Why Do You Get Stuck in a Slump?

There's a reason that everybody in sporting clays gets stuck at 72 to 75. In skeet, you get stuck at 88 to 92, 93. It’s because they do not have a vivid movie in their head of where and how they want the shot to come together. They're just going to pull it out of their butt.

Once you break into the 90s, the thing that allows for you to stay into the 90s in sporting clays and into the high-90s in skeet is your ability to visualize more in detail how you want the brain to bring the shot together and exactly where you want it to happen. That one thing is what we see that separates the people that are good shots from the people that could be great shots.

In our company, my mom is the best in routine. When she misses a target, she just stops and replays what she saw, makes a new plan and goes in and runs the station out.

But the thing that keeps everybody in the seventies in sporting clays and in the high eighties and low nineties in skeet is they do not visualize in detail what they're asking their brain to do. Then once they start doing it and they shoot better scores in both games, then they kind of take it for granted and they stop visualizing and they go back down and think they're in a slump.

They're not in a slump. They just haven't been clear to their brain how they want their brain to bring the shot together. And that becomes more important than anything else, in my opinion, if you want to stay at a high level in the game.

If you hit a great shot, stop and look back at that breakpoint and see it happening again. If you don't stop and pause in between, you'll start speeding up and the last two or three shots are going to not be good for you. So, rhythm is really good to slow down.

 This is an adapted excerpt from the March 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.