Quite a few years ago, I had an experience that brought the topic of bad shooting habits home to me. I had been shooting guns my whole life. I hunted and went plinking as a kid, earned the Boy Scout Marksmanship Merit Badge (it’s Rifle Shooting now) when I was 12, and qualified Expert on the M16 and sidearms in the Army. I had completed all kinds of training and shot more rounds out of handguns than I could possibly count. I knew I still had room for improvement, but I was comfortable that I understood my shooting skills and what I needed to work on. Then I competed in my first USPSA match.
At the end of my first round, one of the Grand Masters sauntered over and introduced himself. He was a retired professional baseball player, which I thought was pretty cool in itself, and was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He told me I was raising the muzzle of my gun a short distance when transitioning from one target to the next, which was slowing down my time because it forced me to bring the muzzle back down before I could acquire a sight picture. I was stunned because I had no idea I was doing that. It was a bad habit, and like many bad habits, especially ones involving shooting, you often don’t know they even exist. I was doing fine, hitting everything, but my times weren’t as fast as they could have been. I focused on what he said, and once I corrected the problem, my times began to improve. Simple as that…well, not really.
How Do We Develop Bad Habits?
New shooters do not have bad habits. They do not have any habits at all, because they are new to the process of shooting a handgun. They may make mistakes, but those mistakes have not yet become bad habits. Bad shooting habits are developed through a longstanding pattern of doing something over and over the wrong way. They usually develop as the result of poor training, or no training at all, starting with the person’s earliest days of shooting. As with any skill, it is difficult to achieve a high degree of success by practicing the wrong way to do something over and over. In fact, the very repetition and constant practice everyone recommends to hone and maintain shooting skills can ingrain a bad shooting habit to the extent that it becomes difficult to break. In cases like this, it is actually easier to train a new shooter than to correct the bad habits of a highly experienced shooter.
How Do We Overcome Bad Habits?
Having said that, we can break our bad shooting habits in the same way we break any bad habit. The first step is to recognize that we have a bad habit. The last thing we need is to become victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect and think we know everything. You must always be willing to learn.
Identify Bad Habits
It can be difficult to identify a bad habit all on your own. In my own example, I had no idea I was doing what I was doing, nor did I know when I started doing it. It was a bad habit. It took someone else to notice it and point it out to me, someone who was skilled enough in shooting that he noticed something so subtle in the short amount of time it took me to swing my muzzle from one target to the next. Which brings me to my next point.
If I want to get better at a sport or activity, whether it is handball or chess, I look for teachers or opponents who are better at it than I am, both to give me pointers and to compete against. There is no challenge or progress to be made by always practicing with people who are at or below your skill level. It pays to extend yourself even if it bruises your ego a bit. I do not doubt that I was the worst competitor at my first USPSA match, but if I had never gone, I might still be unknowingly making the same mistake I had made for who knows how long.
Taking training courses is a good way to identify and correct bad habits with the help of a professional. If that is not a viable option because of cost or time, try making a video of yourself shooting and watching it. Some things, like having your groups pull to the left or right, are relatively easy to correct because you can see the result of the problem and then correct it by improving your trigger technique or grip. Others, like anticipating the shot or locking your elbows, might be harder to identify. Watching a video of yourself shooting will help you do that. Once you identify a bad habit, you can do some research or seek advice on how to correct it.
Putting in the Work
Once you identify a bad habit and learn what to do to correct it, you must practice over and over in order to overcome what might be years of making the same mistake. Muscle memory is a real thing, and you will tend to default to something familiar when the pressure is on, even if it is wrong. Something you can consciously correct while shooting on a range when you have plenty of time might come back to haunt you when you are rushed and under pressure. If that happens during competition, your score suffers, but if it happens in a defensive shooting encounter, it could be catastrophic.
To overcome this problem, you must put in the time practicing the correct technique. Focusing on doing whatever it is you are trying to do correctly and then doing it over and over is the only way to short-circuit an ingrained bad shooting habit. Shooting on the range is good, but you should also practice at home with dry fire and laser trainers. Many laser training systems have shot timers and sound a start tone, which will add some pressure to your practice.
Do Not Get Discouraged
Bad habits can take a lot of time and conscious effort to break, as anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking or eating junk food can tell you. It can be a frustrating experience at first. Remember that habits are behaviors that became ingrained through long-term repetition, so they probably won’t go away overnight. You will have to stick to it for a while. It is also better to practice a little every day than to try to correct the problem during one intensive range session. Your goal is to replace a bad ingrained behavior with a good one, and only repetition will accomplish that.
The Bottom Line
Working on overcoming your bad shooting habits consistently is the key to success. Weeks of excuses about why you haven’t started working on it yet, followed by a three-hour range session, and then nothing for another couple of weeks is not the best way to go about it. Even if you are only able to practice dry fire for fifteen minutes every day, you will eventually begin to make progress. Once it is identified, any bad habit can be overcome with concentration and diligent effort.
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