the shooter to focus on the sight picture during the critical moment when the shot is fired. Shooting is a game of milliseconds and if you divert your attention from the target, you risk drifting off target. In so many cases, shooters will not even notice this. They will establish their sight picture, consider the crosshairs on target and then begin to think about something else. It’s during these moments where we miss the movement caused by a poor trigger press, or a subconscious shift in our body. We need to carefully watch the reticle so we can answer: Where are our sights during the firing sequence? This is the modern, more effective way to call your shots. If the sights remain on target and we deviate from impacting at our expected location, we then need to examine the firing sequence, so we identify the issue. “Was it a case of letting a fundamental go; poor natural point of aim; a failed trigger press; or lack of follow-through? Or do we need to adjust our zero? Calling our shots will help identify any number of issues. It can even help in recognizing faulty equipment such as scope that fails to hold zero.
If we have practiced and trained our body to execute the fundamentals correctly, during live fire the benefits will be immediately apparent. This also extends to positional shooting, from any position. Making this a part of the firing sequence will train you to be more effective.
Recoil Management
In classes, I talk a lot about the fundamentals of marksmanship and how they are the building blocks to all great shooting. When we break them down into a logical order, they address the core elements of a shot. From our body position to our sights, the fundamentals guide us toward a better result: hitting the target.
When addressing the rifle, we look at natural point of aim: rifle pointed to the target with the body pointed to the rifle. Sight picture has become modified when using a scope from sight picture and sight alignment to aiming. Granted, we still have sight alignment, our eye relief, and sight picture is about edge-to-edge clarity behind the ocular. However, these actions are not part of the shot sequence because the scope should be set up ahead of time. When using a rifle scope, it’s more about aiming, unlike iron sights.
Bipod design matters when it comes to recoil management.
Once our body position is established, it’s about the firing sequence. In the past, we would tell the shooter to control his or her breathing giving it that slight pause before breaking the shot. Today, we look at the natural respiratory pause, breaking at the bottom of our exhale while avoiding the urge to hold our breath. Think about this. Movement, going from Point A to Point B quickly, increases our heart rate and breathing. The worst thing you can do under these elevated conditions is to hold your breath. So, we breathe through and merely break the trigger at the bottom of our natural respiratory cycle. Trust me, you have no concept of time under these conditions so don’t attempt to hold your breath.
While ignoring our breathing, we want to begin to take up the trigger without moving the sights off target. Trigger control or the manipulation of the trigger without disturbing the lay of the sights, might sound easy, but it’s our most significant point of error. We combine trigger control with follow-through, the act of physically and mentally holding the shot on target. In our mind’s eye, we want to follow the bullet to the target until the recoil pulse has subsided. We do that by physically staying engaged with the sights on the targets. One hundred percent of your focus should be on the target/reticle relationship during this sequence. Once the recoil pulse has ended and we have observed the results of our shot downrange, we can then run the bolt for the next round.
Part of setting up the rifle to the shooter is balancing the proper height on the bipod legs, so recoil will come back in a straight line.
These are the fundamentals of marksmanship as needed to engage targets at a distance successfully.
But there is more. Today we shoot slightly different than the originators of the fundamentals. They were sling or unsupported shooters. While various front rests existed, the technique did not change much when using one.
For the modern shooter, a solid front rest is the most common way to engage targets. We use bipods, which means we have to modify our body position in a way to allow the shooter the ability to see the results of the shot. No longer do we rely on the spotter to do the heavy lifting. Back in my Sniper School days, the spotter was the Senior Marine who guided the trigger monkey on target and established the variables for the engagement. All the shooter does is follow directions and press the trigger without disturbing the lay of the sights. Today, we have learned that recoil management is an essential element related to the fundamentals.
Recoil management tells the bullet where the barrel is when leaving the bore. It controls your zero. Depending on how you are positioned behind the rifle, once it fires, there is time between the primer strike and the exiting of the bullet. During this short period, new shooters tend to move causing deviations in the position of the barrel. More influence at the back of the rifle, increases movement at the front. If we are consistent, as in we shoot a group, it’s our job to adjust the sights to center the group around our aiming point. This recoil management is why your zero is different than your buddy’s; each person is addressing the rifle in a slightly different way; hence the recoil management changes.
Today, the military addresses recoil management as part of the firing task, the same as follow-through. However, recoil management starts during the beginning phases of the shot sequence. We want to load the bipod or stack our weight behind the rifle, eliminating angles during natural point of aim. Then, when the shot breaks, we ride the rifle through recoil, maintaining our sight picture and our reticle’s relationship with the target. This is the part of recoil management that works with follow-through.
Loading the bipod is often misunderstood. People think it’s about pushing the rifle forward with the shoulders. This is incorrect. You are loading the bipod from the core, our hips. It’s not about pressure, but more about dead weight giving the rifle a slab of meat to recoil against. It’s also bipod-dependent, as you are merely taking the slack out of the system.
A Harris bipod, one of the most common on the market, has very little to no perceived movement in the legs. We load a Harris using one technique, where an Atlas Bipod has slack in the legs and movement. That requires are a different technique. The Harris is more of a rise with a knuckle under with the rubber feet. We do not push any bipod forward, but rather bring the rifle back into our shoulder pocket and move our core up. It’s a pinching method of holding the stock between the bipod and body.
The Atlas comes back into our shoulder pocket, then operating as one unit, we remove the slack from the legs using our core weight to hold it. This way, when the rifle recoils, it just flexes on the slack of the legs. About a quarter inch of movement. Once the recoil pulse has ended, the rifle will return to the original starting point.
This works in alternate positions, too, when we are not even using a bipod. Take a barricade drill as an example. How do you position your body and stack your weight behind the rifle? We want our shoulders square and in front of our hips and the rifle held into the shoulder pocket. Picture the prone body position and translate that same upper chest and head location to other positions.
Recoil management is every bit of a fundamental as the fundamentals themselves. We can spot our own shots; we stay engaged with our targets; and can quickly follow up and fix a miss without assistance. Seeing is essential. The more we can see, the more we can locate, close with and engage. It’s about being our own spotter, and not taking our most senior member out of the fight. Two guns are always better than one.
