Shotgunning: Beating a Slump

Waterfowl season wears you down. When you’re short on sleep, eating too much gas station food, and absorbing too much magnum recoil, you don’t perform at your peak. Bad habits resurface. Misses mount. Most shooting slumps start with one bad day that then grows into downward-spiraling loops of negative feedback. Missing leads to more missing, and once you’re mired in a slump, you feel as if you’ll never get out. But you can—and here’s how.

Check Your Equipment

Honestly, it’s probably not your gear; it’s probably you. Slumps are mostly about confidence and state of mind, but check your gun and ammo to rule these variables out. Put your gun on a rest and shoot it to make sure the point of impact hasn’t changed. Check your gun fit by doing gun mounts with an unloaded gun while wearing your hunting clothes. It’s possible that the extra layers you wear in the late season are interfering with your shooting, and you might need to switch to a thinner recoil pad.

Shoot some patterns at the distances you’ve been missing. Be sure you’re not over-choked or over-loaded. Shooting at 20-yard ducks with a choke-and-load combination that’s designed for 40 or more yards only makes shooting harder, because a small pattern at close range leaves little margin for error. Open your choke if you need to.

If you’re shooting loads that are heavier than 1 1/4 ounces or faster than 1,400 fps, you might be getting kicked into bad habits. Heavy loads are only effective if you’re putting them on target. If the extra recoil causes you to lift your head or pull the stock away from your shoulder, consider lightening your load.

Hit the Range

Once you’re confident in your gear, shoot some clays to reinforce fundamentals and correct bad habits. Shoot your duck gun, but don’t worry about matching the velocity of your hunting and target loads. In fact, slow target loads with light payloads and low recoil will help you concentrate on the fundamentals. Work on keeping your eye on the target all the way through the shot until after the clay breaks. Keep the bead in your peripheral vision. Make yourself slow down. If you’ve been hunting in a group and jumping up on the call of “take ’em,” it’s easy to get into the bad habit of mounting too fast and rushing the shot.

It doesn’t matter how you practice—trap, skeet, sporting clays, or back-40 birds with a hand-trap. Easy shots are often better, because you want to build confidence and see clays break when you do things right. You don’t need challenging targets and more frustration.

Change Your Mind-Set

The best defense against a slump is perspective. Be realistic with your expectations. If you didn’t shoot much in the off-season, you’re bound to miss when you hunt, so why get upset about it? Let the misses go and tell yourself you’ll practice more next summer. You’ll mind the missing less, and you’ll actually shoot better.

Once a slump gets in your head, you can make it worse by trying hard not to miss. The more careful you become, the more you aim the gun and double-check the bead, and the more you miss. So, the next shot, you try even harder. This is what keeps slumps alive.

One cure is self-talk. Think eye on the target, head on the stock as the birds are coming in. Try to see not just the bird, but the bill or the eye. Try to see individual pellets hitting the bird. You can’t, of course, but if you’re looking that hard, you’re not looking at the gun, and your chances of making a good shot go way up.

If you have to, get away from your group and hunt by yourself. Calling your own shot, with your own timing, removes some of the stresses that lead to missing. While your friends’ razzing may be good-natured, it can get under your skin, and bad moods extend slumps. Deep down, know that your slump will end. And when ducks and geese start falling again, shotgun shooting will seem like the easiest thing in the world.