Where should your eyes be focused?
This will be part three of the preparatory queuing series of videos. I'm Brian Hill with The Complete Combatant. We're going to talk about where do we let our eyes settle. Joan Vickers did some work on the quiet eye theory. Muli thought, talked about the soft gaze looking past your opponent as a fight coach. I talked about this a lot because if we looked at a person's eyes, it could lie to us. If we looked at a hand or a foot, it also could lead us in a different direction. So, what we did was we looked to the center and then opened up our gaze because you can pick up motion a lot better that way, and that's what primarily shooting is the dot or the front side is motion. It always will be in motion. You have to be ready to do that.
Common Practice in vision
What a lot of people do though with their vision is they narrow it down to the detailed vision of Faveo Cone and they're looking through a tunnel like this at everything. It excludes their ability to know where they are in the environment. If any of you have ever done precision rifle shooting, you know what I'm talking about. The more you magnify the scope, the less you can see the harder it is to find the target sometimes. So, I want to look to the center of the target. My first two videos had me be ready mentally and step up with posture. All right, now I'm going to look to the center of the thing and I'm going to let my vision expand as far as it will go and see as many things as possible. It will be softer but not hard-focused. Right here. I see this a lot with iron sight shooters and some dot shooters still because they're still dot-focused, but they'll put their heads down and narrow their vision.
Focus on Target
This is almost always indicative of going to a very small level of detailed vision. Like I'm looking at my thumb. That is not where we want to fight from. We need a predictive model of movement and we need to be able to track the motion with smooth pursuit as the eyes following it. And that's what we're going to do with our vision. So, look to the center of the target and see as much of the range as you can. You have to trust that you don't need to narrow your focus to such a smaller area. Remember, in self-defense, you're going to have to manage an arm opponent. Sometimes you must see more than your front site or your red dot. You have to see the entirety of the process. If your competitive shooter, you need to see the entire target. I heard the statement in class and I found it a bit surprising, but when I compared backgrounds, it wasn't.
Learning to primarily shoot
That a lot of people that shoot U-S-P-S-A targets in a purely competitive background shoot low. Tim Herron was talking about it in class. Now, I've never had that problem and I immediately asked my friend AJ Zito if he had it, and he said, well, I don't. No, I don't really, and as we talked further, we talked about learning to primarily shoot against targets that were shaped like people. I always take into account the head and the shoulders. That's the intersection of the target. I'm not a great fan of targets that don't represent people in some form or fashion. My martial arts training was always against things that were similar to people. We were always trying to make bags that looked more like people that had a better shape so we could hit it better. And it's the same thing with targets. One thing that Tim said is they don't see the head as part of the target.
So, they end up to shoot to the middle of the target, which is a lower, which I found really interesting. And I intersect at the shoulders and the head. So, I'm using that vision a little differently. This is important guys. This visual process is our connection to the universe. Fighting is primarily vision and it is feel too of feels of psychological pressure and motion and movement and a little bit of sound. And those are the senses that we're going to be working through. So, it's really important to think, how am I going to use my vision when I step up to the line? I need to look at the target, settle my vision, and let it expand and give myself a sense of control over the environment.
Look to the center
The more I see, the more information I can take in. And then I can say, this is important to look to the center. Okay, those things are not as important, but I know where I am and I can look to the center and I can see the target in its entirety. And when my dot or my front side enters the target, I will be ready to press the trigger. As soon as that happens. It's a very different way to think about things, but do this with your vision. If you have good posture and you keep your head up, you will perceive more. As you perceive more, you must make the goal, the orientation of what's important. That'll be in the next video. We're going to talk about that a little bit, but open up the vision. Don't narrow it and drop your head and put your head down. I think the hat has a lot to play.
Some people put it to the top so they can't pass it, but you're narrowing your vision. Head up, open, chin tucked, see more, look past the target, spread out your vision, and see if it doesn't render results. At first, it doesn't feel very good. It feels like you're surrendering control, which you kind of are. You're seeing more and then you're prioritizing what's important. That's something I think that will help you. This is part of a series of videos of preparatory queuing. So, I've done be ready, I've done posture. Okay, now we've talked about the eyes. How do we look forward? And we have four more to go, and this is something I do every time I step to the line. And it can be done in less than a second. If I have any indication I'm about to do something, I can communicate to my body to do these things and to be ready. At first, it'll be burdensome and it'll take some time, but eventually, you'll start doing it automatically because it's going to reward you with a higher level of performance. I'm Brian Hill with The Complete Combatant, and as always, measure, refine, and perform.
To Watch Click The Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIH6nK8l3NA&t=17s
Credit: Brian Hill, Co-Owner of https://www.thecompletecombatant.com/
Check the next part of the series