Vincent Hancock, Fehaid al-Deehani, Peter Wilson stitch together a coaching masterclass for shooters

Tribune News Service

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New Delhi, June 5

What happens when three of the world’s most decorated shotgun shooters come on the same platform to discuss their sport? The discussion turns into a coaching masterclass.

This happened during a webinar, ‘Happy Times’, organised by Manav Rachna University, which featured two-time Olympics gold medallist skeet shooter Vincent Hancock, Kuwait’s Fehaid al-Deehani, who has won Olympics medals both in trap (bronze in 2012) and double trap (gold in 2016 and bronze in 2000), and Great Britain’s Peter Wilson, who won the double trap gold at the 2012 London Games.

It was Wilson who prompted the discussion about the volume of training, with a disclosure that he has tried to train differently – sometimes spending as much as over four hours in the gym and then another three hours at the range – but somehow hasn’t figured out about the volume of training.

“I used to shoot anywhere between 70,000 to 80,000 rounds a year till around 2008 Olympics,” said Hancock, who won the first of his four World Championship gold medals as a 16-year-old in 2005.

“Now that I have been shooting for over 20 years, I have brought it down to 25,000 rounds and it has worked out great for me. It’s about quality more than the quantity,” Hancock, now 31, added.

Al-Deehani, who became Kuwait’s first Olympics medallist when he won bronze in Sydney 2000, added he prefers to train alone.

“It is not right to train with six guys. You have to wait for your turn to shoot and when you are waiting it may affect your brain. So I train alone. This way it gives me less time to think, change stations and shoot the target. That’s good for muscle memory,” the  53-year-old legend, who has the rare distinction of winning Olympics medals in both trap and double trap, said.

The mental training aspect was also discussed at length.

“There is an old saying in shooting that it is 90 percent physical and 10 percent mental. Most of the shooters get to that 90 per cent but getting to the next 10 is the hardest part,” Hancock said.

Al-Deehani had a slightly different take. “Many shooters start to think about mental training very early. No, first get to the physical part, get to 98 per cent and then think about it (mental training). You see, if you start to analyse your game, what happens generally is your performance goes down as you are thinking too much,” he said. “First work hard on basics, get very strong and then think about mental training.”