Some Concepts (and Physics) of Trapshooting.
Most shooters break trap targets at about 35 yards, so why write an article about concepts that affect shooters before the targets are 10 yards out of the house?
Let me share my experience. When I walked for the first time from the skeet to the trap fields, I broke 21 targets during my second round. A few weeks later, I broke 23. Then, during my last practice before my hip replacement, I broke 45 targets in a row. After six weeks of hip recovery, I was afraid of falling on the winter ice, so for four months I swung my gun in my house, using painter’s tape for targets. I didn’t realize I had developed a bad habit of swinging too fast.
Finally, the ice melted. Bursting with confidence, I went back to the trap fields. But confidence, I learned, can easily shatter against low scores. Surprised, I tried putting the broken pieces back together by telling myself that I just needed more practice. The pieces, however, no longer fit. For some strange reason, I wasn’t seeing the targets well. My scores plummeted.
Discouraged, I started asking myself: Why did I occasionally shoot a good round? Why, when I struggled with my straightaway targets, I then broke most of my hard angles and vice versa? Why, when I delayed my gun swing for a split second, did my scores shoot up?
I watched videos of elite shooters and noticed most didn’t begin their gun swing until the target was about 10 yards out of the house. (Their decision when and how fast to swing obviously occurred sooner.) Finally, I thought about a subject Dr. King Heiple wrote about in his remarkable book, Mastering Skeet:angular velocity. Eventually, after hours and hours of trials and errors, I came to believe that, as a recreational shooter, my shooting defects occurred before the targets flew 10 yards.
First, Some Helpful Basics
Mounting the shotgun higher in the shoulder will lower the point of impact.
To help track a fast-moving target, we should quiet (settle) our eyes and soft-focus for at least a full second. The theory of the Quiet Eye (explained by Joan Vickers in her classic book, Perception, Cognition, and Decision Training: The Quiet Eye in Action), has become widely accepted. Joe Clauser, et al. wrote, “The longer QE enables shooters to more accurately process the speed of the clay in relation to the gun barrel before selecting the correct response…” (“Quiet Eye Training in a Visuomotor ControlTask,” Medical Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol. 43, No. 6.)
Mounting the gun and quieting the eyes are two distinct conscious actions.
In his book An Insight To Sports, Dr. Wayne P. Martin wrote, “It takes approximately one-fifth of a second to complete a blink.” During that time, a trap target will fly about 5 yards, forcing us then to jerk our eyes to catch up to a decelerating target. (More about deceleration later.)
Side note: Dry eyes cause blurry vision. Stay hydrated and, when necessary, use rewetting drops.
Before I get to my concepts, let me say that with trapshooting, as with so much else, there are very different approaches. Each shooter is different and, therefore, must find what works for him or her.
Some elite shooters, like the great Nora Ross, advocate using fast gun speed and getting to the target as soon as possible. Unlike Harlan Campbell, they don’t necessarily wait for the target to become whole before they move the gun.
Why? Speed eliminates time for our conscious mind to enter the picture, so to speak, and measure leads or even lift our head. Because our gun speed allows us to shoot right at the target, we won’t get confused about lead. Also, many shooters believe breaking targets close to the house is an advantage when shooting on windy days.
On the other side of that approach, fast gun speed requires precision, fast reflexes and a lot of skill, which many recreational and older shooters don’t have. For example, when I use fast gun speeds, I often lose control of my barrel and miss high on straightaways and slight-angle targets. Even a great shooter like Zach Nannini believes speed is his nemesis.
Finally, speed is a relative term. What fast means to you might not be what fast means to me.
Eye Movement and Gun Speed
The speed our eyes track a clay target is determined by eye movement and/or gun swing. Here is an experiment: Without rotating your body, scan the top of a wall with your eyes. Next, without moving your eyes, scan by rotating your hips and shoulders as if swinging a gun. Finally, scan with just eye movement, but then also rotate. Notice how your eye movement speeds up!
The faster we accelerate our gun swing, the faster our eyes move. If we accelerate too quickly, we pull our eyes ahead of the target and lose visual contact. Our subconscious will then slow or stop our eyes while the decelerating target flies past us.
When shooting a trap target, the distance a shooter moves the front of the gun barrel and their eyes are miniscule compared to the 20 or so yards most targets fly before we break them. Olympic Trap Gold medal winner Russell Marks (Go Shooting – Series 2 #1; YouTube) experimented and found that, to break targets, shooters holding on top of the house move the front of their gun about 11″; those holding parallel to the house only about 7″. We, therefore, have more than enough time to catch up to targets, even if they leave the house and streak past our eyes.
Where we look is a compromise. Looking higher above the house will help shooters with slower reflexes visually acquire the target after it has slowed and prevent them from jerking their eyes and gun. However, the higher and farther out they look, the wider they must soft-focus. Their peripheral vision, therefore, might not quickly detect both hard-angle and straightaway targets.
Because of angular velocity, all trap targets quickly decelerate. What is angular velocity? As Dr. King Heiple explains in his book, imagine you are standing on a sidewalk. Fifty yards away a car approaches at a constant speed. As the car gets closer, it appears to speed up steadily. When it passes in front of you, it reaches maximum speed. As the car drives away it slows, but at a rate of deceleration greater than its rate of acceleration.
This phenomenon, crucial to clay target shooting, is illustrated in Dr. Heiple’s book by a graph of the angular velocity on skeet Station 4. The graph is based on a paper by Gregory Beran, an undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University (“Mechanics of Skeet Shooting”). The bottom numbers represent feet.
Though I didn’t realize it, when I delayed my gun swing for a split second, my subconscious was able to react correctly to a decelerated target. A more experienced shooter could have instead started his/her gun acceleration sooner, but slower.
Trap targets fly at different angles relative to the shooter. Some targets, therefore, decelerate greater, faster and farther away than others. A normal, hard-angle target from Stations 1 and 5 quickly passes in front of the shooter at an angle of about 38.5 degrees, according to Jeff Meloy, author of The Browning BT-99 Single-Barrel Trap Shotgun. Dr. Heiple’s graph of skeet Station High 3 closely mirrors the angular velocity of the target, which decelerates fairly quickly.
All straightaway targets fly at zero angle relative to the shooter and, therefore, decelerate faster and greater than a hard-angle target. Dr. Heiple’s graph of skeet Station Low 7 closely mirrors a straightaway trap target.
Shooters often miss straightaway targets because, after shooting a fast hard-angle target, their subconscious doesn’t adjust for a slower target. The result: a high miss.
What about the quarter-angle target? From Posts 1 and 5, the target flies at about 20 degrees to the shooter but passes him/her farther away than the hard angle. It, therefore, decelerates more but not as quickly. No wonder the target’s speed during the first 10 yards sometimes fooled me, and I didn’t slow my eyes and gun enough.
Our subconscious does not always make the right decision. The conscious mind is capable of only one thought at a time, but our subconscious can make split-second decisions without thinking. When shooting a clay target, we concentrate only on seeing the target and rely on our subconscious to decide when and how fast to accelerate.
“Trust your subconscious,” say clay target coaches. Are they correct? Well, sometimes. Let’s take a trapshooter such as myself who came to clay target shooting late in life and after playing many sports, including fast-pitch softball. The first time I stepped onto a skeet station, my pre-programmed subconscious reacted to the streaking target as if it were a streaking softball leaving a pitcher’s hand. I swung my gun fast, pulling my eyes and gun too far ahead of the target. My subconscious stopped my swing, but the target didn’t stop. Though my lead looked correct, I usually missed behind.
To take this concept a little further: Most skeet shooters find outgoing targets more difficult than incoming. Why? I suspect it is easier for our subconscious to react correctly to a steadily accelerating target than to a rapidly decelerating one.
Can shooters reprogram their subconscious? Dr. Maxwell Maltz, often referred to as the godfather of self-help authors, writes in Psycho-Cybernetics, “The mind cannot tell the difference between an actual experience or one that is vividly imagined.”
In his book, See to Play, Dr. Michael A. Peters writes, “Athletes can prepare their mind for what they are going to see during future experiences…” Leo Harrison, one of America’s greatest ever trapshooters, says in his DVD, The Biggest Winner, that when he steps onto Post 1, he visualizes hard-angle and straightaway targets.
Research has shown the more vivid the visualization — adding our senses to our visual pictures — the more effective the visualization. When visualizing, we should see the trap target and also feel our cheek pressing down on the stock, our hand holding the forend, our front foot pushing off the ground, our swing slowly accelerating, and so on. Dr. Wayne Martin compared visualization to dry-firing without holding a gun. And, visualization is free!
It is difficult to maintain a hard focus on a fast-moving target. Paul Giambrone III in his DVD Mastering Your Skeet Game says: “I’m going to save my really hard focus for that moment when I am about to pull the trigger.” When it comes to eye and gun movement, the great trapshooter Ricky Marshall says it concisely: “Speed Kills.” (Trap Talk from the Back Fence, Episode 66, YouTube.)
Practice mounting and moving your gun, and quieting your eyes, to match your gun and eyes to the target in those critical first 10 yards. SS
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Editor’s note: More information on Dr. Wayne Martin’s book An Insight to Sports can be found on page 46 of this issue, and check out Leo Harrison’s and Paul Giambrone’s DVDs on pages 48-49.
Randy Kadish is a native New Yorker. His love of fly fishing triggered his move to Missoula, MT. At 63, he shot his first round of skeet. Despite his low score, he felt welcomed. Immediately, he fell in love with skeet and with being part of a salt-of-the-earth shooting club. He is an outdoor writer and member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. His work has appeared in many publications. Much of his writing is about the techniques of spin, fly and spey casting and, more recently, of pickleball. He shoots a Beretta 687 Silver Pigeon III with a mid-rib. Readers may contact him at randykadish@gmail.com.
