Canadian Airgun Forum

You are spot on with proper state of mind being individual thing. I worked with sport psychologist before and saw how some people did better while in deep concentration state (almost kinda half-self hypnosis), while others could simply not achive such thing (yours trully).
It depends on how much of control You are willing to give away. I simply refused to have someone to mess with my mind, and found myself doing math during hypnosis sessions.
My method is simple. I use "execute, fire and forget". No point on dwelling on 7's and 6's and infect next shot with overthinking.
I'm doing much better than I expected to do at this point anyway. When I got Emily(my 46M) I hoped to "break" 500 in a month or two. Then I shot 92 and now I simply KNOW I can do 90+. I can also do 81 , but if I train enough I'll do more 90's and less 80-ones
Its all in the training. More You train better You shoot.
Quarter million of shots got me where I was in RT. Not thinking and analizing.

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Live to shoot, shoot to live

Just finished my first go @10M AR sandbag....wow am I ever bad!
But it was fun, thanks v76!

Looking forward to this each month.

HS

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Play stupid games......Win stupid prizes.

My YouTube channel: Tactical Fail Inc.
http://www.youtube.com/user/HammerSandw ... ature=mhum

I managed to get in 60 shots today, no warm-ups, enough to submit one score for the month. Pulling a shoulder muscle during a workout a month ago left me unable even to hold up the pistol for a couple of weeks, and I've restrained myself from trying more than a few targets for the remainder of the month until yesterday. Dang, a tiny muscle in a shoulder can really go wrong... and lots of ice and rest and anti-inflammatories only help a bit it seems. Still weak, but the pain is gone. The weakness spread from centre deltoid all the way around to shoulderblade and up front into the pectoral. The tension going up top to my neck is very unpleasant after 40 shots or so. Guess I won't shoot so much for the next few weeks yet.

The time away from shooting has left me more room to consider what I've been doing previously, and one thing which bothered me more than the rest was my often careless raises. I'd become quite rash at times, whipping the thing up, while at other times I'd been too slow and couldn't hold long enough to get off a steady shot. Today I tried a raise a lot like that used by the Belarussian shooter Chaika. A slow raise taking a few seconds, only going as high as the 10, no more. Those times I succeeded, not getting impatient, were a mix of 9's and 10's. Especially at the beginning of a target after the couple of minutes rest between I was hitting good middle 10's on the first couple of shots. So this is something I'll be pursuing.

A tie! And from the two shoulder-hurt guys, no less! Go figure. The form for this coming month currently says "The deadline for the August 2011 Matches is October 5th 2011" so you might want to edit that.

The shoulder's not been hurting for a couple of weeks but it's weak, spreading a similar strained-weak feeling throughout my whole upper back. It's weird, like an infection almost. Surprising how one tiny shoulder muscle being injured can have so much influence. I shot another session the other day and could only get to 40 shots, at 81, 93, 91, and 84. So a bit of warm-up shooting (after stretching), then two surprisingly decent targets thanks to the more consistent raising of the pistol, then the last just too tired to hold consistently, leading to over-long holds and careless shots. When there's something like this shoulder thing to fight against it does offer a good opportunity to more carefully observe what was previously taken for granted too often. With so little strength to hold, it becomes so much more important to get the shot off quickly, to trust the patterns of training and let go without lingering.

Oh we're doing great, thanks for asking. First day at kindergarten for my little boy - just a short introduction to teacher and classroom, not really getting to know anyone else yet. It's finally kicked into a proper summer here. We've had the strangest weather in memory this year. Lots of young trees dying - we lost a 21 year old wisteria this past week, something I grew from seed and kept in pots the first decade but which had grown to be the envy of the neighbourhood - and older trees dropping brown leaves since July. Our garden hasn't provided much to eat. But at least it seems September will be nice. Good for biking to the shooting club once or twice per week! I'll head out there for the first time in over a month tomorrow, see how the muscles hold up for a couple of hour session with lots of rests.

and I'm back
will put numbers for october
anyone here thinking about participating in Canadian Airgun Gran Prix?

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Live to shoot, shoot to live

I just entered a score for the October AP30 Shoot on the Blog page.

http://cafpostal.blogspot.com/2011/10/r ... tober.html

Unfortunately no one but the admin (v76) can see submitted scores unless they submit a score themselves then click a link to view that page. Or wait until the second week of the next month of course. But perhaps not unfortunate... as some scores might not be submitted if members check the page, see something significantly higher than their own latest score, and leave. For my part I am trying to submit a score every month at least in the AP30 category since hurting my shoulder. Weakness is still a serious problem for me, and 60 shots tend to yield one or two decent looking targets and the rest like shotgun blasts, as the injury has weakened my whole upper body apparently. Working on it with light weights, but man, at 50 recovery from injury gets surprisingly more difficult.

I included a link to the blog page out of courtesy (as this thread is currently 14 pages long), and having gone through numerous threads myself on a number of boards, I thought it might be helpful to someone, like myself who has not entered on this particular Forum before.

Sorry to hear that you've hurt your shoulder, Gerald.

Yeah, thought you might have linked to it to bring more entries... but hey, an excuse to whine about my shoulder surfaces, I grab it. It was only painful for the first couple of weeks. Silly weight lifting mistake, doing a bunch of low weight reps at a new angle without gradually building it into my workout. It's just this weirdly lingering weakness that's bothersome. Seems so odd that my shoulderblades and pecs and even to some extent my left shoulder (injured the right deltoid, just behind the mid point) should have picked up some of the soreness and most of the weakness. It's like I'm a bit of a baby when lifting weights now, starting over from scratch. I'd understand if the injury had been obvious and immediate, but I didn't even feel it for two days, then suddenly this howling nasty pain.

Thanks a bunch for the very interesting site link! I'm going to have to puzzle out which of those instructions are for how to do it wrong, and which for how to do it right... at first reading it's a bit hard to tell the difference. But time will get it cleared up I'm sure.

Thanks, I was leaning towards interpreting it that way, but considering the upright swinging dumbell thing with elbow against ribs is exactly how my physio/massage therapist guy (a bassist client of mine; I'm too self-destructive to actually let anyone do work on me health-wise) told me to do it, well, I thought just maybe that was supposed to be the right way. Oh well.

I just watched the Uwe Bolleck or whatever his name is video series linked to on TT yesterday, and today tried to incorporate some of what I could understand (it's in German, no subs) into a 30 shot round. Managed a 269, best I've done in a while, with the second target scoring 94 and each target having at least 4 x 10's. The consistency in movement patterns shown in the videos was my focus. Really nailing a routine, in every element of every shot. I think that's going to be my main practice focus for the next while. That, and getting the shot off the FIRST time the sight lines up with decent stability, not waiting for a 'better' opportunity. That waiting habit has cost me so many 10 ring shots.

Hey V, did you jump the gun a little in closing the October match? I submitted a 60 shot score a short while ago, and the blog form showed no other contributions. Still the 5th here, and 5:15 pm.

Got through my first shooting competition this past weekend, the annual Richmond Hibernation Match. Attendance was reportedly the lowest in years at 38 participants and no one seemed to know why. Still a fun weekend, lots of friendly and helpful people, families, even a 7 month old baby boy brought along by one of the most skilled female shooters. Perhaps there are a lot of women shooting generally, but as a first time competitor I was surprised that there were so many - 21 competitors to the men's 15 according to the official results... hey, that's only 36. Oh well, not my spreadsheet to worry about.

Here's an 8 shot panorama stitched together by my Samsung Infuse phone camera, featuring Edmond Lee warming up before the first session on Saturday morning - he turned out to be the match winner with 1683/1800 (93.5%), narrowly beating Al Harding who scored 1677 (93.17%).



The top women's pistol shooter was Lynda Kiejko with a fantastic 1135/1200 (94.5%), and top women's air rifle Jessie Lublinkoff with 1109/1200 - and the rifle targets are tiny, so that seems pretty much amazing to me as well.

My own result was rather more humble at 1586/1800 (88.1%). As a first time shooter they put adults into the Expert category pending later classification, and as such I placed for a bronze medal, beaten out by Richard Todd with 1590 and John Berta with 1615. Considering my very shaky start on Saturday (too much *POPPING* even with hearing protection on, not used to that at the start) with a 511, I'm rather pleased with the final result. It was a fun weekend, if also an intense workout in concentration. Left me with shore neck and shoulders, so obviously some fitness issues to work out before my next competition.

I'll be registering for the spring match at the same arena - which as you can see from the many mats and other equipment is shared with a gymnastics club. Our shooting club is upstairs, with spots for 10 shooters at our regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sessions. That room's just shared by archers, and not at the same time. Anyone else in the Lower Mainland area interested in competition, or just picking up pointers from some very good shooters (Edmond and Al both come out regularly and there are a bunch of other good shooters among the membership) should give it a try. Drop-in costs $10, dropping to $3/session for members. Location is the Richmond Sportstown complex on #5 Road in Richmond. There's all sorts of stuff going on out there and a decent pub in the middle of it all.

Between match sessions on Saturday I decided on a veggie burger (not too bad, but not great) and yam fries (excellent!) with a pint... maybe two... of Stanley Park amber ale. I think the latter might have had something to do with the 545 I shot just after lunch. Yes indeed, a decent pub does have a role in the sport.

As for the female contingent, they seemed largely to be from Alberta. There was a rifle shooter from Kamloops and a 13 year old pistol shooter from up the valley, but I don't think a whole lot of the womenfolk were from this region.