Caffeine and shooting

[Amazi]

I live off caffeine, probably drink more then it healthy specially when I do my pre workout 5 times a week. Just have off days when shooting and on days. Usually when I get pissed off from people being inconsiderate is when I can't hit the side of a barn.

[ZardozCZ]

On days that I shoot bullseye 22 league, I score higher the earlier in the day I stop drinking coffee. I score worse if I continue all afternoon. I'm pretty crappy at "combat" league with or without coffee, for what that's worth.

[jshuberg]

Too much caffeine can make you feel jittery, and effect your ability to hold steady, but in my opinion that's not the real problem. The problem is what it does to you mentally. Doing any type of physical activity requires you to remain relaxed and calm, and maintain a quiet mind. The hard part is doing this at speed, but too much caffeine can effect a persons ability to do this even at a slower pace.

Think of the mind as a pot of water. Most of the time the water is at a slow boil, with dozens of little random thoughts bubbling to the surface. Much of this is happening at the subconscious level, but some of it you can become aware of if you pay attention. Someone with ADHD basically suffers from a rapid boil, with hundreds of random thoughts that become distracting to the point where concentrating on any one thing for any period of time is extremely difficult. A boiling away with thoughts is a noisy mind. Any activity that requires focus and attention is compromised by a noisy mind. Your mind can only do so much, and if a large portion of it is out of your control thinking of everything under the sun except what you want to focus on, you're simply not going to be able to perform at your best. Stimulants (including adrenaline) increases the temperature of the water, increases the boil, and the amount of noise in your head.

The obvious answer is to not drink any caffeine before shooting, or during anything that requires focus, but for some of us addicts thats not really too much of an option. For example if I go without caffeine for more than a day, I get headaches and foggy headed, which also sucks. The best way to deal with it is to limit your intake when you need to, drink orange juice or something like that instead, and to also practice active/passive meditation to get your normal level of noisiness down to the lowest level possible. Think of it like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. With meditation, the more you practice it, the more you specifically work on calming the noise and clutter in your head, the quieter your mind will become. Caffeine will still effect it negatively, but your starting from a much quieter place to begin with.

There's a difference between concentration and focus. Concentration requires effort, it's forcing yourself to pay attention to a specific thing despite all the noise in your head. Focus is passive, and is the ability to pay attention to a specific thing because you've eliminated all (or as many as possible) random thoughts and distractions. Concentration is actually the opposite of focus, because the act of concentrating requires you to "think about concentrating" so you don't drift off about as much (if not more) than thing thing your trying to concentrate on. Concentrating itself is a distraction from the thing you want to pay attention to. Focus is simply dropping all distractions and allowing what remains to come into clarity, but in practice is difficult to do.

For me anyway, if I slam a Mt Dew before shooting, the water starts to boil and prevents me from being able to focus properly long before the jitters effect my hands. 98% of shooting happens in the mind, the hands do very little once you've figured out the physical fundamentals. Leaning how to control the mind, to turn the temperature down, to eliminate the noise, to learn how to focus rather than concentrate, that's where many people should spend more time training. Cutting out caffeine will definitely help, but more than that is getting control of the underlying problem that caffeine exacerbates.