mistermasetti

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Right or Wrong?

I was intrigued by the fact that the military was trying to analyze why planes that left for war missions were successful to return to their bases despite having been hit repeatedly and even seriously.
They began to mark the points where the shots were grouped on a airplane diagram.
After a number of "recordings" of this data, they concluded that if they strengthened the parts where the hits were most clustered, they would definitely improve the crews and aircraft survivability.
But a Hungarian, naturalized American, mathematician named Abraham Wald put the problem the other way around.
He pointed out that the analysis of the hits concerned the planes that had returned, and that therefore despite the damages suffered (those marked in the plane diagram) they had been able to fly to their base.
Therefore it would have been better to reinforce the parts excluded from the hit registration, because those belonged to the planes that had been shot down: hence the name of "Survival Bias"

The analogy of this story with shooting, I identify it with the age-old dilemma of whether it is better to take care of the strengths at the expense of weaknesses or vice versa, in the process of training the Shooter.
Almost always a Coach observing a shooter instinctively notices what can be defined as "mistakes" (I covered this topic extensively in my book Front Sight in the Chapter "Management of...Errors?" starting on page 197) and try to fix it.
Instead, it is much more difficult for those details that define the strengths (correctness) to be noticed.
As always, a coach must be able to "balance" these two aspects, taking into account the psycho-physical characteristics of the Shooter and the time he has to train adequately.
I can definitely underline a mental attitude useful for getting used to non-performing things with at least two pieces of advice:
- Using Scatt system, DO NOT cancel shots that you don't like, just to have a nice track: the Coach he really wants to see those shots (paraphrasing the example of the Plane, just those shots you can't see) because they are the ones that have the greatest amount of information;
- If the Coach has prescribed exercises for you to perform in a given modality, it is important to perform "exactly" such exercises, in the sense that if, for example, you have to do "X shots with control of the result, WITHOUT making sighting shots", You MUST NOT do the sighting shots... but you MUST do those "X" shots regardless of that which will be the result... otherwise the spirit of the training is lost: in competition, every shot fired...is fired!
We also have to get used to the shots we don't like, because all this is part of the growth process!!

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The contents of this site have the sole purpose of illustrating my experiences as an Olympic Shooting Coach. The information contained therein does not intend to constitute a "manifesto" or even a new "theorem" on Target Shooting.

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