Your Periphery is in The Past!

When we're looking out at the horizon, we see a circle of vision. Two-hundredths of one percent of that circle is where your sharp vision resides. Your sharp vision cannot see movement and it's only five milliseconds behind real time on the arrival time of the data from the fovea to the motor center. It's in virtual real time. It sees where it is. 

That leaves 99.98 percent in our periphery. Our sharp vision cannot see movement. Our periphery can only see movement. It cannot see sharply. 

But here's the catch. What you're aware of in your periphery is as much as 200 to 300 milliseconds behind real time.

You've all experienced this when you've been on a sporting clays course and you shot a pair of pro targets. They were coming in to you like that. They were about 18 or 20 yards and you had five pairs. On the first pair, you went “boom, boom, dead pair.” The second pair: “boom, boom, dead pair.” When you shot the third pair, “boom, boom,” you saw that little Polaroid picture of the lead.

 You saw the lead on the very next pair. Rather than shooting the bird, you shot the lead and you missed them both. It's because what you saw in that little perception of a Polaroid of what the lead was happened a third of a second ago. It was not real.

 This is why speed match is so important. When you have matched the speed of the target and the speed of the muzzle long enough to know it's matched, the picture becomes real and the speed match makes the 200 to 300-millisecond delay moot. Because the gun and the bird are moving the same speed long enough to know they're matched, the third of a second delay is moot and what you see becomes real. Therefore, it can be replicated and it can be corrected. That's the magic about matching the speed and then pulling the trigger.

 This is an adapted excerpt from the February 2025 Coaching Hour podcast. You can hear it in full - along with more than 20 years of archives in audio and written form - with your Knowledge Vault membership.