When I was 15, my primary hobby was competitive shooting, and at the time I was, if I may say so, pretty darn good. I would go to a big black powder muzzle odor competition here somewhere in the west and usually place in the top two and frequently I'd win

shooting against adults that had been doing this for decades where I'd been doing it

for just a couple years. Then I developed a flinch. I was

shooting a 50 caliber long rifle often borrowed from a friend of the family.

It was a very accurate rifle and easy to shoot well.

But being a 50 caliber, it did tend to kick. I also shot a 45 some but for whatever reason I never shot it as well

It didn't kick as much

But I think the 50 caliber just fit me a little bit better. When I started flinching,

I went to several meets in a row and never placed and it was frustrating. I'd go out to warm up

you know a few days before the match and I'd shoot and I could tell I was just in a

bad way and I knew it was the flinch.

Oddly enough I'd gotten by with a controlled trigger twitch for some time. I had a good position, a good off-hand

shooting position and I'd learned to just kind of whisk that trigger off as it

wobbled across the bull's eye and I'd usually hit the bull's eye but slowly my

brain evolved you know they do and all my reflexes my body started saying well if we can do that we can also anticipate the recoil

that this rifle is gonna throw back into my body and we can kind of tense a little preemptively so it doesn't knock us as

far back and so on and so forth and that controlled little twitch off of my trigger turned into a bona fide flinch and I couldn't

hit for trying.

At that point I realized I needed to change the way I went about shooting.

I switched from using a double set trigger, which was part of the reason I'd been able to

twitch it off so effectively, you know, it's like a six ounce trigger once set.

I went back to using just a standard function which was about a four and a half pound

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