A Dixie Carpetbagger

Sebastian, discussing training versus skill in the shooting world:

Shooting is the same. I can spend an afternoon and give someone enough knowledge to go out and become a safe shooter, and that’s really all training can do. Shooting, and shooting safely, is a skill. Skills must be practiced, over and over again, until they are muscle memory. Firearms training is a good thing, because it can impart knowledge, and help you on your way to skill, just like piano lessons can help you learn how to play piano. But proficiency, and safety in the case of shooting, are entirely up to the person to develop. If you aren’t committed, and don’t practice, you’ll never be any good at either piano playing or shooting.

Colonel Cooper also used a musical analogy to describe this– having the object (guitar, piano, gun) does not make you a proficient user (guitarist, pianist, shooter) of the object.  This is why I constantly remind my gunnie friends that they need to practice, and that if they can’t remember their last training session, they need to have one.

Why?  Muscle memory.  It takes almost a thousand repetitions of an action to make it an automatic action that the brain can do without thinking about it.  As the Wikipedia article points out:

As one speaks, one usually does not consciously think about the complex tongue movements, synchronisation with vocal cords and various lip movements that are required to produce phonemes, because of muscle memory. In speaking a language that is not one’s native language, one typically speaks with an accent, because one’s muscle memory is tuned to forming the phonemes of one’s native language, rather than those of the language one is speaking. An accent can be eliminated only by carefully retraining the muscle memory. It is said that it takes about 740 of the same motions for your muscles to “memorize” the movements almost perfectly.

This is also why just going to the range and shooting is almost useless– you must consciously work on the repetitions until you get it right.  If you are repeating a flawed action (flinching, improper grip, slapping the trigger, etc.), you will ingrain that action so that it becomes automatic.  To paraphrase the old drill instructor’s lament: “Learn to do it right, and you’ll do it right every time.  Learn to do it wrong, and you will screw it up until you learn to do it right!”  In that spirit, use this target the next time you train.  (Okay, so these targets might be more useful.  Less funny, but more useful.)

(H/T Uncle for the targets.)