Neurological Training for Shooting Performance

The old adage “You fight like you train and train how you fight” is the golden rule for combat effectiveness. Science has its own version of this, the SAID principle – an acronym that stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. In other words, your body ALWAYS gets better at EXACTLY what it does (and how you do it).

In this series of articles, we are going to look at developing better marksmanship by training your nervous system and specifically your vision.

For tactical & military athletes, binocular vision or using both eyes together to see is paramount for both situational awareness, and accurately identifying and seeing targets. The US Army states in published research that the Sympathetic Nervous System, when activated by high-stress combat situations will force both eyes open. If you have proper functioning binocular vision and you “train like you fight” this should not pose a problem, however, it is estimated that as much as 56% of the general population has a defect in binocular vision. This means that one eye works significantly better than the other and the eyes do not work well enough together for the brain to combine both video streams into one.

For a tactical athlete who can’t produce stereo vision (vision using both eyes) their shooting accuracy may be be reduced with both eyes open compared to using only one eye to aim. To better understand what may prevent you from having good binocular vision, let’s start by defining what vision is and from there, we’ll define the core visual skills every tactical athlete needs to own.

Read more- The Loadout Room

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