Understanding the Mental Component to Optimizing Practice

Everybody real quick, before I get into the introductory introduction to this episode, I just want to say because I've had some comments about the length of this podcast and how hard it is to kind of scroll, you know, scroll and peruse through it and find specific information that you're looking for, or how it's hard to digest all of it in one sitting. This is not something I'm doing now, because of those comments, I expected those comments and preemptively kind of prepared for them. But I think just some of you don't. All of you don't know how to find the thing that I did in order to help you with that. So what I want to say is that if you listen to this podcast on audio only, whether it be on Spotify, or Apple podcast right now, because those are the only two things that it's available on audio only. or on my website, you can look at the description of this podcast. And it has summarized all the individual topics that I talked about in every episode. So any episode you're listening to, you can do this on. It has all the topics in each episode, and it has a timestamp that you actually can click that will immediately take you to that part of the podcast. If you are looking at the podcast on Spotify, or Apple podcasts, or on my website, and you don't see that, then click where like look directly under where like the album artwork is of the episode. And you will see like a description of the episode that kind of ends in a dot dot dot. And then there's a thing that you can click that says more, or it may have an arrow down, if you click that, it will expand the description of the episode. And that's where you will find the timestamps. If it's on my website, you won't have to expand it, you can just scroll down. And if you're on YouTube, same thing, it's underneath the video, if you're looking on the website that you're watching this on YouTube on and you don't see that then again, you can click where it says more and it will expand and you can click the timestamps. So those are just there for you. So that if you can only listen to this podcast in 10 to 15 minute you know, sessions of time, you can do it by category. Or if you listen until you can't until you have to leave, you can, you know go back to a specific category. Or if you read the description, and you're like, yeah, there's some stuff here I don't really care to listen to, you can just click the ones that you're interested in listening to. And that'll help you so I just wanted to add that to make sure that all of you knew that so that it'll help you. Okay, now on to the introduction. Hello, everybody, and welcome to week three of the Journey podcast and the new recorded the second recorded episode of the podcast. This is about learning how to set up a practice by and basically, you know, how do I practice? It's a question that for some reason is so simple that I think gets overlooked a lot and is never really gone into in depth to teach people how to do it. There's plenty of interviews on other podcasts about other professionals including myself talking about practice drills or how they practice but nobody talks about the the neurological science of how we as human beings can kind of like hack our learning system to shorten the path towards getting as good as we can as fast as we can as best as possible. And that's what I hope to do in this two part series. I before I get into the summary of the topics I'm going to cover in this episode I want to say that this is heavy information. It's awesome information it's super valuable and quite possibly for me personally, my own personal belief is that this may be the most important episode that I ever record. The I'm you know, as I get better at communicating this stuff, I will probably do another version of this and you know, later on down the road, but for now this is just so important. It is literally the the all encompassing Holy Grail of how to improve your shooting. And to understand how this stuff works, literally will save you so much time so much money, so much effort. That it's it I wish that I knew this stuff when I I first started. And but I honestly think that I don't even think that science knew this stuff 20 years ago. So that's not possible. But for those of you who are starting now you have a huge leg up with some of the research that has been done. And you can take advantage of it. I want to preface this whole episode by saying, by going over this real quickly, I'm going to be talking a lot about neurological science. And like the way that the brain learns how to you how to learn, and and literally the scientific process of reprogramming the neurological circuitry that controls your muscles, and how to do that through practicing with shooting. If I were to tell you, if I may even just rephrase what I was about to say, if I were not to tell you that all of this information comes from other people, I would be doing myself and you a disservice, I do not want to come across, like what I'm about to talk about in this episode is my own personal knowledge that I have either come up with, or that I have learned in some way by myself, that would be a massive lie. And I would have so much ego involved in that explanation that really the only purpose of doing that would be to try to inflate my credibility to those of you who are listening. But the approach that I take is number one, that I want to be honest, in the fact that I am in the learning journey of trying to get better as well, just like you. And it's important for me to be transparent about all this, and tell you that because I'm learning it. as well. I mean, I'm literally researching this stuff to do this episode. And so because I'm learning along with you, it's both, you know, equally exciting as it may be, for some of you that like to hear this kind of stuff for the first time. It's, it's equally as exciting for me, but also, you know, it's new for me, and I don't have an in depth understanding of it. As much as I do under an in depth understanding of the physical and mental and visual mechanics of shooting. So although I do understand, I have researched all of this. And, and it is important, and I've gone through and and put it together in a way that hopefully gives you a filter for how to apply all the stuff for in the realm of shooting. I stumble up sometimes and and that's just human. The other reason why I'm telling you this is because if I were to just say that this is my own information, then I personally don't believe it's as credible as what it really is. Because it it would just come across as opinion or my own experiential knowledge. And there's not much credibility there. Because although my initials may be d r, I just shoot guns for a living. And so you don't want to hold things that I say, you know, to hold them as truth to the grave. So I will be transparent and telling you that this information comes from a plethora of different neurological studies and research journals that I either read, I summarized it really, really fast. And the initial contact with this information that I had that spurred my interest in it and sold me on the value of it was through listening to my favorite podcast, which is called Huberman lab and I would highly recommend any of you that enjoy literally just learning to to subscribe to this podcast and listen to the episodes that interests you. The person that hosts the podcast is Dr. Andrew Huberman. He is a research and teaching professor at Stanford University and with a specialization PhDs in neurology, neuro biology, and ophthalmology, so you know, two or three of literally the most important things when it comes to shooting because he essentially studies the way that the eyes interact with the brain and how all of that influences us as human beings.

The information in here is a combination of some stuff that he covers in different episodes, as well as See me going a little bit more in depth by looking into some of the sources that he cites. So in an effort not to continuously interject with saying this is from this source or that source, or this person or that person, I just want to start the podcast off by saying that I'm giving the credit to this information, or of this information to him. And those people, I'm not taking credit for any of the non shooting information or translations, myself, anything that has to do with shooting or translating this information to how it would work in shooting, obviously, that comes from me and not a professor at Stanford, because I highly doubt that a professor at Stanford would be able to, unfortunately, talk about how this stuff relates to shooting a gun, which is sad, but it's also true. So, with that being said, real quick, I will also just say, if you're, if this helps you, I just ask that you share this podcast or the website of this podcast with somebody that you also think that it would help. I'm trying not to market this heavily, because I don't want to dilute the the the people that are engaged with committing to this podcast, with people that won't hold their commitment over time, because curiosity can get the best of us. And, you know, if I blew up advertisement everywhere, I'd get a lot of people that may start to participate early on. But over time after they realize the commitment that's required to do all the things that I talked about, and suggest in terms of homework and submitting things on forums and coming to YouTube live events and participating and engaging either in the chat or whatever they might drop out. And I appreciate and respect all of you that, you know, do commit to this, to doing this because you know, it's a free thing. And it's a very valuable thing. And if you care about your shooting enough to, you know, pull as much of the value of this podcast out of it as possible, then your commitment level is very close to if not equal to mine as being the the producer and host of it. And I recognize that, I am thankful of that. And I appreciate that. So that's not to say that if you just want to be a passive listener, that you can't get anything out of it, you definitely can, but just not as much as as if you participate, and I don't want people that aren't going to, to continue their commitment to it to a comp to eventually have it help them accomplish their goals. I know if they're not going to, you know, commit to the whole thing. I don't want to advertise and get them interested early on, because then it will, it will make it to where those of you who do and have already decided to commit to the whole length of this will get lost in the weeds. And I in terms of my ability to see the things you're submitting are personally interact and engage and help you. And I want to make sure that I can help you. So like I said, you know, if you want to share this on social media, that's great. But the only thing I really ask is that, you know, if you know somebody that you're thinking of, as I'm explaining this, send it to them, tell them that it would be helpful. And and then hopefully we get a new person to our community. And then lastly, the let's get into the summary I guess. Sounds good. Alright, so here is the summary of topics I'm going to cover in this I want to say that the the topic of how to actually practice which is what this episode is titled, is going to be a two part topic. So I'm going to cover everything in two different episodes. The first one is going to be part one that is this one, and it's going to cover basically, some of the neurological stuff about how you learn and how to set up an ideal practice scenario. The second part part two is going to be taking that information and taking your experience that you had by following the homework that was released last week during the YouTube Live episode, which was to create and follow a practice plan which is also the homework for this week. Because I want to give you guys two weeks to do that. I'm going to take your learned experience from there and hopefully you take notes and come with questions and everything and we're going to pull that into The YouTube Live educational episode this coming Monday, the 30th of January. And I'm going to, like I said, go over your experience, answer your questions, clarify anything in this episode or things that you are confused about with your practice. And then also introduce to you the part two topics of how to actually practice which is going to basically involve taking all of this information and putting it into a translator of how exactly it should work for shooting, and how to come up with a structure, and what information we use and everything like that. So the basically, I'm gonna really fast go over just the questions I want to answer in part two on YouTube live right now. So it's going to be about, and sorry, I'm talking fast. I'm just trying to make it go quickly. It's going to be about creating the perfect practice plan. And the questions I want to answer for you are, how do I structure a practice plan? What information do I use to build out a practice plan? How can I get the information that I need to build out a practice plan? What should I specifically focus my practice session on? And how do I make that decision, the different types of shooting practice, there are so many different types of things we can, like. So many different types of formats that practice can be, and topics that it can be about and focuses that it can be on. And then I'm going to give you some examples of different types of scheduled and focus shooting practice. So I'm going to lay out some different ways to do it, give you an example, and then use some of you and the data that we have collected from you guys from filling out the chute analysis sheet. And I in explaining that I just gave away one of the answers, but that's okay. And I'm going to specifically with some of you build a practice routine out for you. So that's going to be part two, next week on the 30th. On YouTube Live. This episode is going to be about laying out the neurology of learning a new physical skill. So I want to give you guys an understanding of the way that you as a human being actually learn a physical skill. The reason why I want to do that, and the reason why I want to get into the neurology of it is that so we have a level of understanding that allows us to believe in some of the things that are required, because some of the things that are required actually require belief in them. And if we don't have belief in them, then it doesn't work. And it really makes getting a really makes making the most out of your practice sessions very, very hard. And it's literally the not understanding what I'm about to talk about is the reason why I am able to do what I do as a job because if people understood what I'm about to talk about in this episode, I hate to say this, but I also it's impossible for me to keep my mouth shut when it's talking about things like this. Because my job as a coach is to be honest. If people could do what I'm about to talk about in this episode, without knowing about it, they wouldn't really need that much instruction and the way that instruction would happen. And the communication that would happen as from the coach to the student would be much different and honestly much more efficient. So if you take lessons, this will help you make the most out of your lessons. If you don't, it'll help you make the most out of your practice. Okay, so today's topics are going to be the difference between an open loop and closed loop learning process for a physical skill. So what type of physical skills are open loop skills? What type of physical skills are closed loop skills? Why is it important to understand the difference between those two things, what it means to be one or the other of those two things, and how that how that

forces specific requirements for things that we need to include in our practice. The next thing I'm going to talk about are the three core components that we need to be consciously aware of, and include in the process of learning a new physical skill. Basically, these are like the three different lenses that we view practices through and they're all equally important and required. Then the next topic I want to get into today is understanding in how the brain learns and controls physical movement, that's going to be important. Because the more we know about that, the more we can increase the efficiency that it can do that. And if we can increase the efficiency that that it can do that in, then what we do is we shorten the path to being able to get better. And we decrease the amount of time and money and effort that it requires to get better. And who doesn't want that, then the next topic is going to be the neurological importance of failure and learning. And not just the importance of failing while you learn. But the requirement of failing while you learn it, it literally if you are not failing, when you're learning, you're not learning. And this is a super interesting topic. And basically, I'm going to tell you and talk to you about how how messing up and making mistakes and failing on what you're trying to do literally helps you learn faster. And I'm not talking about you know, learning more from losing and winning, it's not that it's totally different. Then I'm going to answer this one question that I think the answer to it may surprise some of you that question is this? Is high repetition, actually good for learning. Um, this, this was really interesting topic for me during the research phase of this episode, and I couldn't not include it. So again, is high repetition actually good for learning may surprise you the answer. And then lastly, I'm going to close this episode, but finish the first half of this topic, with giving you an understanding of what the ideal scenario for learning is. What, what environment? And do we have to be in and what things need to happen? And what things do we need to do or not do in order to create an ideal scenario to be able to learn as quickly and as well as possible? I don't know if that was good English, but yeah. Okay, so that is the topics of this episode. And we will get right into it and start the learning. Thanks for being along with this, guys. I will say that I like nerded out in this episode. So this was a lot of fun for me. If you can't already tell, I'm recording the intro and the summary after I recorded the actual episode. And so like, you may notice a difference in tone and inflection in my voice when I get into the beginning. Because now having just recorded the whole thing. I'm like, super hyped up. That's It's so cool. So I hope that you enjoyed this as much as I do. Thanks, guys. Okay, so basically, the first thing that we want to dive into, in terms of understanding how to learn a physical skill is is essentially, these two different categories of skill sets that encompass all of the physical things that we can learn. The reason why we need to learn this is because it completely determines a couple things. One, it will determine how we go about practicing that physical skill. And two, it will determine where and what we place the value that measures the success of the execution of the physical thing that we're trying to learn. So in other words of saying that, another way of saying that would be it determines what we deem important to define whether or not what we did was good or bad. And we have to also consciously recognize that we have the ability to decide what we deem is important to determine whether or not what we did was good or bad. So those two different categories are open loop and closed loop skills. The definition of those two would be that a closed loop skill is a continuous physical thing that you're doing continuous continuous physical execution of motor control, that has feedback that provides a feedback loop. As you are doing it. And as you are doing it, you continuously can adjust In the execution of your skill, to modify the feedback that you're getting. So some examples of this would be like running, or dancing, or literally walking. But one that I like to think about because it's something that I personally really enjoy is playing the guitar. The reason why playing the guitar is a closed loop skill is because it's not like I can execute these physical movements in my hands without having any feedback. And then when I'm done with them, hear the feedback, I guess, you could turn playing guitar into an an open loop skill by, you know, recording on a, an electric guitar with earplugs in so you can't hear yourself and then listening to the audio afterwards. But that's fairly complex and doesn't make any sense. But basically, it's important understand closed loop is that as you are doing the physical skill you're trying to learn, you are continuously getting feedback that you can adjust while you are executing it. An open loop physical skill, is something with external feedback that happens at the end of the execution of that thing. So that'd be like throwing darts, or hitting a golf ball, or shooting. Just specifically in the filter of shooting the what the external feedback is, I'm just going to pause for a second so you can try to think about it. Okay, the external feedback that we get from shooting is whether or not the target breaks, hopefully, that you guys came up with that. And this is incredibly important to understand, because it can, it can possibly be massively detrimental to our ability to gauge the success of what we're trying to learn. Obviously, we can all relate to the fact that it's very easy and very possible to accidentally hit a target like to do something terribly wrong with a target still breaks. I would love to be able to have that happen all the time in tournaments. But obviously it doesn't. But still it is possible. And when you when you take into consideration, the fact that most of you who are listening to this podcast, have shot sporting clays are clay targets before, that means that you already know how to shoot a target. But you may be, you know, consciously trying to relearn or learn a new way of shooting. So that that would be basically anybody who has a history of shooting, but is now going to a coach or is listening to this podcast and trying to learn some of the physical mechanics that I teach. Or maybe you bought Anthony Magna Reese's book, and you're trying to learn some of the mechanics that he talks about in the book. And there are things that you have never done before. But you already know how to hit targets.

So the danger that we can get into essentially, is that because of the fact that you will probably grade whether or not what you did was good or bad, based off of whether or not the target broke, you could accidentally do the thing that you already innately know how to do and hit the target. And Miss identify that physical movement as the thing that you are trying to learn how to do. And the way that the brain learns, and encodes and and accrete and converts, consciously driven movement into non consciously driven movement is all hugely based off of, and without getting ahead of myself, because I do want to talk about it later off of this thing that happens based off of feedback. So if you are going to shoot and you place your value in whether or not the target breaks to determine if you did what you're trying to learn correctly, then you're going to dilute the recorded memory so to speak that your brain creates of that aligns the movement that you just did, like it's your brain's memory of the motor control movement that you just did. That's aligned with The feedback response neurologically, and that say, out of a pool of 50 shots that you broke, maybe only 25 of them were executed in the way that you're trying to learn, and the other 25 are executed in the way that you are trying to unlearn. So it makes it very, very hard to learn skills quickly. In this way through an open loop skill, if we have value placed in the wrong thing. So basically, what's important to know is that now this is much more easily said than done, we have to learn to value the process over the product as we are learning. So we need to make sure that we have the awareness to sense what physically happened. And compare and contrast that with the other attempts to execute the thing that we're learning, and grade the success of that execution based off of the way it felt or the way that you actually moved rather than the result of the shot. The I'm later on in this part of the podcast going to get in a little bit more to how we can go about doing that. But I just want to keep that in, you know, in the forefront of your mind, keep that thought in the forefront of your mind for now. So real quick summary, before we get into the next topic is that shooting is an open loop skill. Open Loop skills are defined by movements with external feedback that happens after the execution of the movement. And if we miss align and misplace our value, and what we deemed to be important, then it's very easily confused, whether or not what we're doing and trying to learn is actually happening. So we want to place our value in our movement over the result of the shot. So that way we can better file these experienced movements that we're doing in practice, based off of good result of execution versus bad result of execution, that way that you can learn the physical skill faster. Cool. The let's actually just get straight into the next topic. Okay, so the next kind of topic that I want to dive into is in is something that we're just going to label like these three core components to learning something new physically. Andrew Huberman talks a lot about these in some of the podcasts that he does, where he covers, you know, the neurology of learning physical movement. And he mentioned that there are other things involved in this process. But these are the three core components that we want to consciously pay attention to. So I'm going to list them first all three, then I'm going to kind of go into each one. I'll maybe I'll leave the last one out, because it's my favorite word. So the first one is your sensory perception. The second one is your your actual physical movements. And the third one, which is my favorite word, is proprioception. I needed I will say, just a little thrown a little bone to myself. This was not an example of me being a fan of this Huberman lab podcast and learning about proprioception and incorporating it into my teaching. It was kind of actually the opposite. Where when I was listening to this podcast that I that he talks about these three components, and he got to that third word, I've literally almost crashed my car driving down the highway because I was so excited. If you if you want a good laugh, you can just imagine me doing that. Okay, so let's go back up sensory perception. sensory perception is essentially what you are consciously paying attention to. And this can be auditory perception, visual perception, physical feeling perception, but basically it doesn't matter what it is there. You know, there's no better or version or best answer to what should you attach your sensory perception to, essentially it just is what it is it whatever it is that you are consciously paying attention to. That's very, very important. An example of that this component of, you know, neurological learning would be through the filter of shooting would be like, consciously being aware and perceptive of how the target is moving, and the visual information that you're getting from it, and how that makes you feel, and what it feels like to respond in to the target with beautiful harmony and synchronous movement. If I even said that word correctly. Also, if you hear a weird click noise right there, I like to talk with my hands, and I got a little excited there and actually hit the spacebar and stop recording, and I had to restart. So that's just a little FYI. Okay, so the second thing, your actual physical movements, this literally what it sounds like, by by definition, it's, it's the muscular control of your limbs. Another way of saying it, an example of this would be like, your awareness of how you're rotating in your body. And, and, or how you're mounting the gun with your hands. It's like, it's a different, actually, I should not have said your awareness, it's really better defined as like the planned movement. So it'd be like your understanding of how you would be rotating your body and how you should mount the gun with your hands. Because that differentiates it a little bit better from sensory perception, we, you know, perception would be being aware of the things that you're experiencing, the movement, component of this neurological learning process would be like, just the conceptual understanding of that, you know, like, knowing that to rotate with the bird in a way that creates harmony with it would require good balance, and unchanged weight distribution. And what it would feel like to do that, and then how exactly you should execute that, physiologically, or physically, that would be that second category of actual movement. Now, the third category, and my favorite word, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit on my hands. So I don't pause the recording again,

proprioception, this, I don't feel like I need to go in depth and explain this, because I talk about it so much, I'll just give a quick definition. That basically, it's like your body's three dimensional awareness of itself without being consciously paid attention to the one thing I will use as an example, that I heard, not from me. But I just thought was such a cool way to conceptually understand what proprioception is, and how it works is this. So if just imagine this scenario, if this is this does not apply to you. But I would imagine a lot of you are sitting down right now. So if you are sitting down and listening to this, and you were to get up and walk around, you would not have to think about where you're sorry, got an email for the little things, you would not have to think about where your feet are landing on the ground, relative to one another or relative to the ground. But imagine for a second, that would be proprioceptive movement of your legs. So, you know, you're just walking, you're not consciously looking at your legs, you're just, you know, you're not consciously aware, you're proprioceptive ly aware and your proprioceptive ly controlling those things. But just imagine for a second that you're you were sitting in a way that both of your legs fell asleep and got numb and tingly. And now in that scenario, imagine standing up and trying to walk around, you would immediately notice how difficult it would be to walk around and how clumsy you would feel. It'd be like really, really hard and probably a little painful if you got it to the point where it started to get a little tingly, but it would be hard to walk because you have completely disconnected your proprioceptive control of your legs and you're forcing that to happen with visual and conscious control. You would not be getting any proprioceptive feed back from your legs. And like I said, it would just it would have to be, you would have to be controlling them extremely consciously, without any feeling. That is really cool example of what proprioception is the same exact muscles being used the same exact part of your body being used. But one is very conscious, and without proprioceptive feedback, and the one and the other is the opposite. So if I were to translate this example, to shooting with a gun, if, you know, basically, that's translate that example to shooting with a gun through the scenario that all of you probably are in right now, which is that you know how to shoot but you may be talking about or listening to this podcast, because you're trying to learn a new way to shoot or you're trying to get better at doing a specific thing. Your proprioceptive movement with your gun would be the movement that happens if you don't consciously think about control, or consciously feel that movement. It's the automatic auto pilot, intuitive response, subconscious nonconscious, however you want to call it, that's what that proprioceptive movement is, when your movement switches into being consciously controlled, consciously aware of that's when it is not proprioceptive. It is possible to consciously process the feeling of proprioceptive movement. And that is important to learning. And we'll get into that a little bit later. But I just want to make sure that we understand that those three components are the things that we want to focus on, focusing on. Let me say that, again, we want to focus on focusing on those three things, as we're trying to learn new physical movement. I'll lay out a little bit later, why and how we use those things. But for now, just know, the three components of learning a physical skill are your sensory perception, the actual physical movements that you're using, and your proprioception. Let's get quickly kind of into just a summary of the neurology involved in the physical movement. This part I'm going to go over quickly, because it's not important that we I go through the scientific explanation of what these things are, it's just important that we understand what they are, I actually don't even care if you remember the names of them, you can use your own names, if you want to, I'll come up with some on the spot here just to make it more simple. But let's just go into it real quick. Okay, so what I want to lay out for you guys is essentially just the neurology of physical movement, and motor control of your body. There's basically three components to this again, I guess three is an important number in neurology. And those three things are CPGs, which is an abbreviation for central pattern generators. It also means something else, but those are fancy words that I can't pronounce. The second thing is upper motor neurons. And the third thing is lower motor neurons. So your CPGs we'll just call them the non conscious drivers are what control your already learned physical movement. This would be things like walking, breathing, blinking your eyes, or through the filter of shooting, the physical motor control movement that happens when you are not thinking about doing something. So it'd be like the Think of CPGs are the things that control the stuff that you would consider your bad habits that happen on accident. And by mistake. A great example of this would be like if you're, if you're trying to shoot a Shawn del after the apex and you're connecting with it through the apex. A very common mistake to make is that we roll the roll the shoulders and end up leaning over in a bad position. The control of your muscle of your muscles during that physical movement is all being done by your central pattern generators. nonconscious drivers, which let me just note that that is not a scientific term. I'm just making it up right now so that it's easier for you to remember the nonconscious for Iris thing. But that's all being done through the controlled through your central pattern generators, because you're not consciously thinking about it as it happens, basically the well, yeah, I already said that the upper motor neurons, we'll call them, the conscious drivers. So just again, CPGs are non conscious, upper motor neurons are conscious. That is what controls the movement of your body during deliberate on learned physical movement. So when you're consciously controlling and thinking about the movement of your body, as you're trying to learn a physical skill, that is your upper motor neurons, communicating and talking to what the next thing is to control your muscles. And so it's important to differentiate the two. So that we understand that the next one, which is your lower motor neurons, and very simply, that's just the, your lower motor neurons just basically control the movement of your muscles. So that that is the signal firing that happens that, you know, engages the movement of your muscles, it's not something that is conscious or non or it is non conscious. But basically, it's, it's like the messenger will say. So we have the CPGs, non conscious, upper motor neurons conscious lower motor neurons, messenger, the the upper motor neurons, so the conscious drivers communicate both with the CPGs and the lower motor neurons. So your conscious driver will communicate with your non conscious driver and the messenger when you're trying to physically learn a new skill. That's important to understand. Because that means that there's a very, very high level of importance that we should put on what we are consciously thinking about. And controlling when we're trying to learn a new physical skill. Trying to learn something new, trying to learn a new physical mechanic or trying to improve the way that you connect in and harmonize in movement with a target cannot be done effectively, if you're not consciously controlling your movement. That is a lot easier said than done.

The that conscious aspect of what's happening during the shot is so easily lost in our desire to hit the target. So if we pull back what we just talked about earlier, about the three components to learning a physical skill, and then the open versus closed loop skills, we can kind of start to connect the dots and understanding that basically, because shooting is an open loop skill, and it gives us external feedback. And that external feedback is whether or not the target breaks. If we place the value in whether or not the target breaks, that means we really care and we want to hit the bird or we're afraid of missing the bird, then we're going to catalog the learned physical movement. Or I should say we're going to catalog the just recently executed physical movement as good or bad depending on the result, but not depending on the actual success of whether or not we did what we're trying to learn. That would happen if we had a missile assigned area of sensory perception. So if we're, we're putting too much of our conscious awareness and watching the target break, then we're putting the value of the result of the shot as the highest thing, and we're ignoring the proprioceptive physical movements of our body. And because our conscious attention is on the sensory perception of what we're seeing when after we pull the trigger, which is the target break, then we don't have conscious attention and control of our physical movements and our proprioceptive movements. And then therefore you will be shooting with control of your body being done by your non conscious driver or your central pattern generators, and then you are not going to be rude really able to identify the difference between a good shot and a bad shot, even if both of them are good and bad, literally actually give, let me give you this scenario. Let's say you have a poorly executed physical movement that results in a broken target. And then immediately afterwards, you have a really good executed physical movement that resulted in a missed target, if you valued the result of those two shots more than the physical process of what happened. So another word way of saying that would be if you were, if you were consciously deciding to be aware of watching the target break, instead of consciously deciding to be aware of how your physical body was moving, then you would have just done all of the movement in both of those shots with your non conscious drivers, the CPGs. And then you would be unable to differentiate the what those two shots you wouldn't be able to say, Oh, I don't. Yeah, basically, what your response if I was coaching you, and that happened, and I asked you tell me what was different about the second shot versus the first shot, you you would literally only be able to answer, I don't know, I don't really know what was different because I, I can't, I wasn't consciously controlling my muscles. So I don't really know how my body felt during the shot, the only thing I have to go off of is that one target broke and the other one didn't. And so I'm going to, when I say I, I'm meaning you. So then you would make the incorrect assumption that the first shot was better than the second when reality, when in reality, it's the opposite. That's a I'm sorry, that that's hard to follow just an audio. But basically, what I'm trying to communicate to you is that if we don't assign conscious attention to the very specific movement that we're trying to learn, then not just the way that you will perceive it will end up being confusing, but actually, and literally proven by medical science. In neurology, your brain will be confused as to what happened. And you will actually be learning bad movement. This is literally how bad habits get developed in our sport. It's it's how they get developed in in all things. But bad habits in terms of movement in shooting happen, because we're focused on the wrong thing. And we're searching for that, for that external feedback to be a broken target. And in the pursuit of that we're not paying attention to how we're achieving that result. And so the brain catalogs, the the the response of what happens in your brain chemistry, as Oh, all these broken targets are changing my brain chemistry in a positive way. I'll get into that, like literally in the next topic. But this chemical is being released every time I break the target. And that's a good chemical and that. And as a brain, that's the type of movement that I want to remember how to do because it gave me the release of this chemical. So I'm going to remember this, and all those ones that didn't give me the release of that chemical, all those targets that didn't break, we're going to not remember those. And so over time you develop a central pattern generators that, that create a neurological pathway that control your body to proprioceptive ly respond in movement in the wrong way. I personally think that that scientific explanation is fascinating. I know that some of you are like, Oh my God, this guy is just so annoying to listen to because I who cares about science, I just want to know how to break a bird. The translation of that if that's your response to what I just said, is that more simply, if you're focusing on breaking the target when you practice as opposed to what you should be focusing on, which is how your body is moving. So Oh, you should, instead of being focused on observing the bird brake, you should be consciously attentive to how your body feels. And you should be consciously controlling your body during the shot. If, if you're focusing on the wrong thing, you will literally be by your own choice in graining, poor movement and undesired mechanics into the way that your body will move in a tournament, when you're looking at the bird, and not thinking about the the mechanics that you're trying to apply, which, ideally is the way that we should approach every target shot and competition. Just real quick sidebar, based off of everything that we're talking about here, you can make this assumption. In practice, we want to be very consciously aware and attentive, and in control of the way that our body moves. So that we can over time ingrain good physical movement into our non conscious movement. But in a tournament, always, even if you're in the process of learning something new, you always want to be consciously attentive and aware of just seeing the target so that you can allow those CPGs to control your movement, the movement of your body and gun non consciously. Because going back to something that I talked about in the previous episode on on the formal educational YouTube live, the way that our eyes work, is that we have two different styles of movement, I'm gonna go over this very fast, we have two different styles of movement.

Psychotic movement and smooth pursuit movement, smooth pursuit movement is when your eyes move very smoothly, and you never lose a visual image as they're moving, psychotic movement, you could redefine as I snap. And both of those styles of movements are done using the same ocular muscles. So the muscle behind your eye controls your eye to move, using both of those styles of movement. Psychotic movement is snappy, very fast. And if you record a video of your eyes, it looks like your eyes jump really quick, smooth pursuit movement is slow and smooth. And if you were to record your eyes, it looks very clean and smooth. But and they're both controlled by the same muscle. The difference is that that same muscle is sent a signal using two different neurological pathways. For smooth pursuit movement, it requires conscious attention on something in your vision, to engage the ability to move your eyeballs that way for psychotic movement, it does not. So you have two different neurological pathways controlling the same muscle. And you can you can experience this right now, if you pick two different things in your vision right now that are separated from each other, and make it you know, you know, a good amount of separation in between each thing. So you can actually experience the movement of your eyes, but look at the one on the left. And then try to look at the one on the right. And you'll you will be feeling psychotic movement because you're going from the left object to the right object that left object right object and you're not seeing the image that your brain is actually getting during the movement of your eyes because the brain shuts it off. Because if it didn't shut it off, you'd throw up immediately on the spot. Now, look at that left object again and try to move your eyes to the right object very smoothly without feeling little snappy movements of your eyeballs. It's not neurologically possible, unless you put something in your vision. And you can do this with your finger hold your hand out and point at the left object. Now instead of focusing on that left object, I want you to look at your hand or your finger, whatever, and then move your finger over to the right object. And as you do that, maintain conscious attention to your finger. And you will notice now that your eyes are moving very smoothly. It's actually not possible to do this. If you have Oh man, I'm going to make some people mad here. Take a look at the left object, put your finger up right underneath it or right to the sign of it anywhere, it doesn't matter, just make it to where your finger is very close to where your eyes are looking, but not exactly on it so that you're not focusing on your finger, you're focusing on the left object. Now move your finger slowly over to the right object, and try to move your eyes smoothly to the right object in sync with your finger, but not looking and paying attention to your finger, it's still not neurologically possible, because you, you don't have something in the center ocular position of your vision for you to consciously connect your attention to and engage that neurological pathway to control your ocular muscle using those lower motor neurons. Super, super interesting. So because that is scientific fact. And it's also fact scientific fact that in order to proprioceptive ly connect your gun movement to the target movement, which would be required to have the highest level of connection with the target, we have to be engaging in smooth pursuit, visual movement. Why? Because that proprioception, by definition is that non conscious control of your of your body. So and go back to what I just talked about what those three components to learning a physical skill, sensory perception, physical movement and proprioception, I gave the example of what would happen if you've lost the feeling in your legs and you tried to walk and how hard then clumsy you would feel. That's because you're having to do it consciously without proprioceptive feedback. And so if we are consciously moving the gun, because we're looking at the gun while we're moving, then we don't have proprioceptive movement of the gun. And because we're consciously paying attention to the gun, we don't have smooth pursuit, ocular movement with the target, and that it creates this big mess of a thing that's going on, where the target will look really fast, it'll look blurry, it'll look jumpy, and it'll elevate your emotional state, and you'll lose control of your body and your gun and it will never feel very, very good. But, but if you do it correctly, with conscious attention to the bird, smooth pursuit, movement engaged on the target, and proprioceptive movement, or i e, Si, P G, those nonconscious central pattern generators, controlling the movement of your body and gun, that's where we experience that feeling of like, Whoa, that target looks so big, and detailed and smooth, and it almost felt like I slowed down time. So the that that is the only way to do that. So going back to talking about that we need to have conscious attention control and awareness of our physical movement in practice, but not in a tournament. And we need to be totally consciously attentive and aware and connected to the target when we should a tournament. Like you literally want to consciously decide that you will be visually focusing on the target during a tournament. Because all day every day 100% of the time, smooth pursuit, ocular movement, combined with proprioceptive physical movement will net you a better result of broken targets, even if the physical movement is bad, compared to psychotic visual movement with consciously controlled physical movement. That is just fact all the time. So another way of saying what I'm just took probably too long for most of you to explain is that we should care about our movement in practice, and we should care about seeing the target in a tournament. Because if we care about movement in a tournament, we're actually going to be doing ourselves a disservice as far as what the predetermined purpose of a tournament is, which is breaking the most amount of targets possible. Now everything that I just said does not hold true if you are going to a tournament for the purpose of practice. So if you're going to a tournament to try to perform as good as you can, don't try to do anything that you're learning because it won't be as good. But if you're going in, so instead just go on autopilot mode and look at the bird and let your body work. But then the goal is to in practice over time, rewrite the way that the central pattern generators control your body, so that when you're doing it non consciously, they make, they can communicate with those lower motor neurons, those messengers in a way that controls your body. In a in a physical and mechanical, a physically and mechanically better movement. I hope that makes sense. If everything I just said there is confusing, then please feel free to send me an email to ask me to. To kind of like summarize or clarify what I just said. So two last two little points to finish off the neurology of the physical movement stuff. I think I already said this, but I just want to say it one more time, you're if you're using your upper motor neurons, so that is the conscious drivers of your movement. If you're consciously moving,

those upper motor neurons communicate both with the CPGs and the messengers, ie the lower motor neurons. And then to summarize, basically, everything I just said, you can, you can hold this sentence as as fact, if you already know how to do something, and you're doing it, you're using CPGs. If you don't already know how to do it, and you're trying to learn, you're using upper motor neurons or the conscious drivers. But you will always be using the lower motor neurons to control the movement of your muscles. I hope that that helps you guys, the reason why it's important for me to explain that there is because we have to understand that when, during practice, when we're assigning value to what we just executed, the brain remembers patterns, essentially. So what happens is, if we do it right, and we get this feedback, like oh, that was a good shot, then your brain will basically like save the execution and the signal pattern firings of what happened with your lower motor neurons, or what happened with your upper motor neurons, your lower motor neurons and your CPGs. And it saves it let's just say, you know, talking about computer speak, like it saves that as a file. And, and then the more saved files that are very, very close in similarity between each other in terms of the order or the structure of those three types of neurological control of your body, the more of those that are the same, the more that that becomes controlled by the central pattern generators. So, yeah, I think after that I'm confused. So no, I'm just kidding. Let's, let's move on to the next thing. Actually, you know what, no, let's, let's do this. Let's summarize it this way, in in total simplicity as much as I can go. Let's think about this. You need to consciously decide what to attach your sensory perception to, ie, think about the question of what am I going to focus on while trying to learn this specific thing. You can focus on visual information, your visual attention, or proprioception. If so, you need to consciously decide while you're trying to learn something that you are, you're either going to focus on visual information, visual attention or proprioception. Those three things are in order of worst to best. An example of focusing on visual information would be as I'm trying trying to learn this physical movement that I'm practicing, I'm going to focus on the sight picture throughout the whole shot bad an example of your being attentive to your visual information. But not like I should say, an awareness of visual data would be, as I practice this thing that I'm trying to learn, I'm going to consciously focus on seeing harmony with the target to validate that I'm doing it correctly by seeing an unchanged relationship between my target and my gun throughout the shot peripherally, okay, medium that the best way to do it, and they all accomplish the same thing would be a proprioceptive approach in terms of what you're consciously deciding to attach your sensory perception to. And that would be, as I am trying to learn this new thing, I am going to consciously pay attention and be aware of how I feel myself moving without consciously looking at the movement of the moving part of my body. So that would be the best approach to doing it. It would be let me give you a more specific example. So we can, like understand this a little bit better. You if let's say that you were trying to learn how to mount your gun better, and mount your gun at the same speed of the target and mount your gun without doing that seesaw movement that everyone talks about, what you would want to do is as your as you call pull, you actually want to divert some of your conscious attention, that would be seeing the bird to paying attention to feeling your the movement of your hands happen slowly, and at the same pace as the bird going in the vertical direction. But also, you would want to focus on feeling that both hands are moving at the same speed. That's going to draw your conscious attention to the correct thing. So that way, that at the end of the execution of that physical movement, you will be able to correctly identify if it was good or bad. Cool. Okay, now let's end that topic and move on to the next thing. Okay, now we're going to get into, hopefully what I kind of drew your attention to, in the summary of the podcast in the beginning. And kind of like maybe hopefully misled you a little bit in the way that I've framed the question. But basically, I want to answer the question of, is repetition really something that's important in in the process of learning a physical skill. Okay, this is not going to be a long section at all, probably, like three minutes long. So the first thing to know about this is that the more repetitions you do have the specific movement or mechanic that you are trying to learn, the more data points the brain has to catalogue what's, what is happening. The that is going to make much more sense later on. But I want to just basically highlight this the more data points that your brain has of good versus bad, the more easily it can separate the good versus bad. So repetitions are important, but here's one really, really important metric that we should know and take into account. Your your let's just say that in your lifetime, you only have the ability to afford but for simplicity's sake, we're just going to use a low number. Let's say you can only afford to shoot five to buy 500 shotgun shells and you are trying to absolutely maximize the impact that shooting that those 500 shells does in terms of making progress in your shooting.

Here's the formula that you need to know total repetitions is less beneficial than total repetitions per specific timeframe. What What I mean by that is that, let's say, those 500 shots, essentially, it's better to shoot 500 shots, practicing the same mechanic on the same target from the same place in one specific practice session, than it is to spread that out over multiple practice sessions, but through the same filter. So you will make more progress, shooting all 500 shots in one session of practice, focusing on the same thing from the same place on the same target, then you will even over two different practice sessions have 250 targets each, both of in that example, that say, in both of those practice sessions, you are focusing on the same target the same mechanics from the same place, as you were on the example where you shot 500 in one session, you will make much more progress this way, because of the way that you are going to be able to to neurologically catalog your learned experience in that practice session. So very quick summary. Are is repetition important and learning? Yes, absolutely. I don't think any of us discount or disagree with that. But what's more important is that you you focus on a high level of reps in a simplified amount of time. So if you're somebody that practices, you know, three times a week and shoot 100 targets a week, it would act, as long as you're focusing on the same thing in this practice. And those three practices, it will be more beneficial for you to shoot one time a week, and shoot all 300 shots. And there's, there's plenty of neurological data and science to factually support that. And then just something I feel like you guys all should know, because I just learned this in my research for putting together this episode. So I will be changing the way that I practice. Cool. Okay, next topic, making mistakes while learning. Actually, I should rephrase that as the importance in the requirement of making mistakes while learning. And that's also add on top of that making mistakes and slash or missing, while learning. It is literally so important that it is required. In fact, it's actually more and this sounds insane. But, but neurologically, it is more important to make mistakes while learning than it is not to make mistakes while learning. And I do not mean this through the sense of like, how you hear a lot of people say, you know, like, you learn more through failure than you do through success. Meaning that if you lose a tournament, you learn more from that tournament than you do if you want that's that's not what I'm talking about here, I'm actually specifically talking about a more a more boiled down simplistic version of this, which is that in a specific practice session, you you should be missing and making a lot of mistakes. Now, that does not mean I want you to purposely do the wrong thing. That's definitely not we're talking about that would be very, very bad based off of all the neurological science that I just explained. We always obviously want to be attempting to do the thing that we're trying to learn with a very consistent conscious focus on what it would be like to do that and controlling our body in that way. But in the process of doing that it is incredibly value to mess it up. Why errors and mistakes, draw your conscious attention to what was different. It breaks the chain of passive observation. So this brings back the importance of that sensory perception and learning that we talked about earlier on. If you're only executing perfectly while you're trying to learn, it's actually hard to understand what you're doing. Because your attention can easily get unfocused, sort of every attempt at executing a thing that we have, we do and execute perfectly over time. We can and easily lose conscious attention and focus on the thing that we're doing. And then essentially, we're just going through the motions of shooting without actually cataloging it chemically in the brain, for it to then be learned and saved. To be controlled by those central pattern generators, later on, when you're in competition. It's, it's the process of taking a shot or trying to execute a physical movement and not being able to do it or having the result not be good. That gets us to consciously recognize like, Whoa, that was not good, what was not good, or what felt different, these are the, that's the type of mindset that you want to have while practicing the, like missing or making a mistake and doing something that feels wrong. The fact that it draws your attention to that thing, and it will draw your attention to the thing that felt wrong or that fell off or that didn't, you know, get executed correctly, that increases the way of learning the rate of learning. Another way to say this would be like, missing and making a mistake cues, your awareness to the fact that you need to change something. And then it allows you to consciously direct your attention to the thing that you need to change. And that promotes but you know, if you think of this, conceptually, it promotes your understanding of the things required to do correctly, it promotes your level of physical self awareness, which which in turn basically engages those upper motor neurons to deliberately and consciously control physical movement, because the next shot you take is going to have a higher level of conscious focus and control over not having that thing happen, again, that caused the mistake. The Yeah, it's just incredibly important to miss or to, to make mistakes while learning. This is why it's so important to pre determine and plan out a specific thing that you're going to focus on during a practice session, in terms of like an individual mechanic, instead of just shooting, because you'll be hypersensitive to that particular thing that you're trying to learn. So that say that from the opposite side of, of, of the equation there, if I just go out, if if my, if my approach to practicing is just going out to the range and shooting a high volume, I don't have a focused level of attention on any one specific thing. And then I'm not consciously aware of any of a very specific movement. And then therefore, I'm not consciously controlling that specific movement, which in turn overwrites my non conscious control of that specific movement. And because of that, I'm not getting this neuro chemical feedback that happens when I experience or execute that mechanic successfully or poorly. And instead, I'm going to get that neurochemical feedback based off of the result of the shot. And then in turn, I'm teaching my brain to learn poor physical skill and movement. I'm gonna bring up this example I talked about Two episodes ago, but I want to bring it up again. Because I think that it's mind blowing the the numbers that are used in this. So Andrew Huberman in a podcast talking about this brings up an example, I don't remember if he was talking about hitting a tennis ball or golf ball or something like that. But basically, he was saying that, you know, literally, an ideal practice session would be if you're trying to learn a new physical movement would be that say you had you did 1000 reps in a certain amount of time of that single that single practice session of those 1000 reps. An ideal scenario would be that 997 of them were wrong.

Let me just say that again, neurologically, through the scientific understanding of how to physically learn a new skill as quickly as possible and as good as possible. Is that for every 1000 attempts We'd get 997 of them wrong. That is unbelievable. I want to just filter that though through shooting. That does not mean that if we does not mean that if you go and shoot 1000 shots and in an attempt to try to learn something new, that you miss 997 of them, because if that was the case, I would recommend that you take up like bowling or darts, okay? Maybe Rock Paper, Scissors is more along your, your, you know, skill level when it comes to physical movement? No, I'm just kidding. But what it means is that the execution of the physical mechanic that we're trying to do is that it would be perfectly acceptable and good. If we were only able to execute that specific thing correctly, three times out of 1000 attempts. Probably, you know, depending on your skill level, you may hit 80 plus percent of the targets, which again goes back to the neurological science of how important it is to correctly align your value system for what you're judging yourself. For how you're judging what you're doing as being successful or unsuccessful, if you align, if you make the most important thing of your practice hitting the target, then in the day, when you may correctly do the physical mechanic, you're trying to learn three times correctly out of 1000. But you hit 850 targets, you now have taught your brain that you had 850 successful attempts. But in reality, only three of those 850 were the thing that you're actually trying to learn. So you have 847, you have three over 847 attempts. That's correct, I don't know off the top of my head know the ratio of that in a percentage. But that meant three out of three over 847, cataloged and saved, physical movements are correct. And 47 out of 850 are incorrect. So think about how hard it will be to learn the skill you're trying to learn the new mechanic the learn the new style of movement, whatever it is, think about how hard it will be to convert the control of your muscles into being done with those CPGs during a tournament, if every time you shoot 1000 shots, that that hevel heavily weighted percentage of what you consider to be successful, were actually incorrect, you will never learn to be able to do that skill correctly. That's why I have a job. Because no human being that shoots this game intuitively learns perfect perfected physical movement, just because of the way that shooting is being an open looped physical skill insanely, insanely important. And, and I can't stress enough how, how required it is to number one, accept this as fact number two, embrace the failure of it. Number three, focus and assign where your value is in the correct thing. And not in breaking the target while you practice. Now we want to put that value in breaking the target in competition but not in practice. Because of what actually it's in my next topic, so um, let's leave this at that. And in the next topic. I'm going to talk about why what I just said is really, really important. Let's do it that way. Cool. Okay, next topic. Okay, this is getting really exciting. In the nerd in me is getting pumped about how this is all going to tie together and basically all ties together with this To the neuro chemical or neurotransmitter, a little neurotransmitter called dopamine. I've talked about dopamine a lot on other podcasts in relation to ADHD and how, and basically what an ADHD brain is insufficient in doing with dopamine and why that makes it hard to focus and all this of all this other stuff. Dopamine is an incredibly amazing neurotransmitter. And it is responsible for so many different things. It it's amazing, actually, and but we can, I could do a whole podcast on the importance of dopamine, how to manipulate it, and what all it influences in shooting. But just for the specific topic of what we're learning about in this episode, dopamine is pretty much the sole responsible chemical for learning, because what happens is when we experience a successful result, in whatever it is that we're trying to learn, we, our brain releases dopamine that's like, it's what makes you feel good. You know, when you accomplish something, the dopamine that gets released is like, you know, that's the thing that it's like a feat the feel good chemical, dopamine and serotonin. But that that dopamine being released at the moment of that successful result of whatever it is that you're trying to learn is the thing that you're is the chemical that your brain looks for, to catalogue. By definition, this was good, or this was bad. If there's a dopamine release, it says the brain thinks that was good, let's save that. If there was not a dopamine release, or, or your dopamine levels actually decreased, then the brain says that was bad. We're going to save it for now. But when we go to sleep, we're going to delete that. And so over time, you build a you build a? Well, I'm blanking on words here. Over time, you build a catalogue of experienced movements, and muscular control, where all of the neurological response to those things released dopamine. And that catalog or inventory of experiences becomes your non conscious response to movement, it becomes your proprioceptive movement, it becomes your central pattern generators. Auto piloted control of your muscles of your body mistakes and missing either decreases or does not release dopamine, correct execution and breaking targets release or increase dopamine through the filter of shooting. Again, spikes of dopamine on how the brain categorizes success and failure. And here's the problem with the whole system and why it's so easily to spend a bunch of money and a bunch of time and learn a bunch of bad stuff. Because poor up a poorly assigned value while you are practicing, releases dopamine at the wrong time.

So you will get a dopamine spike with a broken target with poor execution. And you will confuse your brain on what you are trying to learn because the brain doesn't know what you're trying to learn. It just knows what you're consciously focused on and what you care about. So when what you care about happens, you get a release of dopamine and the brain says cool that's remember everything that just happened that caused that and we're going to we're going to overtime learn that that's what's going to happen when we don't think about what we're trying to do. Um But and that's if you put your value in breaking the target. And going back to that example of 997, poor execute, or errors out of 1003, correctly executed movements out of 1000, where we can out of 850 attempts, 847 of them result in a broken target. And only three of those resulted in a broken target and a correctly executed mechanic that we're trying to learn or overwrite bad habits. You will have 150 releases or spikes in your dopamine levels, 847 of those dopamine spikes are going to teach your brain the wrong thing. And only three are going to teach your brain the right thing. And you'll never learn to do the correct thing. And that's why you can have people that have shot their whole life, literally every person including myself, you know, you shoot your whole life, but you still do you still execute poor mechanics, or you still have bad habits. And this is, this is fixing this problem is literally what pays my bills. And when I've built a career around, because it's so hard to do by yourself, because of the open loop process of what shooting is. And what as human beings, we decide is important in playing this game. So this is why I said earlier on that this is incredibly easy just to like present this idea or this approach to practice, it's it's so easy to explain, but it's insanely hard to actually do. Because you basically have been ingrained your whole life, that the most important thing in shooting is breaking the target. And if you you know, if you don't have a specific goal of getting to a certain level of shooting, and you break enough to keep you happy, then that's totally fine. And not only is that fine, that's, that's fantastic that you enjoy the game and you don't have to approach learning this way. But if you're trying to accomplish a goal, and a step along the way of accomplishing that goal is getting better at shooting or mastering the physical movement involved in shooting to increase the probability that you hit the target, then now all of a sudden, this is important. And so, this is why we have to actually embrace failure in practice, accept the fact that it will happen and it should happen and not and not allow that to negatively affect our approach to practicing. I cannot explain how frequently in lessons that I I get asked questions like, you know, I basically questions that are all based in practicing and how many targets you know, like, I don't understand why when I practice, you know, I keep trying to increase my break percentage in practice and, you know, what do you do for practice and when I explain that in if, if I have a practice session, and in that practice, if I'm not specifically trying to practice executing, like my event routine, or or if I'm not specifically trying to practice the competitive mindset which the goal would be to break as many as possible. If I'm trying to practice anything else, if I have a break percentage, if I have a normal break percentage, in the result of the shot, I actually am disappointed if my break percentage in practice is around 70 like anywhere from 50 to 75%. Then I feel very good about that practice because not only do not only because of the fact that I understand the science of all this, but also it's very easy for me to consciously process what I learned like I am very self aware of the things I was focusing on the things that I learned the things that I did well, I very easily remember the very few shots that I did that felt like beautifully perfect that really stand out to me. But if I'm trying to practice a physical mechanic, and I'm hitting, you know the same percentage of targets that I normally do in a tournament which is anywhere from like 93 to 97% of the targets that I shoot at, then at the end of that practice, I'm honestly kind of confused and lost as to what I even accomplished. And when I tell people that they look at me, like, I'm crazy. I cannot believe that and, but but the fact is that that is true. It's 100%. True. And it's not only is it true, and just unique to me, but it's not unique to me, if we're looking at people that are are accomplishing a lot in practice, like, it should be your goal. Actually, I shouldn't say that, because your goal in practice should be a specific thing. But you should embrace that result of your practice. So that you don't miss align what you're putting value in. So summary of the dopamine thing is that dopamine is what the brain uses to catalog good and bad. And if you have the wrong value, if you're putting value in the wrong thing. And if you're like, if you're putting value in breaking the target, over executing good mechanics, then holistically all together from start to finish of this episode. So far, if you care about breaking the target, you are your being taken advantage of in terms of what shooting is as an open loop of skill. And you are using too much of your conscious attention to be focusing on the wrong sensory perception, which is going to not allow you to consciously control your muscles, and movement, using those conscious drivers as we assign them. And instead, your movement is going to be done and controlled using those non conscious drivers, which is already the bad habits that you have. So you'll just be rehearsing the things that you do that you're trying to unlearn. And you won't be able to, to engage in the correct visual style of movement. And after you shoot the shot, if you break the target, you're going to get a release of dopamine and very possibly it could have been the wrong physical movement and your brain will say okay, that was the right physical movement that's remember how to do that. And you're just be over time, further cementing bad mechanics, and being unaware of how it physically felt to move. And just basically altogether, creating a massive situation for you to try to do and wasting a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of shells, and not getting any closer to accomplishing your goals. So we want to assign the value in whatever conscious thing in we want to assign the value so that we can focus conscious attention on the specific thing that we're trying to learn. We want to do lots of repetition of that, of that thing with conscious attention and awareness of it, and consciously controlling your body to do it during the shot. With the value placed in if we felt like after the shot, using our awareness that it felt the way that it was supposed to felt, if it did reward yourself in any way that you can, or or need to, so that you get that release of dopamine and long story short altogether. Now you are kind of like hacking the brain's way of learning physical skill.

The one thing that I want to add in here is that if you find that it is incredibly hard to reassign, the where you place value in your practice, the easiest way to do this to refocus your attention on that proprioceptive sensory awareness and to control your body consciously without the distraction of this innate human emotion of being afraid of missing are really really really wanting to hit the bird that distracts us from doing the thing that's required to learn. Go and shoot with no ammo, go practice with no ammo, put snap caps in your gun and do everything normal pull even pull the trigger, but because of the fact that you have removed the external feedback of breaking the target or not breaking it Target, and you've forced yourself to understand that it's not even possible to break the target. All of a sudden, very easily, emotionally and consciously, we can stop caring about, about hitting the bird. And you will find it much easier to pay attention to how you're physically moving. And I know that this works incredibly well, because I do it in lessons all the time, when I a perfect example of this is, you know, if any of you have ever taken a lesson, and your coach is trying to get you to move a specific way, and you just keep doing shot after shot after shot after shot, and after every shot, your coach repeatedly tells you the same thing happened, the same thing happened the same thing, and you're just continuously not changing the thing that you're trying to change. And as a student that gets frustrating for you, like you'll, you'll get frustrated and feel like it's not possible for you to do it. The reason why it's not possible for you to do it in that moment, is because you're putting the value in breaking the bird, not consciously paying attention, or controlling how your body moves. And so just every time you call pull those CPGs control your muscular movement, and nothing is happening differently. So I every time that that happens, I say okay, that's step back, take the shells out of your gun, I put two empty shells, because I don't normally take snap caps with me. But I put two empty shells in I said, Okay, now, I'm not trying to trick you here, you know, and I know that when you pull the trigger, nothing will happen. There's not any ammunition, live ammunition in your gun, I want you to just do all of the things that we're trying to do here, from start to finish, go through your whole process, execute the physical mechanics with conscious attention on controlling your body in the way that we're trying to can to get it to move, and at the end of the shot, pull the trigger like you normally would. And immediately they're able to do the thing that they're trying to do. It's amazing the neurological science in this because literally, you put a live shell on the gun. And for some people or for all people at certain times, it is it feels completely impossible to do that physical thing that they're trying to do. But you take the live shell out and you and you remove their expectation or desire to hit the bird, and nothing else changes. And immediately they can do it every single time. And if you think about that whole scenario, the ridiculousness of you know, say you're trying to learn a physical skill, where all we're trying to do is a very common one, which is slow down how the speed that you are mounting the gun, because a lot of people just mount super fast, a lot of anxiety and they lose control the gun and all this stuff happens like they call pull and just immediately throw the gun to their face. And basically eliminate the of the purpose and benefit of shooting low gun by, you know, for 5% of the whole shot being out of the gun and 95% of the shot being mounted. If I were to ask you in that moment where you're unable to time after time, mount the gun solely in your hands, if I were to say, is it humanly possible for you to move your hands slower than the way that you are moving them right now in the shot? And you said no, then you probably should go see a doctor because you're incapable of of a specific human movement that all of us can do every day, unless we have some type of disability. And so obviously, nobody would say no, it's I am not physically able to move that gun that way. So then the question is what is getting in the way of you being able to do it when you're trying to with the shell and the gun? The answer is simply where you're assigning the value of what you're doing. And how that is not allowing you to control your body consciously because you're distracted by being consciously attentive to wanting to break the bird. Pretty cool scenario really interesting science. Incredibly important to learning. You can see this is directly negatively me giving you this advice is directly negatively influencing my future earning revenue potential. Because I'm telling you that if you've if you are able to modify these things and where you're placing value and what you're consciously controlling, if you're able to do that, you can take much less hours of instruction from me or whoever your coach is, because you will not be needing the person behind you that you're paying 150 to $250 an hour to continuously repeat saying the same thing, because all they will have to do is say at one time, it's, it's important to note that different people's personalities are more or less heavily influenced by this. So, um, one thing I may recommend doing is, you know, going back to the the first episode that I released, where I put a link in the description of that podcast episode, where you can take your personality tests, and I would take that, and that will teach you more about how much you are influenced by negative emotion, how easily that your emotional state can change, and a bunch of things like that. So that is the importance of dopamine while learning. Let's get into the last topic of the neurology of this and set up an ideal situation for learning. Okay, so before I get into explaining what the perfect situation would be, that would allow you to learn this, whatever new physical mechanic or skill or aspect of shooting that you're trying to learn as quickly as possible would be, I'm going to give you the real I'm gonna repeat telling you what I would say should be your suggested homework assignment to try to do to try to both conceptually build and go do before the next episode of this podcast would be. And so the next episode of this podcast is going to be a YouTube live interactive educational and formal episode. And I'm going to get into part two of this. But I want to be able to use the learned and experienced information that you guys put yourselves through by following along with what I'm going to suggest here. My suggestion would be that after you process the information in this episode, and you use the format of what I'm going to talk about right after this, put together a specific training plan for a specific mechanic that you're trying to learn, and, or that you feel like would be the most beneficial for you to get better at being able to do and then go and try to follow that plan in a practice session.

And catalog and journal or take notes on what you experienced. Don't expect it to be perfect. Don't expect it to work really good. Because the purpose of next week epic next week's episode will be to have me actually build one for you guys, and answer your questions. And then explain some of the questions that you may have or the things you may be confused or unsure about, based off of what you experienced by doing this yourself without 100% guidance. So that's what I would suggest build a practice plan based off of what you've learned so far in the podcast, go out and follow your practice plan, and then take notes on what it was like doing that. So now, here is an ideal situation, and scenario that will be set up for you to be able to practice. The first thing is that we want to start off the practice session or the day with low levels of dopamine. The the reason for that is because the way that the brain like I said previously, the way that the brain catalogues what is good and what is bad and decides what to try to remember How to do and what to basically delete once you go to sleep is based off of how high of a dopamine spike you had when trying to execute that thing. So a way to allow the brain to easily identify the good ones and the bad ones, is to have a greater difference between the status quo and the perfectly executed shot. So that, you know, for a sake of simplicity in numbers, let's say that we're going to use a scale of, we'll use percentages. And let's say that you started off the morning, and you went and worked out. And you, you know, got a great amount of sunlight in the morning. And you just did a bunch of stuff that releases a lot of dopamine. And then you went out into practice. And by the time you got to the practice session, let's say even on the way there, you're listening to really pumped up music, and a bunch of stuff like that. And you're just in a great mood when you go to practice. Now, let me table that for just a second to say, don't purposely be in a bad mood when you go to practice, all I mean is that we want low levels of dopamine. Another thing to say would be if you are ADHD, and you take medication, don't take your medication, when you go to practice, because it will have an unnatural level of release dopamine as your baseline levels. So, you know, if you were to do all of those things prior to going to practice, then let's say you're starting practice with, you know, 80%, of the maximum level of dopamine that your brain will produce, well, if you do something absolutely perfect the most, you're going to get his 100%. And you have a 20% net difference between bad and good, harder for the brain to run through that whole practice sessions experience. And, you know, separate and delete, and save or delete the good or bad. Experienced execution of movement. If you start the morning off, and you don't do those things, and you stay positive, but at the same time, don't try to do things that get you in a really productive feeling positive dopamine heightened levels of dopamine state, then let's say you go to that practice at a 20% level of release dopamine and the perfect experience shot would still give you that 100% feeling there is now an 80% net difference. And there's a very easily there it is very easy for your brain to catalogue the difference between just normal or bad versus good. So number one is low dopamine levels to start the practice. If you don't know how to if you don't know any other ways of influencing dopamine, then just do a quick Google search of like what types of things influence dopamine. The second thing, high volume of failures during practice session to increase your neuroplasticity and influence your dopamine levels. So you don't want to again purposely make mistakes. But you also don't want to try to avoid making mistakes by being cautious and careful and paying attention to the target. So embrace the fact that you will have a high volume of failures because the thing that you're trying to do is not hit the bird which you probably can do fairly proficiently. What you're trying to do is a new and on learned physical skill or mechanic and that is a hard thing to do. So expect it to be hard, expect to have a lot of failures, but understand that failing that increases your neuroplasticity and your brain's ability to accept change. And it will draw attention to the specific poorly executed movement that just happened which will allow you to maintain attention on that specific mechanic from shot to shot to shot and be able to catalogue and identify the differences in how it felt proprioceptive ly. The third thing it's very important again to have huge dopamine spikes when everything is executed correctly. So when you do have a shot that happens that feels amazing, or that you know you did perfectly. Allow yourself to live in that for a little bit. You know literally things like self talk or like You know, let yourself get excited that that happened. That's good, that releases dopamine. And just bask in the glory of the perfectly executed shot that you're trying to do. Next thing, have a consciously predetermined and decided area of focus or awareness, meaning, basically have an answer to the question of what are you going to pay attention to, for this whole practice session. Like, pay attention to and consciously like flag the mistakes that you make, don't ignore them. But it is super important to have that predetermined area of focus or thing that you're trying to be aware of and sense as you're trying to execute whatever it is that you're trying to work on. And there's one thing that I should say, like, it's important to note that it literally doesn't matter. Yeah, I can say it this way, it literally doesn't matter what specific thing you decide to pay attention to. Consciously like, it doesn't matter what you're trying to be aware of as you're doing it, as long as it's something involved in the motor control of the physical movement that you're trying to learn, and that you consistently are paying attention to only that one thing. So another way of saying that is that it doesn't matter what you pay attention to, as long as it is a physical movement. And as long as the thing you're paying attention to does not change from shot to shot, because you you need to have the consistency in that topic of awareness or that specific thing that you're trying to pay attention to, you need to have the consistency in that. So that you can you can compare and contrast the differences from shot to shot to shot if you take a shot focusing on the feeling of your hands. And and then the next shot, you focus on the feeling of your rotation. The next thought you focus on, you know, your emotional state, you're not giving yourself enough data points in the same categories that are valuable to be able to, you know, to create an inventory of learned experience, that gives you a spectrum between a pure failure and 100% success. So do not consciously change what you are paying attention to throughout the whole practice. Again, that's why it's so important to completely boil down and be incredibly specific in identifying pre determining and, and defining the one specific thing you're trying to improve in your practice. The next thing, have many repeated repetitions with the same area of focus, to catalogue the subtle differences of each repetition through perceived experience. So exactly what I just said, you just want to make sure that the all of the repetitions that you have, all have the same

thing that you're consciously paying attention to through your awareness and focus, hopefully proprioceptive ly through physical movement. Um, and so that after you, after you execute, you have some perception of what you just experienced and are able to, in some way quantify or explain how it felt. The next thing immediately after your practice session, and before any additional external stimuli happens, close your eye this is for real though, close your eyes and process or visualize in as much sensory detail as possible. So like sight, feeling, emotion, movement, whatever. Close your eyes and process or visualize in as much sensory detail as possible. Everything that happened Well, try to relive the shots that you remember that you feel like are perfect with your eyes closed. If you do this, basically your brain is going to replay and keep the motor sequence of movements so like it's going to remember the the the signals sent either controlled by beings hopefully controlled by those those conscious Drivers, if you remember earlier on in the podcast, it will, it will keep and replay the control of your messengers by your conscious drivers that were associated with high levels of dopamine. And it's going to eliminate the motor sequences of movements that were associated with low levels of dopamine. So again, if you close your eyes and visualize as in as much sensory detail as possible, everything that happened in your brain is going to better be able to replay and keep all the good controls of those messengers that that influence how your muscles move, and it's going to be able to delete and get rid of the bad controls, have those muscles based off of your dopamine levels. Again, that's why it's important to have lower levels of dopamine and start to create a bigger difference between the good and bad. The next thing and this is where people that are like high for high, like really, really productive and, you know, go getter personalities are going to have trouble with this. Do not focus on anything else that requires high level of conscious attention for the rest of the day. Or at least until you can process that training session through that type of visualization or post process, you know, rehearsal in your mind, if whatever you want to call it. Or you can go to sleep slash take a nap. So we want to make sure that the that that motor sequence of movements is and it's in the different combinations of those things that are associated either with high levels of dopamine or low levels of dopamine are, are the most fresh, and and recent thing in your experienced in your experience to memory. Because if you go practice and put all this effort and everything. And then immediately after the practice, you don't allow yourself to process it through visualization or any type of thing like that, and you don't go to sleep or take a nap, then you're going to dilute all of that with new stuff that you're constantly paying attention to, and have a high level of awareness of and then essentially, when you do go to sleep, which is when your brain does all this stuff that kind of like if you was a computer, when you go to sleep, basically your brain deletes the junk files to create space on the hard drive. And it only does that when you go to sleep. So if you if you're not going to sleep immediately afterwards, then there's just they're just more spam, so to speak in there that gets in the way. And will you learn Yeah. Are you going to learn as fast as possible? No. And that's the purpose of this podcast. Let's see. Where's the next one? Yeah, the next note I have here, just get good sleep, the and that that would be even. Let's say that you practice in the morning. And you you I'm not somebody that can take naps. It's not possible for me, I've never been able to do it. So let's say I I practice in the morning. And somehow I was even able to take a nap immediately afterwards or shortly afterwards. But and before I went into putting a high level of effort and conscious focus into a new thing, I still would want to make sure that that night, I took my sleep very seriously, I went to sleep at the normal time I and I allow myself to sleep in and sleep well. Very, very important, based off of the neurology of how all of this works. One thing to note, though, is dependent on the the stage of learning the physical thing that you're trying to learn. I keep saying physical thing because that's how I'm defining what this is. I mean shooting is all a physical movement. So that's why it needs to be this way. Learning physical movement is much different than like learning you know? like getting a degree in something and increasing your understanding and knowledge in it that much different process. Because it's not, it doesn't involve creating these neurological pathways that control muscular movement. But anyways, in the early stages of learning these new physical movements, whether it be that you're learning how to shoot for the first time, or you're trying to overwrite bad habits with new learned good ones, either from a coach or from reading a book, or watching a YouTube video, early on in that process, it requires a specific, consistent focus on one thing, but as you get better at at executing those physical movements, like as you refine the control of your muscles, like that motor control for those motor control functions, through rehearsed and repetitive movement, because of the amount of reps that you're putting in the end, let's say, your proficiency level in not being able to hit the bird, but being able to execute the thing that you're working on better. If that proficiency level increases, you at that point, you can change your area or of perceptive focus more frequently. So like an example would be if this is the first time you're trying to learn this, whatever new mechanic or thing is that you're trying to go do and you're planning out in your practice, if it's the first time that you're attempting it doing this. And, you know, your ability to do it perfectly, is very, very low. You need to continuously assign what you're, you're putting what you're focusing your perception on to one thing, and one thing only, and again, it does not matter what that one thing is, it just matters that it's consistent. So if you're trying to learn how to shoot, you know, let's go super basic, you're just trying to learn how to shoot low gun, a feet task mount, you could, uh, you could always pay attention to the speed of your hands, you could always pay attention to the posture of your body, you could always pay attention to

the directional movement of your hands, you could always pay attention to that, you know, it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's something involved in the motor control of that new skill you're trying to learn. And it's always the same, but it cannot change. If you get more efficient at it, you from shot to shot or from a certain amount of shots to a certain amount of shots, you can change what you're assigning your awareness to, and kind of like, you know, almost do a domino effect of of things where like, you know, you're you're trying to pay attention to moving your hands a specific speed. And that's what you're assigning your conscious focus on to, while you shoot, you know, four to five shots of that. And then that feels good, but you're also but you notice that something else is happening in the shot, then you can switch over to focusing on on trying to make that mechanic better, or whatever it is. But that's only once you become more proficient in that skill. That's important to note. And then lastly, just through researching some of this and trying to you know, increase my ability and being able to explain it, which, you know, some of you are gonna think it's awesome after listening to this and some of you gotta think like, he's horrible at explaining this totally fine, whatever. But in in doing that, I came across a little interesting fact that I thought I wanted to include here because I have heard and seen a lot of people doing this, including some very, very accomplished professional shooters and coaches. It has to do with practicing in with slow motion blur, practicing with slow motion movement. There's a lot of people that you know, have drills on YouTube or something of the say specifically talking about the mechanics of a mount. And they talked about how valuable it is to learn that movement in slow motion before you put it in. What before you put it into practice and rehearsing it like actually doing it at normal speeds on a real target. There's the neurological science actually shows that that is counterproductive. It's actually something you want to avoid because it The the movement that happens, the physical muscular movement that happens in your body, when you're doing whatever it is that you're trying to do and slow motion is too accurate. It doesn't produce errors. And based off of the other stuff I just talked about, it's the it's the mistakes and the errors that happen that are crucial for the neuroplasticity of learning, and allowing the brain to be open to change, because of the conscious recognition of the thing that went wrong. And the desire to try to make it better, and drawing the attention to that thing. So, so literally like rehearsing in slow motion, because of the fact that it's, it allows you to do it more efficiently. Because it's slow, and you don't make the mistakes. The purpose that people talk about it for being good to learning is actually by definition, the thing that makes a bad for learning, which is really interesting. And that the second reason why it's not a good thing to do is because the proprioceptive feedback that you would get if doing it and at a normal speed becomes unavailable to you, because you're doing it. So you have such high levels of conscious control of that thing, that it's not happening proprioceptive ly. So you're you are eliminating one of those those three important core components to learning a new physical skill, which is that proprioception. It's important to note on top of that, though, that slow motion practice moving in slow motion on a specific mechanic does become valuable once you become a once you basically you master that physical skill, because it forces it to become more conscious again, and rehearses the perfection of that movement. But not when we're trying to learn it as a new thing. So just something to note. Okay, so I'm gonna go back through those. There were 10 points in there. But the last two were just notes and interesting facts. So I'm just going to quickly read off the those eight points again. So that way, you don't have to try to remember what I just said with explanation. So the ideal components and to create a perfect situation for learning. Number one, low dopamine mean levels at the start of the practice session. Number two, expect and accept high volume of failures to increase the neuroplasticity and influence your dopamine levels to a drop to draw attention to the specific poorly executed movements. Number three. Allow yourself to have a huge dopamine spike when everything is executed correctly live in that moment. Number four, have a consciously and preemptively decided predetermined area of focus or awareness for your practice basically answered the question of what are you going to pay attention to for this whole practice session. It doesn't matter what you pay attention to as long as it's something involved in the motor control of the physical movement you're trying to learn and that you consistently pay attention to only that one thing throughout the whole practice session. Do not constantly change what you're paying attention to. Number five, have many repeated repetitions with the same area of focus conscious attention, so that you can catalogue the subtle differences of each repetition through your own consciously perceived experience. Say that one more time. Basically, repeat what you're doing a lot with the same area of focus so that every time after you do that thing, you can recognize the difference from attempt after attempt. Number six immediately after your practice session. And before you do it before you have any additional external stimuli, close your eyes and process or visualize with as much detail as possible everything that happened well. Number seven, do not focus on anything else that requires high levels of conscious attention for the rest of the day, or at least until you can either do that visualization processing technique, or to go to sleep, or take a nap. Number eight, make sure that you get good sleep that night. So that is the ideal situation for learning to set yourself up to be able to basically learn a physical skill as fast as humanly possible and kind of hack, using a little bit of some science, cheat codes, your your path towards mastering whatever it is that you're trying to do and shooting. Cool. Well, that's it for this part of the podcast. And I'll just get into a summary. Real quick at the end, and we should be good to go. Thanks for hanging in with me. On all of that goes that was deep and complex. All right, so just to wrap everything up, I'm just going to run through the topics that I talked about and give as short of an explanation as I can, I promise this will be short. But I will just add that if you are wanting to get the more in depth wrap up summary, you can always go to the description at the bottom of either this YouTube video or this audio release on whatever podcast app you're listening to this on. And look at the timestamps. If it's not there, if you don't see it, click comments, or click like it'll say data dot more click that it'll expand the description of this episode. And then you will see the timestamps and you can click them. And when you click them, it goes directly to that part of the episode. So that you can listen to it without having to scroll through and try and find what you're looking for again. Okay, so the first thing we talked about was an open loop versus closed loop.

skill that we're trying to learn shooting is an open loop skill. An open loop skill is something that has external feedback that happens after the execution of the thing you're trying to do. And that can be dangerous in shooting because if we miss align what we think is important and what we value, then we will be distracted in getting dopamine releases when the target breaks and not when we execute the skill. A closed loop process or closed loop skill, I should say, is one that has continuous that has a continuous feedback loop as you're doing the thing that you're trying to learn. And you can continuously adjust doing that thing. That's not important to remember, what is important to remember is that shooting is open loop and open loop means there's external feedback that is that can be unrelated to the physical movement that we're trying to ingrain into what most people would call muscle memory. The three components to learning a physical skill are sensory, these are the important things to focus on in an create use as a foundation when you're trying to practice your sensory perception, which is like being aware of what you're actually consciously paying attention to the actual physical movements. So the control of the physical muscles of your body, and proprioception, which is your body's three dimensional awareness of itself without consciously paying attention to it or visually looking at it to control it, because that engages consciousness. We want to make sure that we are hitting those three things in our practice, a great way to include all of that is that you are planning and have pre defined and identified what the physical movement should be that you're trying to execute. You have your sensory perception is assigned to a, a proprioceptive movement, and that you're allowing that movement to happen proprioceptive ly so that you're allowing the fluidity of this learning process to happen as best as possible. The next thing that we talked about is like the the neurology of physical movement. We talked about CPGs the central pattern generators, those are the things that's what's controlling. The let me do it this way. If if you're doing something thing that you already know how to do, and you don't have to consciously think about doing it, your CPGs are controlling your lower motor neurons. If you're doing something new that you're trying to learn, your upper motor neurons are controlling your lower motor neurons. And we redefined the CPGs central pattern generators as non conscious drivers, we redefined upper motor neurons as conscious drivers. And we redefined the lower motor neurons as the messengers, because the lower motor neurons is the neurological pathways and synapses that control the physical muscular movement of your body, they send the signal to your muscles to tell it how to move. The next thing that we talked about is, and we'll say that that one that's category that I just went over is understanding how the brain learns and controls movement. The next topic that we talked about was the neurological importance of failure in learning, and how failing actually helps you learn faster because of the way that it increases your neuroplasticity, and allows the brain to accept change, and, and draws attention or cues your attention to the physical thing that happened that was wrong, which allows you to, to categorize and assign dopamine levels to the the perfectly executed physical movement, and the poorly executed physical movement. If we put those last two categories together, we can assume in as a simple explanation as I can give that we need to consciously decide what to attach our sensory perception to, so that we engage the upper motor neurons, or the conscious drivers in controlling the lower motor neurons or the messengers that send signals to the muscles to make them move a certain way. So we need to be able to answer the question of what am I going to focus on while I'm trying to learn this specific thing, the three different types of things that we can assign our sensory perception to, in the filter of shooting would be the visual information of the sight picture, your visual, peripheral awareness in seeing harmony through an unchanged lead or gap during the shot as you execute movement, or proprioception. visual information, ie the sight picture is the worst thing to assign your sensory perception to, because it makes you unaware of how you got that sight picture. Your peripheral awareness of seeing harmony with an unchanged gap between the target and the gun is like the medium, bad or good thing to pay attention to. Because what it does is, it does allow you to notice that you have connection with the target throughout the process of your shot. But you're segregating or segmenting, I should say, your conscious attention 50% towards your visual information like the sight picture and 50% towards your proprioceptive movement, which would be how you're creating that harmony. And what's going to happen is, it's possible for you to learn that, you know, neurologically to teach your brain that it doesn't matter how we move. But as long as we create harmony, that's the only thing that matters. And the reality of that statement is that that is untrue. It matters how we create harmony, because certain ways are more efficient and more reproducible than others, and will result in a better percentage of broken targets once they become converted to being nonconscious. And then that, that proprioception is it like assigning your sensory perception to proprioception would be like how you feel yourself moving without consciously looking at the moving part of your body that you're trying to pay attention to, and without caring about seeing an unchanged relationship with the target and the gun. So that means you're 100% consciously aware of the feeling and the control of your Physical body while executing the shot, that's going to give you the highest amount of appropriate and valuable information to assign Tor to, to connect to that high dopamine release when you do it right versus when you do it wrong. The next thing that we talked about was the importance of repetitions and learning, the only thing that you need to know is that the total amount of of basically, we should put it this way, quantity is not as good as that same amount of quantity, over less time. So the important thing to do is understand that if you only have so many shots that you can take, do them all in one practice session, so that you increase the data points that your brain has to catalog good and bad, and therefore can learn the skill faster. If you have the the choice of, of splitting a practice session into two different days, and or doing it all in one day, do it all in one day. Then the next thing we went over was like the importance and requirement of making mistakes and missing while learning. Basically, the reason why making mistakes and missing while learning is important is because it draws your attention to the thing that went wrong if you have the value of what you're paying attention to in the right thing. I II, that proprioceptive movement, and drawing your attention to that will break the chain of passive observation or a lack of awareness to what you're doing. It keeps you focused on the physical movement that you're trying to learn.

If, like another way to say that would be missing and making a mistake cues, your awareness of the fact that you need to change something. And that allows you to consciously direct your attention to the thing that you need to change. And that is why it's important to to plan out a specific practice that is focused on an individual mechanic that you're trying to learn, instead of just going to shoot a bunch of different variety and volume. Because if you have a specific focus on an individual thing, you're going to be hypersensitive to that particular thing that you're trying to learn more aware of it. And you'll be able to catalog how you're learning it much better. And then just remember that 997 out of 1000 example. The next category that we went through is the importance of dopamine while learning. Basically, that mistakes and missing decrease or don't release dopamine and correct execution. And breaking targets increases dopamine, the fact that breaking targets increases dopamine is dangerous, because like I just said, that means that you can possibly catalogue bad execution with high levels of dopamine and then dilute the learning process to where you never actually are able to do the thing non consciously that you're trying to learn consciously, because it's never going to get cemented into your muscle memory, so to speak, which that's another thing for another day. But that's not really a real thing. But it's easy way of explaining it. One way if to to override your inability to reassign what you care about, if you're having problems, not caring about breaking the bird and you're noticing that you are having a hard time consciously focusing on how the shot feels would be to shoot without shells. And then lastly, we went over the ideal situation for learning which we just talked about that so you know you basically low dopamine levels, lots of failure. Like oh, decide what you want to focus on what you're paying attention to. Don't constantly change what you're paying attention to from shot to shot. Do a lot of repetitions with the same area of focus immediately after the practice. And before you get any other stimuli or, or engage in a complex cognitive process of thinking and learning. Close your eyes, visualize what happened and replay all the things that went well so your brain can basically delete the motors sequence of movements that were bad and maintain the ones that were good. Then get good sleep. So that is the wrap up summary. I probably could have made that the whole podcast. But that's not the way I like to do things I like to talk obviously. Oh my goodness. Okay, so just a reminder, the homework would be to if you have not already tried to design a practice, plan around a specific mechanic that you want to improve on or that you feel like would be your biggest and easiest path forward and improving your performance on a course, design a practice plan around that specific thing. The more singularly focused that specific practice session can be the better take notes afterwards and come back on this coming Monday. Let me check the date of this coming Monday. It will be this coming Monday, the 30th of January, if you'd have the time to be able to do this, come to that YouTube Live episode with questions, concerns, comments, or a summarized experience of what it was like to try to do all this. And I will answer your questions, I will, I will re explain things that don't make sense. And I will go over part two of this, which is actually taking this information and the things that you experience in your own practice. And helping you learn from what did or did not work in your attempt to do this by yourself without my help. And I will give you a structured format. To be able to do this on your own from practice session to practice session to practice session, so that you're continuously singularly focused on the one thing that is your lowest hanging fruit to improve your path towards being able to get better as fast as possible. Thank you guys, again, for listening. Again, share this podcast with anybody that you think that would thoroughly enjoy or benefit from it and would actively participate. And thank you for actively participating and sticking with me in all of this. It's a lot. They're long episodes. But I have to do it this way with the timestamps because otherwise, we run out of just takes too long to present you all the information. So I will see you Monday. Best of luck for any of you that are shooting tournaments. And if you have any questions, shoot me an email or text message on through my website, you can find all my contact information. And I will say that by the time the we do the next episode, I will be in Florida teaching for the week. So if you live in Florida or you will be in Florida and you listen to this and you would like to take a lesson with me. Like I said earlier in the intro, you can go to my website and schedule a lesson I'll be at two I will be teaching at Quail Creek. So I hope to see some of you there. That'd be awesome. We will see you later. Adios guys

Transcribed by https://otter.ai