Mind Games

For the past year or so, I have been fighting what I thought was a flinch: about every fifth shot would land at least an inch below the others. It wasn’t a reaction to the noise and explosion of the gun going off. I’m far beyond being upset by that action, but it was still annoying and more importantly, I couldn’t find out what was causing it.

I did a 25–round Dot Torture drill while waiting for students on Saturday, and one of the easier shots in the drill ended up missing the target at 4 yards, because of this “flinch.“

This time, I was able to isolate the cause. I said to myself “bang!“ before I pressed the trigger. This in turn led to my body reacting to the “bang” rather than the actual firing of the gun. I was preloading the recoil, not because of the actions of the gun, but because of the actions of my mind. What’s worse is, I was only doing that on the easier shots like the two misses on the 4 yard target at the top of this post. The more difficult shots, the strong hand and support hand shots for example, I did pretty well. I’ll need to work on that (bad) habit, but at least I’ve isolated the cause. 

Lesson learned. Let your body react to the actual shot, not the shot in your mind.