Shooting tips from the pros
Sports Action Skeet Shooting
Shooters, they hide in blinds, obscured by trees and stand silently upright in open fields. From a height of 80 meters, it falls almost in front of you. You briefly see an orange disk before pulling the trigger. Skeet and skeet shooting are emerging from the woods for beginners from all walks of life, thus creating part-time shooters. Another addiction is born. The challenge and fun of following a clay target, only five inches in diameter, has taken corporate executives out of the boardroom and onto the fields. Even golf addicts trade in their 7-iron for a long-barreled Beretta automatic rifle.
“Sweater!” ordered Sandy Mize. A few seconds later a pigeon crosses from right to left at about 40 meters. She follows her way with her finger and then falls to the berm. “Sweater.” This time, with her Beretta tucked deep into her shoulder and her cheekbone in the stock, her eyes follow the same path she has a few inches left of the barrel and she pulls the trigger. She dents the back of the frisbee.
“Keep your eyes on the target and when your eye catches sight, the target is there. Then pull the trigger,” advises Bill McGuire, a national shooting champion, to Mize.
McGuire comes to “The Willows” in Tunica, Mississippi about every six months and offers expert advice and techniques to both novice and experienced shooters.
According to Mike Mize, hunting guide and NSCA Level III Instructor, “The key to good shotgun shooting is allowing your subconscious mind to calculate the speed and velocity of the weapon. After choosing your stance and method of the gun, let the conscious mind do the one thing. This is to focus as hard and clearly as possible on the target. This allows your eyes to feed your subconscious brain the speed, distance, and angle of the target.”
Baseball is a great example of how this works. If you’re at bat and the pitcher throws a pitch at you, you don’t have time to consciously calculate that the ball is going 87 mph and will hit the plate in about 0.50 seconds slightly high and tight. All you can do is focus on the ball and trust your instincts. You don’t look at the bat either, it’s there in your subconscious or as a blur but the ball is what you see clearly.
“When shooting shotgun, the barrel of the gun is your bat. Some people say they don’t see the barrel at all. I think we all see it in our subconscious or as a blur. But the most important thing is to see the target clearly.” Mize said.
After shooting for a while, you will surely hear the familiar words “stopped the movement of your gun.” The natural reaction is to push the weapon in at the last second to avoid parrying and create follow through. That is absolutely wrong. Stopping the blow of the gun is almost always due to trying to see the lead. That is consciously trying to see the distance between the barrel of your gun and the target. To do this, you need to shift your focus from the target to the barrel. You have taken your view off the moving object, the target, and shifted your focus to a stationary object, the gun. This will stop or slow down the movement of the shotgun. An example of this is if I tell you to point (with your finger) at a bus driving on the road, as long as you look at the bus, your finger will keep moving. When I tell you to now look at your finger, it will stop. You are looking at a stationary object. “Focus on the goal.”
“Once someone goes out there and tries it, they’re hooked,” says Mize. “Guys who play golf don’t think about dropping their clubs and picking up a rifle and the next thing they know they’re part-time shooters.”
“Shoot, don’t aim. Follow the bird with your eyes and let the shotgun move with you,” advises Mike Brooks, instructor and trainer at the Andy Dolton Shooting Range and Outdoor Education Center. Brooks spent 17 years with the Greene County Sheriff’s Department.
Brooks has been with the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Andy Dalton Outdoor Education Center and Shooting Range for seven years and is the Outdoor Education Supervisor. He teaches and trains students of all ages and experience levels. “Here we train the conservation specialist, act in a support role to the agents, and offer certification programs for instructors and the NRA and ATA.” Brooks is one of only 14 certified instructors in the world who can train instructors other than the public.
“There are three fundamentals that I teach in basic shooting. One is hand position on the gun. Two, your eye needs to be focused on the target. And three, get proper lead time.”
“In addition to stance, you need to know what their dominant eye is and make sure the gun is right for them,” Brooks said. “There is nothing more satisfying than watching someone who has never wielded a weapon before, smash a clay target.”
As students head out to the range, an instructor will be on hand to observe stance, flow of shots (while shooting), and proper gun control, and then offer advice to each individual. As a trainer, they will be able to tell you why something is happening.
It’s important to focus on one critical element at a time, such as proper weapon position and stance. “You want to put 60 percent of your weight on your front leg and keep your knee slightly bent. Keep your feet shoulder-width apart, and most importantly, don’t rock from foot to foot when moving the rifle or the shotgun. I also want to only move from the waist up, turning to follow the bird,” Brooks advises.
Often when someone has a bad habit, it just takes practice to correct this habit and form new and better ones. For example, women (and some men) tend to lean back at the waist when shooting. This is bad. Again, keep 60 percent of your weight on your left foot, your lead foot, if you’re right-handed, or vice versa.
Brooks advises moving on after you pull the trigger. Do not stop moving your weapon, continue after the shot. You will be able to see the target shatter (as long as you hit it) with peripheral vision.
Brooks looked at a 75-year-old man who had been hunting his entire life and assumed his right eye was dominant. He passed through the range, and as Brooks watched him, he noticed something only a trained instructor or trainer would. Although the man was right-handed, he dominated the left eye. By demonstrating with a simple eye test, Brooks was able to determine a dilemma the man had and didn’t even know it was affecting his hunting abilities.
“We interrupt the vision and force the weaker eye to take over, we line up the shotgun and it’s instant,” Brooks explained.
Seventeen percent of women are cross dominant. This is more common in women than in men. This means that a woman can be right handed and yet dominate the left eye.
Most guns are built with the average man in mind: for men between 5’8 and 6′. This creates a problem for women where the stock is too long or too short and the crest of the stock is too low for women. Brooks is reminiscent of a manufacturer that makes taller butt models for women, Browning.
For delivery time this will depend on the angle you are facing the hoppers. Think of the lower numbers on a clock, if you are standing at the eight o’clock position (8) and the bird is coming down the ramp behind you, you only need a one finger lead. This means that you want the barrel of the gun to be about a finger width in front of the clay bird. You also want to shoot as the bird goes up, not down.
If you’re standing at the six o’clock position and the bird is shooting from your left, you’ll need a two-finger lead before you pull the trigger.
Again, it’s worth mentioning that you have to have faith and think of the gun as an extension of your arm. Keep your eye on the target. When (the target) gets to where his arm and gun are extended, he will pull the trigger and continue with the barrel. And you will succeed!
When shooting skeet, you’ll want to shoot the first target coming from the left as it rises first, then you’ll only have a few seconds to move the barrel slightly and shoot the second clay bird. In this sport, everything is in time.
And practice, practice, practice.