Unleashing the Power Swing : a Sporting Clays Excerpt

Sports. It conjures up images of tremendous endurance,  speed, muscle and talent. Baseball, football and tennis players hit hard. With intensity and aggressiveness, the tempo here is fast. Move! Hit! Want to win? Get tough. Survival of the fittest. Sports generate very powerful emotions for both competitor and spectator alike. It’s all about more. More speed, more torque. Bigger and faster is better. We have Indy blood. We live for Armstrong pulling away from the pack—Tiger at one stroke back with two holes to play in the championship. Vicarious sports fans are addicted to the lip-curled, anytime, anywhere-you-want attitude. You want to see fanatical? Sit next to me during the Olympics when the Americans are competing.

We love this stuff. And why shouldn’t we?

Then it should come as no surprise that we naturally bring this same wide-open, go-for-it passion into our sporting game. If smashing a hypersonic teal and the 50-yard battue off the tower on report doesn’t make your heart pitter-patter a little faster, what are you doing here?

Though power and speed are quickly associated with sports, agility is in every way just as important. Take away precision and timing, performance suffers. Significantly. Without precision, speed and power are practically useless.

The power, or force in sporting lies in the shell, not the hands and arms. It is here where some of us misdirect our energies. Sporting is not a game of muscular dominance but rather stroke and timing. Misdirecting our physical energy in sporting usually reveals itself in our swing. It is here where trying to break the target sometimes leads us away from doing what good shooting requires. Because we learned long ago that power and speed are important to sports some of us like to swing the gun fast. Unfortunately, sometimes the target breaks. I say unfortunately because we soon begin to believe this: if gun speed breaks targets, more gun speed will break more targets.

This belief continues until gun speed is out of control, scores go down, consistency is lost and our shooter plateaus. Too often, this is not a temporary plateau. Smoked targets stingily feed this shooter encouragement and the cycle continues, as does the plateau.

We definitely want the target to break. The energy focused toward the target is high voltage.  For this reason, often an element of force is applied to the swing instead of pace and direction. Too much aggression in the swing leads to blazing barrels—a misguided muzzle—a determined shot sent to the wrong address. I’ll be the very last one to inhibit a desire or determination for breaking birds. But shot placement breaks the target, not testosterone…….

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This Sporting Clays Article was previously published in Sporting Clays Magazine by Dan Schindler in September 2005.

The Paragon School of Sporting is now making available the remainder of this article as well as numerous others, available for download on The Paragon School of Sporting Website:(http://www.paragonschool.com/catalog)

Sporting clays continues to be an elegant sport born of long tradition, fulfilling our wingshooting passion to experience the wing and shot. Feather and clay, inescapably tied, grants us so many learning opportunities to hone our skills, a path of personal growth that affords us a refreshing, unbiased look at ourselves. Time and again, my students have learned how entirely more capable they are than once thought. The American sporting clays shooter can honestly and proudly say, in a very short period, he has indeed advanced to take his rightful place among the best in the world. And, let’s not forget, no one is having more fun out here than you and I are.

The events, times, places and persons in my articles are all true. While I changed a name here and there, 100% of the information came from my experiences with you. Each tournament, each lesson, each experience with you generated the material for my work. I am grateful.

We hope you enjoyed the first part of the article and will visit us online to browse the numerous collection that is available. Until then, happy Sporting!

The Paragon School of Sporting
Order Magazine Articles Online: http://www.paragonschool.com/catalog

The Paragon School of Sporting, established by Dan Schindler in 1994, is a prominent Sporting Clays Shooting and Wing Shooting school specializing in Sporting Clays instruction, Sporting Clays instructor training, lessons for the Wing Shooter, and Corporate Special Events.


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