The Paradox of Shooting # 1

I hear this a lot:

“Coach, I tried so hard to make it better during a match, but it didn’t work.”

Behind this phrase, there are so many emotions: disappointment, frustration, regret...

And I don't always know what to answer.

Because simply saying, "In shooting, the harder you try, the less you get," doesn't really help. So I've decided to try to break down this phenomenon.

First of all, I'd like to say that trying harder during a match is natural. It comes from our best intentions, out of our best understanding, and I cannot blame anyone for that.

We think that during a match we need to aim better, pull the trigger more smoothly, maybe hold longer to stabilise the arm, or, vice-versa, shoot faster before the sights start to move and then jerk the trigger. We try to improve things that we didn't pay attention to during training. As a result, we start focusing on various things that we never practised. We try to control everything, including our emotional state.

You can actively control your stance, your grip, your sight focus, your trigger pull, your follow-through.

But you cannot directly control the score, whether this shot will be a 9, a 10, or a 10.8 or what other people around you do.

When athletes attempt to control things that cannot be controlled, tension appears.

Tension interferes with execution. Execution deteriorates. And the result they desperately wanted becomes less likely.

The more desperately you try to manufacture a perfect shot, the more elusive it becomes. Thus, under match pressure, these "harder"efforts often produce the opposite effect.

This is one of the strangest lessons in precision shooting: effort and results aren't always connected in the way we expect.

In most areas of life, trying harder usually produces better results. Work harder. Study harder. Train harder. Get better results.

Then we arrive at the shooting range and discover a paradox:

The harder we try to shoot a ten, the less likely we are to shoot one.

The problem is not effort itself. The problem is applying effort to the wrong thing.

Let me give you a typical example. A shooter starts a match with a series of good shots. They feel confident and relaxed. The trigger moves naturally, and the shot breaks almost by itself. Then they notice they are shooting well. Suddenly, the next shot becomes important. "This must be a ten." The trigger slows down. The aiming becomes more careful. The shooter starts analysing every movement of the sights. What was automatic becomes manual. The result is often a worse shot, despite a greater effort to make it perfect. Nothing improved. The shooter simply got in the way of their own performance. Sounds familiar?

Have you ever noticed that some of your best shots happened when you were not trying to make them perfect? Perhaps you were focused on your process (I call it “consumed by the process” or you were “dissolved in the process”). Perhaps you were simply executing what you had trained without thinking too much. The shot broke automatically, and only afterwards did you realise it was a ten. This is not an accident. Performance often improves when trust replaces control, i.e. you “switch off” your conscious mind and allow your body to do the work it had been trained for. Although it takes time to develop.

But if you take the elite shooters, you'll see that they are not passive. They are not relaxed in the sense of being careless. They are deeply committed to the process while remaining detached from the outcome. They apply maximum attention and appropriate effort to execution. They apply almost no emotional effort to forcing a result. This balance is difficult to learn.

Beginners usually try to make good scores happen. Experienced shooters learn to let good scores emerge from good execution.

The paradox of precision shooting is that excellence often appears when we stop chasing it.

Trying harder to achieve the result is often exactly what prevents it.

The harder you try, the less you get.

Until you learn where effort truly belongs.

Many match problems are not caused by lack of skill. They are caused by lack of trust in the skill already developed during training. The harder you try during a match, the more you move from execution into correction. But correction belongs in training. Trust belongs in competition. However, the development of trust is the hardest thing that a shooter needs to achieve, and probably, it is the theme for another post…

Meanwhile, I usually say: “during training we rehearse THE shot process; during match – mental processeS”. During a match, we do not try to improve something – it’s too late – we learn to apply what we’ve worked on during training, just under a different mental state.

Many shooters unconsciously treat the match as a final opportunity to fix everything. They're no longer competing. They're still coaching themselves; they're judging themselves. Or they're still experimenting. They're still correcting. They're still searching. And searching is the opposite of trusting. At that moment, they're no longer executing. They're troubleshooting. And troubleshooting under pressure is exhausting.

The paradox is not merely that "trying harder gives less".

The paradox is that after years of training, many shooters perform best when they finally trust what they have already learned.