Can one DVD change everything? Can it have so much impact that it helps you distill a bedevilingly complicated sport into 4 simple things? Can it take an upper C class 12 year old shooter an have him shoot with the “big boys” for 5 of 6 stages yesterday? Saul Kirch’s “Mastering the Mental Game” can.
Yesterday, Brian and I shot an IDPA match down in Las Vegas. The evening before Brian had watched, on my enthusiastic recommendation, the DVD. Or part of the DVD… I’ll explain how watching only 1/2 of it impacted things in a bit. But first, lets cover the video…
The video, which is just Saul Kirsch – a top rated IPSC shooter shooting mostly in Europe – talking to a class in Sweden. No shooting. Not a gun in sight. But what he says is magic.
Here it is in a nutshell:
- Only things you do subconsciously are fast. Training’s purpose is to build subconscious skills. Like drawing your pistol without thinking about it. And finding the front sight again after recoil. If you have to think to do it, you are slow. An analogy is your drive to work… you don’t remember doing it, but somehow you got there safely. He talks about how to train to build subconscious skills.
- The subconscious minds does what you see and it doesn’t understand negatives. It understands only the last 3 words of “don’t hit a no-shoot”. The subconscious uses pictures as instructions. So visualize good things – like double alphas, and getting a round of applause as top overall shooter. Basically, this section is “how do you tell the subconscious what you want it to do”.
- Stress is good. The adrenaline it produces makes the subconscious faster. BUT not too much or it makes it worse. He talks about how to ramp stress up or down into an optimum bell shaped curve of peak performance. In summary, “how do you make your existing skills faster on match day”.
- Stage analysis/tactics are for the conscious mind. But as soon as you can you should visualize your plan to give it to the subconscious mind.
Brian has been working since Christmas with his new airsoft to make fundamentals like drawing, movement, transitions and picking up the front sight be subconscious. I knew that was important before the video. So we started him on a daily training program to build those subconscious skills.
But the video showed him to visualize properly. And he did that to good effect on 5 of 6 stages, putting in top 3 to 5 scores (of 50 shooters).
But as the final stage came, he knew he had a great run going, and he was stressing. And what part of the video hadn’t he got to yet… how to reduce stress. He tanked the last stage, and while he had a good match, if he had just shot in the middle of the pack on that stage, he would have finished 4th of 50 shooters overall. He just didn’t have the stress management skills yet to handle the brink of success.
So we plan to finish the video this week and integrate some stress into his training using drills like 10 alphas, where you have to draw and shoot an alpha, repeatedly until you get 10 in a row. The stress you get at shots 9 and 10 can be significant, since you have to start again from one if you miss.
In summary, the DVD was a pleasantly helpful surprise. It will be available for loan at the next match.