Managing Your Shooting Under Stress

In competition or combat, shooting well under stress is an important ability but stress often undoes our shooting ability. Let’s take a look at some aspects of stress and how to manage it for better performance. We will mostly look at competition for examples today because competition is narrower in scope.

When preparing for a competition, I don’t generally feel stressed until a few minutes before I have to shoot. I feel more stress in some competitions and less stress in others. To be clear, stress is a good thing in competition, as in life. Some stress can help us produce amazing results, while too much stress can cause us to crash and burn. Managing your stress and using it to excel is the goal here. I am definitely not trying to eliminate stress.

The first and perhaps most important way to mitigate stress is to feel confident in your abilities. If you are well-trained and well-practiced, your level of confidence in your ability to execute on demand should be high. I have found that the best way for me to feel comfortable with what I’m about to do is to have done it repeatedly at a high level (for me). If you are inconsistent in practice, hope is all you have if you want to pull off a good run.

There are at least two aspects to this. Frequency of practice and level of execution during practice. If I practice once a month and do well each time, I may do well in competition. If I practice once a month and am inconsistent in my shooting during that practice, I am more likely to crash and burn.

If I practice almost every day, and my results are inconsistent, I’m still left wondering about my performance when it counts. If I practice almost every day, and I practice correctly, I can’t help but perform well. That level of performance will come out in competition more often than not. Maybe we will talk about proper practice in the future.

I believe in the power of words and self-talk, but only to an extent. To that end, I make sure that I think positively about my abilities while still noting my deficiencies. If you don’t track what you are bad at, you can’t work on improving it. Acknowledging your weaknesses is how you eliminate them. I don’t dwell on my mistakes and beat myself up, but I certainly pay attention to them and then work to improve them.

Leading up to shooting a stage, I visualize my performance. I learned about this technique very early on in my development, but I mostly ignored it until relatively recently. Whether waiting at phase line yellow for the execute command to come over the net, or waiting for the next stage in a match, the more perfectly you can visualize yourself doing what comes next, the better you will do it. It seems slow and boring, and it is WORK. It does not come easily to me. You have to find a little piece of internal quiet to focus on and try to see, hear, feel and experience the event in your mind. Go through your actions as perfectly as possible in as much detail as possible. This is where you only see perfection, there is no room for looking at weaknesses at this point. The more detailed you can make your visualization, the better it will work. Color is better than black and white and “video” is better than stills. I can’t prove that empirically, but I believe it to be true. If you can only see black and white stills, go with that. The more you work on it over time, the better your images will become.

When I was younger and fought fairly regularly, I never dwelled on my size or strength relative to the other guy. I was always smaller, and even in great shape, smaller usually means weaker. Instead, I focused on my speed, agility, and technique. I also focused on my unwillingness to lose. That unwillingness to quit or lose has held me in good stead throughout my life and can absolutely be channeled for shooting competitions.

Ultimately, the ability to perform at your highest level, and the lack of ability to quit, is where you want your training and mental imagery to take you. I dropped a plate at the Flagler Cup last week, which took me from a High Master score to a Master score. I was pretty disappointed when it happened, and I briefly thought about giving up, even while I shot the remaining plates on that string. My prior preparation and self-image very quickly took over and it seemed like two people were having a conversation in my head. One wanted to quit because I could no longer shoot the score I wanted. The other voice forcefully shut the first one down, reminding me that while I may not get the score I wanted, quitting was simply not an option. I had more shots to fire, regardless of score and I needed to do that as perfectly as I could.

Because of that mental battle, I only dropped one plate. Other shooters dropped a plate and then proceeded to drop the next one as well. They either gave up mentally or were unable to fix their mistake in real-time so they repeated it. In that instance, I ended up in third place. I don’t really care where I place, as I simply want to shoot the best I can, but better to place than give up. Ironically, had I not dropped that plate, I still would have been in third, as the guy who came in second would have still beat me by a couple of points. This is one reason why I don’t shoot to “win”. I shoot to excel, and do as well as I can. That is in no way dependent on where I place.

We’ve looked at some of the mental strategies for managing stress, how about the physical side? Shooting a bunch of competitions is a great way to start. I have never found IDPA or USPSA to induce stress in me, but if they do for you, have at it. In my case, Steel Challenge and Action Pistol do it for me. My heart rate goes up and in extreme cases, I get butterflies in my stomach. In Steel Challenge, I often only feel that stress on my first stage, though I have felt it on other stages as well. It can be especially noticeable when you need to relax in order to move fast, but instead, you are tensing up.

In Action Pistol, I tend to feel stress at every stage. Weirdly, I did not feel much stress at Bianchi this past week, but at Flagler the weekend before, I felt a lot of stress on each stage. I would describe my arousal state at Bianchi as fairly “flat”. I don’t think that is a great place to be for top performance. Some emotional and physiological arousal is needed for most people to perform at their best.

Todd Green once ran a class called C.U.S.S. – Control Under Simulated Stress. In the class, there were penalties for every missed shot, and stress was added in different ways to every evolution. Sometimes it was competition against other students, sometimes it was shooting a FAST test with $20 bills surrounding the 3X5 card. I did not get to take this class, but TLG and I did similar things during much of our training together. For many shooters, this can be a good way of inducing stress without a very elaborate setup.

One way that I think is useless for inducing stress is the stereotypical “stress course.” This is usually a run-and-gun type course of fire that employs physical exercise to raise the shooter’s heart rate. LE and Mil units often use these types of courses, and though they can be great fun and good competition among teammates, I think they fall very short of replicating either internally or externally induced stress.

JAG and I are working on a modern approach to inducing stress while training, and we hope to share it with you in the near future. Since it involves a little technology, it is already inducing stress in me! Stay tuned and hopefully, we will launch our idea shortly. In the meantime, give the above ideas a shot the next time you are concerned about your stress level at a shoot. It may not work the first time, but the more you practice these strategies, the better they will work for you.