More Shooting Under Stress

I shot a 1907 this week during an Action Pistol club match, a PR for me in a match. Getting closer to 1920! Let’s look at a couple more ideas for managing stress that I left out of the last post.

A time-honored method of dealing with stress is controlling your breathing. Sometimes called stress breathing, belly breathing, or combat breathing, these techniques have been around the martial arts world forever, and are also used with great success in Lamaze. There are many variations on how to do it correctly, but the common theme is a deep breath through the nose or mouth and a slow exhalation through the mouth. During inhalation, your abdomen expands, and during exhalation, it contracts. Your chest does not move in a noticeable way. Chest breathing, which is shallower, is generally considered to be bad and does not help mitigate stress.

I have been doing this since I was a kid. I breathe this way most of the time. Maybe my baseline ability to deal with stress pretty well is because of this, I don’t know. I do know that when I try to purposely reduce my stress level by breathing, it doesn’t seem to do anything noticeable. Regardless, I encourage you to try this technique if you haven’t, as lots of people seem to have success with it.

Another strategy I want to mention is what I call “dramatization”, or spinning yourself up. I wish I had a better term for it, so if you have one, please let me know. When I’m practicing, I try to spin myself up internally to replicate how I feel when stress hits during a match. Some days go better than others but yesterday I was able to successfully use this in my barricade practice and I really got my heart rate going! I felt a little nervous, almost exactly like I do at a match.

Finally, a practice technique that I have used since the beginning, but just recently redoubled my efforts with. When I’m shooting someone else’s par time course of fire, at work or a class, the time limits are usually more generous than I might need. So, I strive to shoot as perfectly as I can within the time limits. Usually, that means shooting first, finishing shooting first, and having the tightest group in the end. Lately, I have been changing it up and trying to simply shoot the tightest group possible within the time limits. Picture a B8 black as the scoring zone, as an example. Once I can keep everything in the 10-ring, instead of just in the black, I will speed it back up again. You can probably adapt this idea to whatever your particular situation requires.

It is this idea that caused me to take the No Fail Pistol class a couple of months ago. Take a difficult class and try to not drop a single shot for two days. This adds a fair bit of internal stress that I have not found elsewhere. I tried this at Justin Dyal’s class as well, and though I came close, I did drop a few shots. I find that putting this kind of pressure on myself really helps me replicate match stress and improves my ability to stay focused and produce.

Try some of these ideas if you aren’t already, and see if they help. If you have a technique you use that I haven’t mentioned, please share it below.