Thread: Dealing with a flinch

Originally Posted by Chur Bay

Lots of shooting with good ear protection. Your head needs to unlearn it.
Are your rifles suppressed ?

I would second this as a first step. Your 7mm08 may be suppressed but have you used an unsuppressed / larger calibre recently? Flinch is really the body anticipating the felt recoil from the BANG. The mind is an incredible thing- it associates a loud noise with a reaction like a impact from recoil and assumes by itself that the louder the noise, the more the impact. Once it figures out it is coming it anticipates the impact and flinch develops. Another technique I use for new shooters (mostly have a go tyoes as guests) is to get them to pull the rifle as hard as they can into their shoulder almost to the point of discomfort/ pain. The reasons is that if the rifle is part of the shoulder, then the item going backwards under recoil is the whole body- if you try hold the rifle forward to resist the impact, it means just the rifle is coming back rather than the whole of the person.

Think of it as holding your fist against a car and pushing it along.....the whole car moves and you feel pressure but not pain on your fist. Now hold your fist 6 inches from the car and apply one forceful motion hard enough to move the car....its going to really hurt.

So in short, chuck on some good hearing protection, and really really pull the rifle into the shoulder. Once you teach /trick the body that recoil wont hurt again, then work on developing the technique /accuracy again....