Shooting Exercises

Citizen_Erased

Hi all,

Long time since I've posted on here, mostly as I moved to the North to go to Uni. The problem with that is my rifles are back home and I rarely am at the minute. Annoyingly I can feel my accuracy dropping everytime I do get a weekend back home. So my question is if anyone has a specific set of exercises or routines that can help with shooting skills in the absence of an actual rifle ? I had imagined maybe buying a BB gun of sorts and putting one of my scopes on it simply to hold cross hairs on a target. Or does anyone know the likes of something you could do during a normal day (bar running around with my finger pointed and shouting pew pew at my office colleagues )


Cheers all,

Thomas

It wasn't me!

You can train inside your own head if you're familiar enough with your own kit. Think about the timing of squeezing the trigger and breathing, pressure in your shoulder, following through and so forth. If you set aside some time to sit with your eyes closed, relax and visualising, you'll find maintaining your skillset much easier. May sound ridiculous, but it works.

Sparks

What kind of shooting C_E? Shotgun? Rifle? Pistol? Standing? Kneeling? Prone?

Citizen_Erased

You can train inside your own head if you're familiar enough with your own kit. Think about the timing of squeezing the trigger and breathing, pressure in your shoulder, following through and so forth. If you set aside some time to sit with your eyes closed, relax and visualising, you'll find maintaining your skillset much easier. May sound ridiculous, but it works.

Thanks for the tips, I'll certainly give that a go - I would imagine before going to sleep could easily fit this in

Sparks - It would be rifle shooting , mostly prone and kneeling as, although targets is all I get time for these days, I try to work towards abilities I would apply more when hunting.

Sparks

Sounds like mental training would be more useful to you so C_E; the kind of thing you'd do for target shooting exercises wouldn't be that useful from the hunting point of view at all. IWM's ideas are spot on for that sort of thing.

Citizen_Erased

Thanks sparks

Just out of curiosity what sort of exercises do target shooters do, I've heard before of all the stretching sort of relaxing stuff they would do during shooting ? Any recommended reads ?

It wasn't me!

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

Thanks sparks

Just out of curiosity what sort of exercises do target shooters do, I've heard before of all the stretching sort of relaxing stuff they would do during shooting ? Any recommended reads ?

Stretch well before shooting (Something I really need to start doing consistently). In terms of keeping fit, I run, do daily exercise like press-ups and core strength work and go to the gym as often as I get a chance (Not often enough - final year and dissertation is eating my time horribly). Exercises while actually shooting or to improve shooting performance? Well, being fit and in good muscular shape isn't a bad idea. Not that you should be bulking up, but having muscles used to being used means they don't suffer as much and recover better and you're more consistent. I do autogenic relaxation stuff in position if I feel I'm getting tense or anything, focusing on tightening and relaxing isolated muscle groups to control overall and specific tension. I do a good bit of mental visualisation training like I described to you there, thinking about timing, breathing, shot release, the feel of the position and balance. Lots of dry-firing is important too, need to develop muscle memory alongside the intellectual familiarity with the routine.

In short, keep in good nick, shoot lots, think about shooting lots. Seems to work okay here! In terms of reading material, the best I've found on actual technical shooting is Ways of the Rifle. If you want to work on perfecting yourself as a performer, Mental Training in Shooting by Pensgaard and Jeppesen, and if you want to improve your mental performance under pressure and turn your skillset into wins and medals, Bassham's works, Mental Management for Shooting Sports and With Winning in Mind are excellent. Mental Training in Shooting has some really interesting stuff, particularly on developing key words and triggers to calm yourself and deal with immediate pressure and banish doubts and concerns.

Sparks

Citizen_Erased wrote: »

Thanks sparks
Just out of curiosity what sort of exercises do target shooters do, I've heard before of all the stretching sort of relaxing stuff they would do during shooting ? Any recommended reads ?

Physical exercises? The general fitness stuff (core work especially, and back strength emphasised even amongst that) that IWM outlined is very good indeed (you see precious few shooters carrying excess weight on an international firing line), but the more specific exercises would be to do with flexibility, stability and balance. Arabesques are good, wobble boards are good, standing on a swiss ball is good (but that one's a bit advanced ). It doesn't work for everyone, but martial arts of one form or another help a lot of people because of the mix of mental focus and balance they emphasise; and again, it doesn't work for everyone, but meditation helps a lot of folks with the mental side of things.

Personally, I have an old wooden rifle stock with a roll of roofing lead to give it the same weight as my rifle; I stand holding it watching my balance as a daily exercise when I'm training. Sometimes just in street clothes, sometimes barefoot, sometimes while standing on balance bags (sortof like wobble boards, they're flat circular airbags about 1.5 inches thick and a foot across).

For flexibility, I generally just do the kind of stretches we used to do in aikido for warmup along with some from yoga. This was my normal gym routine, though I wound down on the physical training when I wound up the technical training over the last six months - there's only so much time you have unfortunately.

The important thing is to not push it - the kind of physical training you need as a shooter is not the same as you need as a weightlifter. We use smaller muscle groups, under finer control; building up muscle mass is a bad idea for our sport. You want to work on core strength, stability, balance, control and flexibility, and all those things take time. A little bit every day, never pushing too far. Believe me, you do *not* want to do this too aggressively, the sight and sound of your knee hyperextending out of the joint stays with you

Citizen_Erased

Cheers guys, plenty there to think about to keep me going

Actually I have pretty much been bulking up consistently since I came to uni for various sports - might have something to do with the diminishing shooting abilities. Might join the lady friend at one of her yoga type classes, work more on the focus and control instead

Also I definitely agree with what was mentioned in the blog, sparks - graphs are a top notch motivator like no other !