Shotgun Sports

Shotgun Sports – 2021 October The Bartholow Brothers, Foster and Matt, give their suggestions this month on stance in trapshooting. Comfort is the main idea with other ideas that are universal to all shotgunning. Stand to allow your body fluid motion. They are believers in a whole-body swing from ankles up. The real cr ux of this is to move your shoulder and gun to the target using your whole body. With the gun in a fixed place on your shoulder and your head in tandem with this you use your whole body to move the body, head, and shoulder in the direction of the target. Move your nose to the target with the gun and shoulder moving all together. Feet should be shoulder width apart and keep your arms locked in position with the gun and shoulder. The swing should always be one smooth move with no acceleration at the beginning or the end. One smooth move. As to how you should face the trap from any Post, stand so that you can get to the right or left target on each Post with the same ease. Things to note as you swing, do your knees break down when you swing in one direction over another on the Post, does your face come off the gun as you swing, is your swing one consistent speed. Any problem here can be fixed by adjusting your stance.

We learn by making mistakes then making corrections that are permanent in nature. Michael J. Keyes, M.D. gives suggestions this month on making those corrections permanent. He tells us to use a “learning adaptive” schedule to fix our mistakes. Learn and practice basics to solidify our skills level. Next, we push those skills to their upper limits but not beyond. Once this is established, start practicing random sets of challenges to see how your skills are working. These challenges, when we fail, are then worked on using our fundamental skill knowledge until they’re conquered. On conquering a challenge, move on to another target presentation. This builds knowledge and skill rather than attempting too many challenging targets at random without going back to the basics. In skeet we conquer the incoming targets first, learning good basics along the way. Next work on the outgoers, High 2 for example. Conquer this first before wasting time on High 3 or 4. Conquer one thing at a time learning or improving on your basic set. Hope that makes sense. Learning and adding to your skill set puts context into your shooting and makes adding new targets to your skills set easier and makes the learning permanent. This month’s issue has a nice write-up on the Olympic team and their stellar shooting at this year’s games. Also included is an interview with Joe Fanizzi about his Silver Medal performance at the World FITASC championships. Both are a