The importance of routine
Top Sporting Shot and coach Matt Hance continues his instructional series, in looking at how to create a successful routine.
Consistent routines lead to consistent performances
Following from where I left off in last month’s article, in Lesson 6 we’re going to continue to look at what it takes to have a consistent routine and good mental state to allow us to reach the ‘flow state’. For those of you new to the series, the flow state can be experienced when all other 99 pieces of the jigsaw puzzle (see p46) come together, where there are no mental interruptions and where everything feels effortless.
As you can see from the jigsaw puzzle, a large proportion of success in shooting, around 15% of the jigsaw, is made up with your ability to achieve a consistent mental state – ‘consistency’ – and this is what we are going to focus on here.
What would it look like if you could master this?
You would be able to consistently increase focus and decrease anxiety, thereby putting you in the best possible mental state. In my time working with Henry Hopkin, this is what we focused on most. Henry can even measure what mental state you’re in and see how effectively you can increase your focus on demand – just another indication of how the sport is evolving.
Pre-shot routine
In the context of achieving the right mental state, a pre-shot routine should help you to focus and distract your conscious mind into productive thought towards regeneration or reactivation. An effective pre-shot routine would be one you have developed and structured to help you manage distractions and achieve the optimal mental state to maximise focus.
Hence, a pre-shot routine should be structured in a purposeful manner, with thought behind it. Often, I come across shooters who are just replicating what they have seen other successful shooters do in their pre-shot routine, without a clue of why they are doing so. Similarly, pre-shot routines can often simply become an accumulation of superstitions, and many routines can become too busy and long.
“Have an understanding of what you are doing every moment”
Ultimately, this won’t achieve the purpose of the process but instead you trick yourself into believing you’re doing the right thing. Not only this, but you are also less likely to perform your routine when under pressure, let alone benefit from it. If you don’t fully understand why you’re lining up your cartridges or touching your glasses – both of which could potentially have good reasoning behind them – you cannot benefit in the same way. Instead, have a complete understanding of what you are doing every moment and for what purpose.
A pre-shot routine may be made up of several components or actions. Most acts should be included to help you to relax, settle your thoughts, compose yourself and regenerate, before using triggers to help you to reactivate your mind before calling for the next pair. Within the phases of regeneration, there may also be points where you begin to focus your mind on to the targets, perhaps using visualisation or incorporating your reading of the target into the routine.
For example, having marked out your viewpoints, hold points and kill points, you might decide to focus on these during your pre-shot. Indeed, having worked out the line of the bird at your kill point, you might turn the cartridge to reflect this. For instance, let’s say we walk up to a stand and we have a following pair of right-to-left loopers; at the kill point, they enter the box at 2 o’clock and exit the box at 7 o’clock. Part of your pre-shot routine could be to line up the ‘H’ of the Hull Cartridge, so that the ‘H’ sits in the gun at 7 o’clock, reminding you of the trajectory of the target.
There should also be a large portion of your routine dedicated to complete relaxation, with no intrusive thoughts, that will allow you to ramp up your focus in a few seconds. Finally, within your pre-shot routine, you will shift your full focus and awareness out on to the targets before calling ‘pull’ – this is the activation phase of what you might call a pre-flight checklist.
There is no absolute and universal blueprint as to what people have in their preshot routine. Your plan should be bespoke to you. Also be aware that there is often more than what meets the eye, especially when watching top Shots who have run the same routine thousands of times before.
Post-shot routine
Although often neglected, a good post-shot routine or diagnostics is equally important as a solid pre-shot routine. As the name suggests, a post-shot routine is the series of thoughts and actions that you go through once you’ve made the shot(s).
While this may be challenging – and our desire to curse may occasionally overcome us – our physical post-shot routine should, in theory, be just the same as when you hit a target and when you miss a target. That said, in the Sporting disciplines, there may be certain diagnostics we need to run in our post-shot routine before taking us back to
our pre-shot. In competition, we need to run either of two alternatives in our post-shot:
Scenario 1: Lost pair
Scenario 2: Dead pair
If it’s good, don’t change it – or if it’s not working, change something.
Putting this back into the routine, if you miss a target, you need to:
1. Cut out the emotion from the previous shot – this is a vital point, or you could end up missing the next pair by being hung up on the previous loss.
2. Adjust your plan – if it didn’t work, change!
3. Re-run your pre-shot routine – including the regeneration and reactivation phases.
This whole routine should feel like a loop, with the diagnostics running after each shot leading back to either ‘repeat’ or ‘adjust’, then allowing yourself time to regenerate fully then reactivate.
Next time you’re out shooting, I would encourage you to practise going through each of these stages and realising at what phase of the routine you are in. Train yourself to be able to fully regenerate, reactivate, pushing your awareness outward and try to feel the rhythm of the routine taking place. Then, take the time to run your post-shot diagnostics, letting go of any emotion from the previous shot, and REPEAT.
Post-shoot analysis
During a competition, we have to cut out the emotion from the previous shot and the previous scores of that card, layout and stand. I always teach students to focus on the next pair or to try to split up a course of 100 into more manageable 25-birders. Once they’ve shot the first 25, they actively try to ignore their score and move on to the next 25. Even within a 25, I would discourage students from over-analysing performance at this point, as the rest of the course can then become a case of trying not to miss.
After we have shot, there is plenty of time to analyse what we can do next time to improve. I often find myself reminiscing about my weekend performance throughout the rest of the working week. I would also add that a post-shoot analysis could provoke you to include an extra element to your pre-shot routine the next time you’re out shooting. For example, if you found that you were struggling to find the line of a target, add turning the cartridge heads to your pre-shot.
This sort of review or analysis can be structured with Henry’s 100-piece jigsaw. Take each section of the jigsaw and score yourself as to how well you achieved each section. As an example, here’s one that Rhys completed on his performance a few months ago for a shoot at Honesberie (right).
This is an excellent way of finding out what it is you need to train on. For Rhys, at this time, he was having technical and confidence issues when shooting teal birds, and his consistency at this shoot wasn’t great at times, so we worked on these topics in his next coaching session with me.
Also, it was interesting to see that Rhys (unknowingly) calculated his score to 84%, which was the same as his actual score at the shoot.
As I have said before, focusing on all of these things within our control will help us to experience ‘flow’, allowing us to shoot to the best of our ability.