If you want to build more consistency into your shooting, please listen up. What follows will help.As a full-time instructor and coach, this comes directly from some of our students who inquire about Paragon instruction. They seek truly helpful answers to their good questions about why they are inconsistent. Thankfully and much appreciated, Paragon delivers those answers! During the phone inquiry about instruction, our caller says he/she is inconsistent, lost, confused and doesn’t know why. Serious about wanting to advance their shooting skills, we’re told they’ve paid one or more instructors…often multiple times…to improve. And they ...
Finding the Right Balance: Building Confidence with Muzzle Awareness (MA)In the simplest of terms, muzzle awareness (MA) means keeping the gun muzzle in our “peripheral” vision, before and during our swing. Seeing this target/barrel “relationship” allows us to a) know where our gun is actually pointing and b) intentionally guide our gun movements with XX precision.Each shooter’s MA will differ slightly. Most are comfortable with 95% or more of their visual focus on the target, while maintaining a small yet crucial peripheral awareness of the muzzle. While these are rough guidelines, the key is to maintain enough MA to establish some harmony ...
Originally published in Sporting Clays magazine in 2014, "Trust Your MA" by Daniel L. Schindler sparked significant controversy, ultimately leading to the widespread adoption of this groundbreaking approach by shooters and the industry.I am incredibly blessed to be busy in a sport I love. I work with people of all ages and skill levels, from those who have never touched a gun to Master class shooters. Yet, I’ve observed a concerning trend among my clients and the broader Sporting Clays community. Many shooters arrive frustrated, discouraged by their lack of progress, especially in achieving consistency. This often stems from their approach to visual focus, and I’d like to ...
My previous article, The Path to Consistency, focused on mastering control in clay shooting to achieve reliable outcomes by intentionally building precision into each swing. The key takeaway was understanding every aspect of the swing to eliminate randomness and create a dependable technique for consistent results. Building on that foundation today, I want to emphasize why controlling our movements in the swing matters greatly, especially for those standing in front of a scorekeeper.While we all pursue clay shooting sports with different goals, I think it’s fair to say no one enjoys watching their best efforts fall short. It’s not just about missing targets but ...
For those who aspire to higher sporting clays skills, the focus inevitably shifts from breaking the target to the final score. It is here we begin to look at the miss. Why did we miss that target? For that matter, how did we hit the previous one?In the beginning, just hitting the target seems a worthwhile goal. We read, we watch, and we listen—all to improve. Getting a handle on the tangibles, like equipment, is first. Next comes strategies and methods—the mechanics of sporting. Gradually, the game makes more sense. Where to point the gun and how to get it there are calculated, and the number of hits begins to outnumber the misses. For those who are patiently building their ...