This simple technique could revolutionise your shooting

My preliminary research gave me a fairly good idea of what to expect. Nick Penn is an evangelist for the practice of shooting with both eyes open, saying he wants to bust the myths around eye-dominance, something that has been the accepted wisdom for at least the last 100 years. It is an intriguing notion, given the prevalence of shooting coaches who talk of eye dominance, and the need to counteract it. Could something so simple be the cure to my shooting woes? That said, I approached my visit with a certain amount of scepticism - when something seems too good to be true, it most often is.

 

Upon my arrival at Pennsport on a sunny Thursday lunchtime I was warmly greeted by Nick and his son… Nick, who has recently escaped an office job to join his father’s business full time as an instructor.

 

 

I explain that I am “left eye dominant, and since I shoot from the right shoulder, have always been told to shoot with my left eye closed to counteract this. I also explain that my particular ‘bogey bird’ is a driven pheasant or partridge, straight over my head. “Don’t worry!” says Nick Sr, confidently. “We’ll sort all that out.”

As we make the short journey from the lodge to the shooting ground in a well-weathered golf cart, Nick gives me the abbreviated version of his CV, starting his career in the 70s at the well-regarded Apsley Shooting Ground working for David Olive, who, coincidentally, also gave me my first shooting lessons as a lad, and a couple of subsequent refreshers in my early 20s. After that he set up the shooting ground that was to become the Royal Berkshire in1981. He also had a shooting school in Barbados, which may have been a pretext for a few rounds of golf in the sun.

 

 

Built from scratch by Penn in 1990, the shooting school near Newbury is now fairly well established, though ever evolving, as evidenced by the presence of a mini-digger. “Great fun, you can have on one of those,” Nick comments as we zip by. The school is set in around 60 acres of woodland with a small stream running through it, and you would never know that you were just minutes from the M4, and only one hour from London. It is so tranquil that midway through the lesson a roebuck wandered up, to a distance of about 10 yards, gave us a casual look before skittering off as I reached for my camera. The school is big enough that it can host ten 4-man flushes simultaneously on simulated game days, and can show a range of different types of target so can cater for up to 100 guns, all firing three or four hundred shells each in a morning, with no queuing or waiting around - ideal in these days of social distancing.

 

Nick starts the lesson by elaborating on the both-eyes-open theory behind his coaching philosophy. In a well-rehearsed patter, he explains how our brains are effectively powerful computers, which calculate the speed and distance and trajectory of a clay or bird using triangulation. Closing one eye, he says, makes this impossible, and consequently you end up guessing, making consistent shooting impossible to achieve. This makes sense to me - name another sport where hand-eye coordination is key, in which participants close one eye! You don’t see Roger Federer or Ben Stokes with an eye patch, do you?

He also outlines the five major points that he says every gun needs to have a good grounding upon which to build their shooting, but Nick says I’m not allowed to share these with you - trade secrets and all that! You’ll have to go and see him to find out what they are.

If you’re like me, you’ve always been told to give birds “lead”. This, according Nick, is all wrong. His explanation is that your brain will tell you when is the right moment to shoot. “Get on the bird, swing, and just pull the trigger when it feels right,” he says. I do so on a few clays straight over my head and a few slightly to my right, thinking hard about keeping both eyes open. I break a few, and miss a few. When I miss, Nick tells me - to my surprise - that I was missing in front, and explains that when people are first adjusting to the new technique, they have a tendency to want to overrule “the little Irishman” in their head who is telling them when to shoot, because they’ve had the need for lead ingrained into them. “There is no such thing as lead,” he declares.

 

 

According to Nick, all this stuff about eye-dominance is nonsense. Commonly when people start shooting they miss straight driven birds to the left, and the instructor tells them that this is because they have a dominant left eye, pulling them over. Nick says it's more down to biomechanics - it's your body pulling you across and causing the barrels to describe a slight arc that makes you miss to the left, not your eyes. Instead of closing one eye, Nick refers you to points four and five of his five-point principal.

 

 

With this in mind we try some wider clays to the right, and I find that the principal seems to work. However, when we try targets to the left the wheels come off a bit. Again, Nick explains that I’m missing in front, and encourages me to slow my swing right down, enabling him to “recompute” my picture, and ignore the urge to give loads of lead. This is, he tells me, a common problem for people making the change to both-eyes-open shooting, since swinging to this side is unimpeded by the right arm. Another common issue is missing below the target, as those who shoot with one eye closed have to keep their barrels below the clay in order to see it. With both eyes open this problem is eliminated. “Stare at the clay,” is his mantra, another to add to my list along with “There’s no such thing as lead”.

 

 

It takes a bit of getting used to, though not in the way that I imagined it would. I thought the issue would be remembering to keep both eyes open (on the one occasion that I forgot, I missed), but in fact the hardest part is to trust my instinct as to when to pull the trigger and forget about lead altogether, and to slow my swing on clays wide to the left to avoid missing miles out in front - breaking the habits of a lifetime takes a while. This is why Nick recommends another visit or two to build up the muscle memory. What’s more, he often allows sessions to over-run, as he doesn’t wear a watch, having had a golf lesson once and caught the instructor clockwatching, rather than studying his client’s swing.

 

The system is not without its sceptics, though others are starting to come round to Nick’s both-eyes-open approach. But for every sceptic, Nick tells me in an article he did, he offered money back if he didn’t convert clients from one eye to two. Everyone has paid up. He’s got a host of satisfied customers, including some famous names, like author Wilbur Smith, who immediately booked a follow up session the day after to ensure it wasn’t some kind of fluke. And it wasn’t.

I was genuinely thrilled with the difference that the new technique had on my shooting, especially with regard to birds straight over my head, which have always been something of a blind spot for me, if you will forgive the pun. I certainly intend to put his techniques into practice this season: watch out, pheasants! I’ve also been extolling the virtues of the technique to my family and colleagues. It will be interesting to see how things go when I put them into practice on live quarry come the season, and without Nick around to point out the adjustments I need to make if things go wrong.

 

 

Nick’s advice is delivered in a very relaxed, friendly way, and the entire experience was a genuine pleasure. Pennsport is also one of the nicest shooting grounds I have been to,. though for totally different reasons to somewhere like the Holland and Holland ground - it has a lovely rustic feel to it, which is rather relaxing. Readers may also be interested to know that along with Paul Beacher, Nick Jr has been trained in his father’s techniques and is working full-time at the ground, also preaching his old man’s gospel… and at a significantly reduced price!

 

To book a lesson at Pennsport Shooting School visit their website, or give Nick a call on 07836 762579, and don’t forget: if you don’t leave with both eyes open, he won’t charge you a penny.