Not quite eat,shoot,leave

No room for error

These tiny margins of error are compounded by the sports physicality. Shooting may not be as taxing as playing football or running a marathon,but achieving perfect stillness with a heavy rifle clamped against your shoulder or a pistol held at the end of a fully extended arm calls for highly specialised physical preparation.

We do a lot of upper body exercises, says 3-position rifle shooter Sanjeev Rajput. But we dont use heavy weights,since we dont want to add bulk. Mostly,strengthening is done with resistance bands and elastic tubes.

Each shooting discipline comes with its own targeted muscle group. In 3-position,we use different muscles for each position, says Rajput. For example,in prone,its the upper body and hands,and in kneeling,its the thighs and calves.

Pistol shooter Vijay Kumar targets his shoulder specifically. Since its a one-hand hold,all the pressure is on the shoulder, he says. For the shotgun disciplines,distinguished by the rapidly moving clay targets,shooters go through a different regime,improving hand-eye coordination using tennis ball exercises.

And while it isnt necessary for shooters to conform to classical athletic body types,its important they maintain a consistent shape. A shooter,carrying significantly more or less weight than normal,is unlikely to feel comfortable while taking stance the weapon may no longer feel like an extension of the body. Even at peak physical condition,shooters have only gone halfway towards achieving that state. The mind remains to be tamed.

Vaibhav Agashe,the Indian teams mental trainer,says relaxation,alertness and mental focus on the technique are the objectives of mental training. Like other sportspersons,shooters occasionally get into the zone,where the act of shooting becomes instinctive and thoughtless,but dont actively chase it,he says.

Our objective isnt to get into the zone,because it is a very low percentage scenario. You try and relax as much as possible,believe in your shooting technique and let it happen. The objective is to be able to shoot very very alertly. It is almost an opposite of the zone stage very very aware of exactly what is happening around you.

Just breathing correctly,according to Agashe,can set off a positive chain reaction in a shooters performance.

If you watch babies,the stomach inflates when they inhale,and goes down when they exhale. At some stage,many people forget that easy kind of breathing and start using their chest more, he says. Under pressure,most people tend to tighten up their muscles,neck and shoulder,and if you are tight and breathing through your chest it becomes very shallow and irregular,affecting heart rate. Then,the mind switches off. This sequence needs to be broken,and you start by controlling the breathing till it becomes habit.

Agashe monitors the effect of his mental training techniques,using biofeedback equipment. One of the things we look into is Heart Rate Variability HRV. When excited or relaxed,the HRV changes and there are advanced mathematical calculations to analyse it and find out about changes in mental state.

Cold hands

Other indicators Agashe uses include neurofeedback changes in the EEG wave patterns give you a very correct picture of the mental state galvanic skin resistance which is measured on the fingertips,an indication of the nervous responses and even finger temperature.

In common parlance,we say a stressed person has cold hands, says Agashe. This is a reality,so when you measure finger temperature you actually see it drop by 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit. So you can ask a particular player to train and increase finger temperature.

Similar aim,different means for archers

In many ways,archery replicates the demands that shooting places on its practitioners. The need to remain perfectly still,while focussing completely on the target,and use only selective muscle groups. But drawing a taut bowstring is slightly different from pulling a trigger,and archers8217; fitness routines are therefore slightly different.

We do work out in the gym,since we need power and strength to lift that heavy bow, says Jayanta Talukdar. But we stop one or two months before major competitions. The idea is to keep our muscles loose. At training,Talukdar can often be seen gazing at a target,without a bow in sight. I imagine shooting the centre of the target without my bow, he says. It grows bigger and bigger in my mind,and I shoot dead-centre.

Mental trainer Agashe is also involved with archers Rahul Banerjee and Tarundeep Rai. He says that the training techniques he employs are similar,but the competition formats exert different kinds of pressure. In shooting,there is a qualification round and there is a final round. Archery,I would compare it with badminton or tennis,it is more head-to-head .