Rifle Coaching Tips – Balance In The Standing Position

An essential skill to develop and gain mastery of when you are shooting in the standing position is the skill to hold the rifle confidently and maintain your body in a balanced and stable position. This means that forming stability in your shooting position and understanding when you are getting unbalanced is significant.  Emphasizing on building balance while training is the only way to form this feeling and to have enhanced control over your balance.

Here are some exercise techniques that will help you to balance in standing position:

- Hold your rifle in your shooting position. Emphasize on feeling your position correctly – the balance in your feet, your hips, your arm counter to your body, how you are holding the rifle, the way you lean into the position, just to name a few.  Do not be concerned regarding where the rifle points at this time as it really does not matter – you are concentrating on making a best position and forming muscle memory for that position.  Schedule 5 minutes for this exercise.

- Hold your rifle properly in your shooting position with all gear on. Emphasize on ensuring your position feels correct.  Next, ensure you have the precise natural point of target and you are aligned on the aim.  Now you are prepared to emphasize on your internal position – the sense of your balance, your muscles, your feet, everything.  Devote 10 minutes attaining the position, and standing in your position, emphasizing on all these things.

- When you think that you have done this, and you are having confidence about your position and your balancing ability, step it up further, and make it tougher. Holding the rifle with your eyes shut will pull all your attention to your balancing act, which will be harder to manage when you can no longer see what you are doing.  In order to do this exercise successfully, you ought to get into your shooting position, and begin to aim on the target.  This is the time to shut your eyes – no breathing, just being still for 5-10 seconds while you would typically be targeting.  You must be able to feel every movement, and then you can work towards holding your balance. Just open your eyes and breathe.  You can use around 10 minutes on this exercise.

- Find your centre of gravity

- Dry firing for additional 10 minutes can now aid you to think about targeting and triggering with proper good balance. However, no dry firing for break barrel rifles.

- Last of all, you can dry fire with your eyes shut. Start just as you did in step 3, build your position, aim at the goal, and close your eyes.  Feel your balance, and when everything feels steady, you can simply dry fire.  If the balance does not feel good, then put the rifle down and restart again.  You can have this exercise done for 10 mins.

- Follow through

If you practice all these exercises together, each one progressively increasing the difficulty and demanding you to focus more intensely on balance – you will have accomplished 45 minutes of holding and had something interesting to emphasize on each time.

Happy Holding!