Have you excercised your myelin today?

This may be a little to cerebral for the casual plinker.  I mined this nugget by wading through the many posts on TargetTalk.org.  This website/forum is dedicated to competitive, Olympic style shooting disciplines.  I find it a bit more analytical than Steelchickens.  Folks really get into the system of shooting.  Let's face it, the sport is 95% human and 5% equipment.  That is what makes it so darn exasperating and fun at the same time.

There are some people who just have talent.  I am not fortunate in this area and my only way to improve is practice.  After reading Lanny Basham's With Winning in Mind some 8 years ago,  I truly felt I had an epiphany.  When other veteran shooters took on the roll of Match Director, I used to have the luxury of just practicing and showing up at a match.  Part of my practice was shooting 33 feet in my garage in Texas.  I used my TX200 and my Weaver KT15.  I would spend hours working on hitting those little animals.  Then, one day at a match, I had a bit of an out of body experience and my mind said "just put the reticle on the animal just like home" and I managed 10 rams with my 10m airgun.  Yup, that's 45 yards with a target airgun.  You could watch the pellet travel the last 10 yards and see the impact.  It was as if I was reliving a dream. In fact, I was reliving my many practice shots, and for a moment, I just let my trained body take over.

Lanny calls this the subconscious state.  I fully agree with what he puts forth and encourage others to read the material and develop their own understanding of what he is telling us.  Recently, found an article which is a bit more physiological than Lanny's psychological explanation.  This new to me article talks about the role of myelin and importance of training, quality training to teach the "nervous system" how to behave.  All of this was in response to the question of whether "wobble boards" were helpful or not.  This is akin to shooting with a heavy trigger and then hoping a light trigger will yield better results come match day. Or shooting a really heavy rifle and then shedding the weight for the match.  The point was, practice with something that is as similar to if not identical to your competition equipment.  The argument is that this reinforces, "strengthens" the neurosystem (myelin) system.  In short, it indirectly is telling us to not train by introducing "extremes" into our regimign.  Thus my effort to reduce weight in my gun.

This article is not intended for the casual "equipment centric" shooter.  This is intended for the shooter who maybe has hit a plateau and is looking to better understand what techniques are out there to aid them in climbing to the next level.

Here is the 2007 NYT article.

Here is the post which introduced this old NYT article.

Now if I could just find the Larisa Preobrazhenskaya of off hand shooting to tell me what I need to focus on to improve, I think it would all click.  But then I would have to learn Russian!