In order to make a shot, the shooter must hold the gun, aim at the center of the target and pull the trigger. These three elements can be practiced in different ways.
Aiming
From the point of view of human physiology, aiming is practically untrainable. Visual acuity can be improved only slightly over several years of hard training.
Pulling the trigger
Reaction time when pulling the trigger is also practically untrainable. The normal reaction time for humans is 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. No matter how much one trains, one will never achieve a reaction time of 0.1 seconds.
Weapon Retention
This is the element of shooting that has the most potential for training. The muscles that hold the weapon are the most trainable. During training, fine muscle coordination improves, which leads to improved stability, and stability already facilitates high performance shooting.
To better understand the mechanism of improving muscular stability, let’s also consider this issue from a physiological point of view.
Stability is mainly provided by two components:
The first is the muscles that hold the weapon. The second component is the cerebral cortex, which controls these muscles. The muscles contain receptors that transmit information to the cortex about the state of the muscles, the position of a joint or any parts of the shooter’s body. Small children have very few muscle receptors and their number increases during various games or training, which improve coordination.
In shooters, the fine coordination of muscles is also trained by increasing the number of receptors in them. The more receptors, the more coordinated the muscles are. But these muscles are nothing without control. So the second component of resilience is the cerebral cortex, which sends a complex of signals to all the muscles that hold the weapon.
The process of training is to make sure that the signals that are generated in the cortex are even in frequency and amplitude. The more even and stable the signals are, the more stable the weapon can be held and held.
Given that visual acuity and reaction speed are practically untrainable, the process of stability training will be most effective if most of the attention during training is dominated by muscle sensations. Doing this is not easy, of course. Our attention almost always tends to shift to aiming. This is due to the fact that a person receives most of the information about the surrounding world through the eyes, and therefore our attention is mostly directed to visual perception.
The simplest solution is the long known dry fire training. It is quite boring and few people have the patience to do it for a long time. The reason is that the shooter does not see the results of such training and usually stops after 4-5 days. But it will take one to three months to get improvement in stability. It is to maintain this useful technique that shooting simulators for home were invented. The shooting simulator for home has retained all the usefulness of dry fire, while making it as realistic as possible, and most importantly allowing you to evaluate your progress in real time.
But I would like to mention the deterioration in stability. It is most often observed in case of long breaks in training, as well as in case of overtraining. In both cases, the cause of stability deterioration is the same. It is a failure in the second component of resilience – the cerebral cortex. With interruptions in training, the shooter simply forgets the subtle muscle sensations that allowed him to hold the gun steadily, and with overtraining, defects are added to the muscle model of the shot that do not allow sending accurate signals to the muscles.
Therefore, if you are forced not to train for a long time, it is possible to keep the sports form for quite a long time, if you do not forget the muscle sensations. To do this, even without weapons, you can mentally visualize your muscle model with your eyes closed and do it for 25-30 minutes every day.