tunnel, only the critical portions of the sight picture are consciously noticed. It’s like being in a chair reading when your wife calls you for dinner. She calls it, “Selective Deafness”. She’s absolutely right; whether or not the process is conscious or not. We all have the capacity to do this, it is what the Psychologists call the “Fugue State”. The task we face is to be able to consciously initiate it, then immediately switch to sustaining it as an unconscious process. How do we do this? It begins by believing we can, then finding something to concentrate on. That thing can be anything, the practice can take place anywhere that it’s safe to exclude the external world. Don’t doubt the process, it will happen.
Second, the trigger squeeze can be initiated the same way, then followed through subconsciously with the attention switched to the critical sight picture factors.
If the natural point of aim and breathing were established right, the autopilot needs nothing more to accomplish.
All this takes practice to get to the point where the autopilot becomes effective and reliable. Practice of one skill at a time; until that skill becomes utterly boring and utterly reliable.
Good marksmanship is no accident;
Greg Langelius
