“I have developed a terrible flinch. Why do I flinch and how can I stop it?”
There are two types of flinches with very separate and distinct causes. The first type of flinch is a physical flinch. A physical flinch is caused by an anticipation of recoil. There are a couple of ways to cure this. Shooting with a smaller gauge gun or very light load for a time may help you overcome a physical flinch. As you execute your shot with the lighter recoil, concentrate on activating the trigger with a lighter touch. Instead of using a heavy-handed trigger pull, activate the trigger “gingerly”, using just enough finger pressure to activate the trigger. Try to shoot enough shells through the gun to get accustomed to the feel of the lighter recoil and lighter trigger pressure. Then gradually work your way back to your normal load. If you are recoil sensitive and shooting a 1-1/8 ounce load, I recommend that you consider going to a one-ounce load permanently. We use only one-ounce loads in FITASC where the targets are generally at greater distances so there is plenty of lead in the air. You can achieve a higher shot speed with less recoil and only 17% less shot in your pattern.
The second type of flinch is a visual flinch caused by visual confusion. This is a bit more complicated to diagnose because there are a number of different causes for a visual flinch and you may only experience this type of flinch on certain target presentations. In shotgunning, the brain can experience a subconscious confusion when the flow of visual information is either, 1) interrupted by the barrel, or 2) interfered with by unwanted targeting information from the non-shooting eye. When the connection between the eye and the target is interrupted by the barrel, it is usually due to poor gun fit, improper gun mount or improper gun movement, otherwise known as “spoiling the line”. A shooter “spoils the line” when, instead of moving the barrel up to the break point at a slight angle, thus keeping the shooting eye and the target above the rib, the shooter moves the barrel along the target line. By doing so, the shooter unwittingly occludes the shooting eye with the barrel, breaking the connection between the shooting eye and the target. Regardless of whether the cause is gun fit, gun mount or spoiling the line, the shooting eye and/or the target falls below the rib causing the non-shooting eye to acquire the target and take the lead in transmitting “target guidance” input to the brain. In one instant, the brain is taking its cue from the shooting eye. Then, as the barrel occludes the eye, the brain must take its cue from the non-shooting eye, causing the visual confusion. The second reason for the brain to experience visual confusion is because it is receiving visual imagery from the non-shooting eye that conflicts with the imagery being received from the shooting eye. This rarely happens in a shooter who is solidly dominant on the side they shoot from. Only about 25% of the population however, are solidly dominant in one eye so the rest of the shooting population, to a lesser or greater degree, experiences interference from the non-shooting eye. For some shooters, this interference is insignificant enough to have no effect. For other shooters, with a meaningful amount of center ocular shift, this interference can cause significant difficulty when engaging certain target presentations: for example, a left-to-right crossing target for a right-handed shooter.
If you are convinced that you are not suffering from a physical flinch, you should schedule some time with an instructor well versed in gun fitting and eye dominance anomalies that can make the proper assessment.