Blog Archives - Page 31 of 81

A Freezer Filling Skill

On Wednesday morning I got up very excited to share this video with you. And then I checked the news.

Suffice it to say that I didn’t think it was appropriate to send out this video on the day of a mass shooting.

But here’s an uncomfortable truth: there’s a mass shooting almost every single day in the United States. 154 in 165 days. And that’s using the narrowest definition. It doesn’t even include the shooting on the same day in San Francisco where four people including the shooter died.

So either there’s never a good day to talk about how to use a rifle properly for hunting or precision sport shooting, or any day is as good as any other.

I sit at a weird place when it comes to guns and regulations. I’ve jumped through the BATF’s hoops and waited through almost year-long waiting periods to have a firearm or a part that meets some narrow and ridiculous set of criteria. I’ve also walked into a gun store and walked out with a handgun I could easily conceal when a convicted sex offender used a house showing to steal my social security number and I had no idea if he was coming back.

And yet in general I think it’s way too easy. I think we need a major re-thinking of gun policy in this country. In fact, if someone could wave a wand and round up all the guns in the country I’d hand mine over. That’s not going to happen, so we need to think really, really hard about making it aggressively difficult to buy firearms, unbelievably costly when you use one in a crime, and impossible to keep when you’ve already committed a crime that demonstrates you can’t be trusted.

That said, as long as firearms exist as a tool to be used for hunting and sport shooting I think it’s well worth learning how to use them properly. This video focuses on the skills you need to shoot a precision long rifle out to long distances, well past the typical 100 yards. If you’re a hunter it’s critical to be a competent shooter so that you can make a clean and ethical kill the first time every time. Even if you’re not a hunter, precision rifle shooting is a lot of fun. In the western U.S. there are great events that combine hiking, navigation, adventure, and difficult shooting challenges into endurance precision shooting events. And even if you’re just plinking steel, long distance shooting involves combining basic fundamentals of shooting with deep knowledge of conditions and even some math.

It’s hard to convey the satisfaction you get when everything comes together and you pull the trigger to hear the distinct “ping” of steel a couple seconds – or longer – later. Or, when you take an animal you’ve been hunting for hours or days and it drops in on the spot and you know you’ve filled your freezer for the next several months with the most natural free range meat there is.

In this Human Skill video I take my good friend Marshal through the basic setup to hit a target 300 yards – imagine three football fields – away. You’ll have to watch the video to see if he gets a hit on his first try.

While I’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg for precision shooting – like anything worth doing you could do it for a lifetime and not learn everything – these are the fundamentals you need to be able to shoot accurately at any distance.

I hope you enjoy this video, and I sincerely hope that some day soon we have more sensible gun laws in this country.

by david Leave a Comment

What does a coach even do?

Due in part to my wide and varied interests I’ve experienced a lot of coaching over the years. From piano lessons to indoor skydiving coaching I’ve seen a ton of different techniques and styles. My wife, Jen Sinkler, in her capacity has a fitness editor for a decade has quite possibly attended more fitness workshops than anyone else as well as having played rugby at an elite level thus had dozens of different coaches. We’ve been able to witness and experience a LOT of coaching.

What you may think of when you think of instruction or coaching is someone telling you how to do something new to you. And sure that might be part of it. But there’s much more that a good coach actually provides:

Safety: When you’re stepping outside your comfort zone to learn something new or go somewhere you’ve never gone before you want to know that you’re safe. Sometimes that’s literal safety like knowing you’re not going to get hurt with a new movement (or by slamming into the wall in the wind tunnel like I’m always afraid of) and sometimes it’s a more general sense of trust that you’re in good hands and it’s okay that it’s uncomfortable because you trust you’re safe.

Communication: Telling someone something is not the same as communicating. To communicate the other party has to receive the message, and that’s not always the case. A good coach however is a master communicator, always honing the message and tweaking it based on their judgement of how well you’re receiving it. You can see this when you watch a coach repeat the same cues without any change happening – they’re not adjusting the message to make sure communication is actually happening. Communication also means you understand the big picture and intention behind what you’re doing, not just the motions.

Instruction: This is, in my opinion, the least important piece as compared to the other two. If you feel like, and are, in a safe environment for experimentation you will eventually figure out whatever you need to although maybe not as quickly. And without communication the instruction is useless. But of course a piece of coaching is the actual methods of instruction. Some are demonstrably visibly better than others. I’ve worked with coaches who have made something click in one session that has taken others multiple sessions to not even break new ground on. A good coach experiments with different techniques and methods until they find the best practices that work with most people, but they also keep all the other ones in their back pocket in case the usual tricks don’t work.

These are the biggest and most important things that a good coach provides. There are others, but you’ll find the common thread among great coaches is that they fulfill these needs first and then everything else is just the cherry on top.

I was thinking about coaching for two reasons. One is that I was doing some flying in the vertical wind tunnel last night and experienced some of the best coaching I’ve ever had so it got my gears turning about what made it that much better. The other reason is that I’ve been thinking about reviving a group coaching group I did a few years ago that got rave reviews. We’d focus on a building strength with some good fundamental movements as well as some cool old time strongman stuff and you’d learn how to structure your training (and mindset!) to PR every time you train. If that’s something you’d be interested in, just shoot me a super quick message on my contact form.

by david Leave a Comment

But first let me check one more thing…

I sit down to write. The cursor blinks on the page.

Nothing is coming to me.

Better make sure nothing life-changing has been posted on Instagram.

Wait I was writing. Back to typing and deleting. Can’t think of anything.

Pretty sure there will be some breaking news on twitter that’s important…

Damn I should be creating something. Back to writing.

OK but nothing has come to me so I should probably check cryptocurrency prices.

Fine I’m back to writing but a whole 15 minutes has gone by and I haven’t been able to come up with something so maybe today isn’t the right day. Maybe I should sit this one out and come back when I feel fresh tomorrow?

The battle with distractions from you doing something hard but worthwhile is never ending. I’m sure Picasso didn’t have Facebook and Netflix but I’d wager he was no less distracted by fair maidens and breaking news telegraphs.

Maybe these distractions stop you from creating something that is trapped in your minds eye, or they pull you away from long term slow endeavours like building a strong body or aesthetic physique. Either way they’re stealing from you.

While there are no true “hacks”, it’s worth experimenting with different systems to interrupt an unproductive pattern. I have tons of friends who have had great luck with and swear by GTD, the Getting Things Done system. Others do something as simple as using the Pomodoro technique when they’re in dedicated work times. I don’t think it matters so much what systems you use, rather that you have something that causes you to examine and focus on your behavior if your automatic habits involve too much distraction.

At the end of the day it comes down to asking yourself the same question often and repeatedly: “Am I creating right now?”

Because in the end that’s what matters. What you create. No one has ever been remembered for what they consumed. Consumption can have a place in creation to be sure, I get some of my greatest inspirations from reading, but that type of consumption can be directly connected to creation.

It’s not clicking yes on “Are you still watching?”

Be patient. Sit with it. Sometimes it takes more than 5 minutes of investing your time before you see the payoff. Sometimes you have to start writing nonsense or drawing doodles or just showing up to the gym to move something before the inspiration really kicks in.

So do whatever you have to do to keep the focus, and go make what you’re capable of.