Maintaining target focus against an external force is an important skill and greatly impacts performance.
For example, maintaining target focus when experiencing a weapon’s recoil. You don’t want to risk losing target focus with every recoil force. Here’s what happens:
- The weapon’s recoil creates an external accelerative force on your body – pushing you posteriorly.
- Your vestibular system senses this acceleration, and the plane that you’re moving in, and sends that information to your brain for processing.
- Your brain quickly processes this information and sends the signal to your visual system to create the appropriate eye vergence movements.
- You keep the target in focus.
This typically happens in less than 15ms and can have a significant impact on accuracy in conditions of rapid fire.
How can we incorporate this skill into your training? Add multi-planar acceleration with target focus into your strength and conditioning programming.
For the weapon recoil plane, we want a forward/backwards movement that will reproduce the vergence response.
A great exercise you’re probably already doing is a depth drop push-up to explosive rebound. To add vergence, just place a target on the floor to maintain focus on. I like letters for targets, and stickers are great options. (Just be sure to pick it up off the floor when you’re done)