Do you flinch when you fire your gun? Most shooters will say no – and yet look what happens when they get a misfire. Without the anticipated noise and recoil, any tensing up and snatching the trigger is plain to see. Often they’ll feel foolish and laugh it off in the moment, rather than stopping to think about the problem it’s highlighted. There’s a lot of self-denial and shame surrounding the subject, with shooters not wanting to own up to being ‘soft’ or ‘frightened of the recoil’. Let’s be clear that I am not talking about ‘trigger freeze’ here. That is a related but different problem where your trigger finger locks up tight on the trigger with the first shot, instead of releasing again. That prevents the trigger mechanism resetting, and stops you firing the second shot. That can be tied up with a flinching problem, but here I’m talking about the flinch itself – the shooter tensing up and even screwing up their eyes in anticipation of the recoil. In my job I spend a lot of time taking photos and video of shooters in action and then editing the results on the computer – and I can assure you that most shooters flinch to some degree, many of them to such an extent that it simply must be affecting their performance. As you’d expect, it’s most obvious in beginners. It would be unkind to show them here, but I have endless videos of new shooters with their eyes screwed tight shut as they pull the trigger. If you watch carefully, you can see their whole body tense up as they prepare to fire. The hands grip tightly on the stock and fore-end, the arm and shoulder muscles lock up and the eyes are screwed up. In an extreme case, the shooter may turn their head away from the gun, moving their head off the stock in an attempt to avoid the noise and recoil. That’s the extreme case, although it worries me to see just how many people on have-a-go sessions are doing exactly that. They surely can’t be enjoying the experience, and they certainly aren’t getting a good grounding in shooting technique. More experienced shooters tend to flinch less, but it’s still there to some degree, as my misfire example shows. The very top shooters, as you might expect, show the least tendency to flinch. Their technique is a joy to behold in slow motion video. Their gun-mount is precise and consistent, with minimal movement. When they fire, only the trigger finger moves; there’s no tightening of the grip on the gun, or tensing of arms or neck. As the gun fires, the eyes stay open, fixed on the target. The gun hardly moves in the shoulder. It seems almost inevitable that the target will break – and it usually does. That’s what we should all aspire to, but it’s easier said than done. Flinching is a natural reflex reaction to an anticipated impact; we do it …Continue reading »