How to Shoot Better, In A Shorter Amount of Time

The other day, I was talking with someone about what I did and I was having a hard time explaining the concept of muscle memory and neural pathways.

They’re the key to shooting better in a shorter amount of time, but they’re not always the easiest thing to understand.  I finally ended up with a simple, understandable description that is better than anything I’d thought of before.  I’m guessing that means that I heard it from someone else at some point.  If that’s the case and you know where it came from, let me know 🙂

In any case, it all starts in the brain…

Your brain has 100 billion neurons, or brain cells, all connected together in a massive web.

This is oversimplified, but when you go to do something for the first time, your mind has to figure out how to send a signal from one neuron to another.

It’s kind of like looking at a map of the US and figuring out the best route from New York to Los Angeles, taking speed limits, construction, and weather into account.

Only, if you will imagine this with me for a second, every city and town (Think of towns as neurons) has a bridge (or a synapse) going into and out of the town and every bridge is out from coast to coast.

So, the first time you make the trip, it’s HARD. You’ve got to span the gap at every bridge crossing (synapse) and that is awkward and slow.

The second time you make the trip, you take the exact same route and it’s a little easier. You’ve built the equivalent of a neural pathway and can use the bridges you made the last time, and improve them a little so that they’re a little wider and stronger.

The sooner you make that 2^nd trip after the first trip, the better shape the roads and bridges will be, but you still need to take your time until you’ve made the bridges wider and stronger.

At first, it’s very important to take the same route every time. If you start making detours or alternating your route too early in the process…say you go through Chicago the first trip, St. Louis the 2^nd trip, and Dallas the 3^rd trip, you are cutting new ground and building new bridges with each trip.

This wastes a LOT of time, money, and energy. You end up with 3 mediocre routes (neural pathways) instead of 1 really good one.

So, each time you make the trip, you take the same route and improve the bridges and, before you know it, you’re able to go full speed from coast to coast.

Once you’ve got the road and bridges built, you can switch cars (guns) and still take advantage of the route you’ve made (neural pathway).

Once the route is built, you can even take slight scenic detours along the way without seriously affecting the overall trip.

Then, you decide to go crazy. You build a rail system, enclose it in a tunnel (myelin sheath) to protect it from elements, tunnel through mountains, and straighten out the curves. Eventually, you shoot through it like a canister flying through the tube at a bank drive-through…all you do is get in one end of the tube and you shoot through the tube at super-human speeds without any steering or conscious thought required to flawlessly make it to the other end.

This is the process that people go through with all skills…not just shooting. And there are ways to speed it up. I’ve talked about many of them before, but here are the biggies…

1. Practicing exactly the same way, every single time, (focus) will allow you to master a skill faster than random practice, so only practice as long as you can without your form failing.That’s one of the reasons why I promote dry fire practice so much. Since there is no trip or range fees involved with dry fire, you don’t have to stretch out your practice time to “get your money’s worth.” You simply practice until your form starts falling off, and then stop.
2. Practicing skills while in “flow state” or “the zone” will allow you to achieve mastery 230% faster than normal. Depending on the definition, flow state is a state of mind that everyone has been in at one time or another where fear disappeared, creativity flowed, and you felt on top of the world. Few know that flow state is something that you can trigger instantly and on command and we cover how to do that in the Insight Deadly Accuracy Home Study Course that you can get >HERE<
3. Neural pathways get cemented in the brain faster when there are large amounts of good OR bad hormones or neural transmitters released like adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine. The bang, flash, and recoil of firing a gun causes all of these chemicals to be released, regardless of how well or poorly you shoot. Because of that, it’s important to do as much of your training and practice with dry fire as possible and use live fire to reinforce or cement in the neural pathways developed with dry fire.

So, next time you’re going shooting or doing dry fire practice, remember to focus on practicing the exact same motion with every rep and go as slow as you need to to maintain perfect form. Speed will come, but it will come as a result of developing smooth, efficient neural pathways, not from simply forcing your joints to move faster.

If you need tools to help with this, ALL of the dry fire products that I have created and sell are purpose built and proven to help shooters develop neural pathways as quickly and efficiently as possible, including:

Dry Fire Training Cards – They cost less than a box of practice ammo and they deliver the most bang for the buck in the firearms training world. There’s no other training tool that comes close to the value that you get from these cards. 50+ drills from myself and special operations personnel and the elite trainers who teach them.

30-10 Pistol Course – From former Force Recon Marine, Chris Graham…this course will take you from wherever you’re at as a shooter to being in the top 10% of all shooters in less than 15 minutes per day for 30 days.

Concealed Carry Masters Course – From retired Navy SEAL, Larry Yatch…over 9 hours of DVD instruction that includes cutting edge classroom, follow along dry fire drills (think P90x…except with concealed carry pistol training instead of a workout), and live fire examples. Or the live, in-person version of this training >HERE<

That’s all for today. Questions? Comments? Let me know by commenting below: