Monday 18 December 2017

Position training

Yesterday I mentioned how I am going through a process of rebuilding my shooting position and I said there were a couple of interesting things which have come up. Today I will mention trying to find the correct position and approaching the target correctly. Both of these things are really important to do correctly, if the position isn't stable or if you need to force the rifle onto the target then you will probably find you will be fighting for the rest of the shot.

I have heard many people say that if you learn your shooting position enough then you will feel when it is not right. I understand some of this, but the biggest problem for me is that until you have learnt the position and know how to feel what is going on, then how can you train it? The real problem being that I cannot use some of the normal training tools, like watching yourself in a mirror or videoing your shooting and observing. In fact the only way I can detect what my body is doing whilst shooting is by how it feels, but we have established that is what I am trying to learn. At this point the only solution I seem to have is to have someone sighted observe me whilst shooting and for them to comment on what they see happening.

Similar applies to the path I follow as I lift up the rifle and approach the target. Again sighted shooters may use techniques like having a laser pointer attached to the rifle and to get it to follow a specific line. What makes it worse is that if I don't find the target then the audio aiming system gives no clue as to which side of the target I am pointing and so I don't even know which way to adjust next time I try.

I feel that needing to have someone sighted observe and help with these tasks is probably limiting my ability to train the position and target approach. Some time ago it was decided I needed to sort out my trigger action and so I took my rifle home for a couple of weeks and did some trigger training every day for those two weeks. The difference that two weeks made was amazing and I am sure that something similar for position training would be benefitial too. If anyone has any ideas on how I could do position training independently then that would be great if you could share those ideas.

In my next post I intend to discuss some findings I have made about the EcoAims VIS500 and the audio parameters.

Experience of creating shooting videos

You may be aware that over the last few weeks I have been creating some videos for IBSA on vision impaired shooting. It has been quite an ex...