As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs I tend to suffer from cheek bruising when I shoot. It has got to the point where I actually cannot shoot within a week of another shoot because my cheek is still bruised and/or swollen. I recently tried a cheek pad which I ordered from the States and used it for first time at my first shoot at Lains Shooting School. After 150 cartridges there was barely any bruising which was FANTASTIC!!! The extra height on the comb gained by the pad also did not seem to affect my shooting so I thought that the problem was finally solved.
The other day I got delivery of a book called “Mastering Skeet”. Great little book and while flipping through it I happened to stop on a page where the guy mentioned cheek bruising. So I stopped and had a read of that section and it was quite a revelation!!! Basically and in a nutshell, it is because like most beginner shooters I put my head down onto the stock at a slight angle in order to get a good sight picture down the rib. What this does is cause my cheek bone to be in direct contact with the stock, and the skin stretched tight across the cheek bone. When the gun recoils, the stock moves sharply back and forth against my cheek bone causing the bruising.
What the guy in the book recommended was to put the gun up into your shoulder, then swivel your CHIN towards the stock without tilting your head until your CHIN makes contact. Once making contact, drop your head STRAIGHT down onto the stock. This movement bunches up the skin on your face under your cheek bone. This now causes two things to happen if you’ve done it right. 1) Your cheek bone is now cushioned by a thick layer of skin which absorbs and cushions the recoil without bruising the cheek bone, and 2) you are now looking down the barrel of your gun with your eyes in an almost perfect HORIZONTAL position.
It is hard to explain this in text but when I did this in front of a mirror it was quite an eye opener. I mounted the gun in my normal way and was rather surprised to notice that my head was tilted ever so slightly over to the right (I’m a right handed shooter), and my cheek was pressed firmly against the stock and the skin stretched tight. Without seeing this in the mirror I would never have guessed I was doing that. Using the new technique my head ended up almost perfectly horizontal, which is the ideal way to look down the barrel, and I now had a nice bit of loose skin between my cheek bone and the stock. The book clearly explains that if your head is tilted slightly, as mine was, it can cause you to misread your sight picture and you can end up missing the target. The reasoning behind this is that our brains automatically try and right our eyes to the horizontal when our heads are titled and this is done so subconsciously that we don’t realise it. As a result, as you point the gun at the target and get ready to fire, your brain is starting to right your head back to the horizontal. By the time you squeeze the trigger your head has lifted up ever so slightly, causing a miss as you are now no longer looking straight down the barrel.
Anyway, I went to shoot at Lains again on Saturday and spent the morning going round their excellent layout and deliberately did not use my new cheek pad. Instead I made every effort to use the new “swivel chin towards stock and drop head” method and it actually worked a treat!!! I came away after 100 clays with very little cheek tenderness, and no bruising which was awesome!!! The only reason for the tenderness was simply because on some of the stands the targets took me by surprise and I lifted my head. I knew I’d done it and made a concerted effort to rectify it afterwards. So, I paid £11 for that book and just one paragraph has solved my cheek problem. Well worth the money in my opinion… :o)
Dear Garath,
ReplyDeleteThe week before and the last week I shot and ended with quite massive bruise and tenderness. I was not aware of that problem before. Small tenderness existed but nothing important.
Maybe due to fact that as a greenhorn I shot about 50 rounds per training and training was only once a week. The week before the shooting pattern had changed and I shot over 150 rounds including shooting with 3,5 mm pellets not just 2,5 trap cartridges.
To cut the long story short - it was painful and dissapointing. Moreover, it cut out my abilities to enjoy tra shooting - pain and odd looking face temporary excluded me from practising. Tomorrow or after tomorrow I should be fine and I will try to change the way I mount.
You are right in "Mastering skeet" there is such a description on page 34. I hope it will help me.
Thank you for your suggestion!
Best regards
Andrzej
hi garath,
ReplyDeletei am a thai living in thailand and a greenhorn shotgun shooter. i just bought my first shotgun, a remington 870, less than a month ago. i am not a clay shooter but want a shotgun for self-defense.
though familiar with revolvers and pistols, shooting a shotgun is another story for me. yes i found that the face slap is a painful trouble of mine.
searching in google, i found your sharing is very useful. we both had the same problem, tilting our heads to the side of the stock. . . and bruises.
your tips from the book helped me a lot. yesterday's pratice, my third time, ran successfuly. no pian. no cheek scratch, no bruise at all.
i want to thank you for posting this very useful information on the cyber. i believe it surely will be plenty of new shotgun shooters facing the same problem as ours. your tips works indeed.
regards,
nattee boonsong