Last week our crew at Teton Sports Club had a corporate team-building experience with the Jackson Hole Shooting Experience. We all had a great time and discovered that there are some similarities between fitness and recreational luxury entertainment shooting. If you are looking for things to do in Jackson Hole, I suggest giving shooting guns a try!
As it turns out, discipline, dedication to detail and persistence seem to pay off in both activities. Most of the members of our team had little shooting experience, however by the end of our morning, we had all achieved long range shooting hits at 600 yards!
As we sometimes observe with people beginning a fitness program, one has a desire to start out with huge challenges right from the beginning. When we began our shooting experience however, we saw a correlation to our recommended beginning to a fitness program. Baby steps. We started out shooting with 22 caliber rifles and then moved up to 22 caliber pistols. A 22 caliber cartridge is a very small cartridge and does not have much recoil and is not very loud.
This is akin to beginning with stretching and gentle exercises rather than trying to deadlift 800 lb on one’s first day back to the gym after being MIA for a decade. After shooting the smaller caliber guns, we moved up to larger caliber pistols and larger caliber rifles. With our small caliber warmup, we were ready!
We learned the importance of the trigger press. The human body and brain have certain tendencies and developing the discipline and personal control to overcome them is very important. I think this relates to a workout program when I consider not using jerky movements when lifting heavy weights. While explosive resistance moves can be done by an experienced athlete, in the beginning stages, it is very wise to pay attention to slow and deliberate and well-calculated movements.
Like an exercise program, shooting is very simple, except of course when long range shooting in Nomad Rifleman Style. There is a lot of math involved, also physics and observation of environmental factors. For beginning and intermediate level shooting however, Shepard Humphries explained that there are really only two parts to shooting rifles and pistols, pointing the tube in the correct direction and firing the gun without moving the tube away from that correct direction. Simple? Yes. Easy? No.
This is like the simplicity of an exercise and diet program. Eat healthy food, do some stretches and some exercises that get you out of breath and lift some heavy things. Simple? Yes. Easy? No. I left the experience encouraged with the simplicity of shooting while also appreciating the difficulty. It was fantastic watching some of our fitness trainers when asked to teach elements of shooting they had just learned to others on our team. See one, do one, teach one. I was very proud of our crew’s incredible coaching ability, even when teaching something they had just learned.
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