SHOTGUN SPORTS

Shotgun Sports – 2021 July There are two articles this month on hearing protection for the shooting sports. Lowell Strauss provides one in this issue and Garr y Gordon wrote one for the latest issue of TrapShootingUSA. Both provide good explanations of the impact of shooting on your ears. Mr. Strauss provides a listing of several manufacturers and their products. Dr. Gordon’s has an in-depth guide on questions to ask when purchasing your protection.

———————— Mental training is a skill and requires focused practice. Michael J. Keyes, M.D. asks the question this month, how do we quantify our mental training? Using score to quantify your mental skills is fraught with problems. How can you compare scores when one may be from an event where you were trying out a new skill? Obviously, this score would have nothing to do with your mental state and more to do with improving your technique. It also doesn’t account for the fact that time and practice will improve your technique, becoming better as an eventuality with little to do with mental training. So how do we use score to measure our mental game progress? Michael suggests using a moving average as a guide to measuring performance. Take the average of the last ten matches you have shot and start tracking your average. After the next shoot drop the oldest score and recalculate your average. This is a more realistic way to track if you are showing improvement. In this way you calculate a new average after only your last ten tournaments. This assumes quite a wide range of assumptions: consistent and timely entering of tournaments, consistent practice sessions, and focused mental practice sessions.

There are so many things you can do to improve your mental training. You can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of techniques. You can follow the Lanny Bassham school where you work on your selfesteem, the visualization and “In the Zone” teaching of Bob Palmer and Dawn Grant, or the process-oriented training of John Shima. Whether you choose one school of thought or if you steal a little from each one, you need to devote time to focused practice for your mental game. Tracking practice time is also good if simply to remind yourself when you last devoted time to your mental game.