Dealing With a Slump

At some point in time, I suspect it is inevitable that we all go into a slump, this article is about how I got out of my 2012 slump.

Toward the end of the indoor season in Spring of 2012, I was shooting very good and very consistent, my 8 week averages were solidly in the 95% range. I was placing very high in the matches and leagues and my confidence level was solid and without question. At that time, I was ranked indoor as a sharpshooter but shooting near master level scores and even won the Club Champion trophy for the Chicago Rifle Club.

On June 10th, I shot at the Bristol regional match and performed very poorly with an overall 2455-44x (91%). During and after the match I tried to understand my poor performance but couldn't really pin point anything so I wrote it off as a "bad day". After that match my practices seemed okay, I was around a 94% average with both guns. Then at Camp Perry in July, I shot horrible again but all the time on every day. My overall score was 2414-29X (89.40%) which was very disappointing. Throughout the week I was trying to figure out what was happening, why was I shooing so poorly? On the last day (45 day) I started to see some signs of good performance in the individual match so I decided to shoot in a practice match before the team match. The practice match seemed to indicate what was going on because I shot good in practice. It certainly looked to me like I was folding under the pressure of match conditions. Makes sense right, shoot bad in match and good in practice on the same day. By the afternoon I shot okay for the team match so things were looking up.

The long ride home from Perry gave me time to think and analyze. Historically, I have shot well at matches so folding under the pressure seemed odd or foreign to me but it seemed to make the most sense. Practice and training in the previous weeks had clearly shown I was good and solid with all the fundamentals. While my guns are getting older, I know they are performing better than I and some bench rest shooting a few weeks before Perry eliminated that as a cause.

After returning home and getting back into my normal practice and training routines I found something I didn't like, more poor performance. My 22 scores ranged from 271 for a low and 289 for a high, I was all over the place. My 45 scores ranged from 261 to 282, again all over the place with no consistency. It seemed like I was doing everything right, however the scores didn't reflect it. This sure wasn't a problem of "performance anxiety" or folding under the pressures of match conditions.

Something was broke and I needed to fix it so I started going through the basics. First thing was to eliminate the guns - bench rest tests once again proved they were still great guns. Review my fundamentals, slowly working through my shot process to see if I am forgetting something or doing something different - couldn't find anything there with the exception of trigger control during the actual shot.

As always seems to be the case of poor shooting, trigger control is the one thing that can always ruin a shot. But why did it get so bad, what had I done wrong or what I am doing wrong that has made it so bad?

As I work through the correction process to try and get back to that "automatic pull", I am finding that mental focus is also lacking. For me, trigger control is a trusted subconscious effort. I have to force my conscious mind to let go of what I think I need to do for a 10 and let the trigger control happen subconsciously. This takes a lot of mind control to let go of the natural thought process and abandon seemingly logical thoughts. During my last practice session on 7/28/12, I was starting to see things change for the good. I went back to my training targets (10 ring only that is black) and focused as much as I could on trigger control. These training targets allow me to see more of what is going on during those few milliseconds as the hammer drops. I was able to see the same movement in the dot for both 22 and 45 at both stages of the shot - aiming and pulling. During aiming, I have a lot more side to side movement than normal for me. Once I start the pull, a lot of my wobble settles but I could detect that I was pulling the shot one way or the other.

This will be an on-going process of correction and I will be updating this page as things progress. As of right now, I no longer believe I was folding under the pressure of the match, rather I suspect most of the problems were mental problems, specifically, lack of concentration or focus. Aside from being a competitive shooter, we all have lives outside the sport. With a lot of intense activity at work, I have not been able to "leave work at work" as much as I would like, and that may be a contributor in my lack of concentration at the range.

Update 8/4/12 - After spending a lot of time practicing today and shooting for scores, I am more confident that trigger control is the primary culprit in my poor performance. Mental focus seemed good and I had few "distractions" that I was conscious of. While my scores are about 10 points below my average from 2 months ago, I was very consistent today. Between both guns, my high was a 282 and my low was a 276 with an average of 280.375 over 8 NMC relays.

As mentioned on this website, I am firm believer in Dry Fire, however, I seldom do it. I try to replace it with live fire practice - lots of it. At this point in time, I do not think I can get away without Dry Fire anymore. Dry Fire affords you the time to really focus on trigger control without having to deal with much else (recoil, noise, flinching, etc.). All of my fellow competitors that I shoot with on a regular basis have been teasing me about my lack of desire to do dry fire so I think it is time to join the ranks and get serious!

Update 8/19/12 - While I still have not found the time to Dry Fire, I have been able to focus better on shooting which certainly helps the scores. This weekend I ended up shooting two of my highest scores ever in outdoor match competition. While I would like to think the slump is over, I know all too well that I can't rest on my recent performance. Of the changes that seemed to help were a reduction in work related stress which allowed me to focus better on shooting - shooting is a mental game and you need a clear mind to perform. The mental focus also improves trigger control which is at the core of most bad shots. Another thing I realized is I broke two of the golden rules and that is "do not change anything before a match" and "don't do anything different at a match". Knowing that other top shooters used Nosler 185 JHP for the long line, I figured there were some points there to be bought. Just prior to Bristol and Perry I started experimenting with them. While they are excellent bullets, I had to fiddle with resetting zero on my scope between the various distances. Not having a place to practice outdoor, I did all my experimenting at 50', then at the match spent a lot of time (and rounds) finding zero during slow fire. You can lose a lot of points doing that.

It would be nice to blame my past slump on the ammo, however, there are many contributing factors to shooting at higher levels. Also, the closer you get to Master level, the more important each and every point becomes. Here are two examples from this weekend, I ended up in second place with a 1717-47x against the first place shooter with a 1717-63x, one point would have put me in first. Furthermore, my overall match scores this weekend were 3412, had I shot 8 points higher, I would have made my Master classification this weekend. So lessons learned are not to break the golden rules and stick with what is working. Some things you can control, some things you can't, so you have to be on top of everything as much as possible.