It is quite common for people to just pick up their rifles, gather their friends, and head into the wild during hunting season. These people more often than not take a good number of shots without hitting their targets, get frustrated, and leave.
Are you in this category of people?
The reason you’re not hitting your target is not far-fetched, your accuracy is lacking, and improving your accuracy will lead to more successful hunts.
You may be thinking “I’ve got an expensive rifle, why shouldn’t my accuracy improve?” well, a quality rifle is good but the bulk of the accuracy rests on the shoulder or finger of the shooter.
There are things you can do to improve your accuracy when you go hunting with your rifle.
1. Get a High-Quality Scope
The common theme among hunters is: get an expensive rifle and a cheap low-quality rifle scope attached and expect to get unrivaled accuracy with your rifle.
A scope helps increase your accuracy, especially when shooting from a distance. A low-quality rifle scope will not give you a precise enough target to shoot. Here is a recommended list of quality scopes for your rifle.
Get a quality rifle scope, check and adjust your scope mount, ring, and base consistently as they tend to loosen over time and this can affect your accuracy.
2. Practice Your Shooting
This goes without saying. If you want to become a fantastic hunter you need to practice. Your accuracy will greatly improve once you can get repetition into your shooting.
Practicing lets you get accustomed to your rifle, scope, shooting style, and angles. While just shooting consistently will help, the way you practice is even more important. That is why the Best Hunting Advice is important.
You need absolute focus while practicing. It is normal to not feel completely in your element when you’re just practicing without a life target but you must try as much as possible to stay focused.
Practicing focus is just as important as pulling the trigger so you have to do away with all distractions even if it’s just practice.
Here’s a good practice routine you can start doing: call your shots before they hit the target. If you feel a 10-degree shift towards the right just before shooting, call it. You’re doing well if you can predict where your bullet will hit even if it wasn’t the intended target.
It shows you understand what went wrong and can fix it.
3. Get the Right Ammo and Stick to it as Much as Possible
Every rifle has a selection of ammo that does best with it and finding the best ammo for your rifle will improve your shooting accuracy. You should do your research on what the best fit for your firearms is going to be, and you may find something like this 38 spl info to be useful when you are looking into ammo in more detail.
Once you find the best ammo for you, stick to it as much as possible. Using particular ammo improves your proficiency.
You also want to practice loading your ammo. This will make your loading a routine and make it faster for you to reload.
4. Get Your Breathing and Heart Rate in Order
When shooting, your breathing and heart rate can be the difference between hitting your target and another near miss. You need to pay attention to your breathing and heart rate before you pull the trigger.
Slowly take a deep breath just before shooting to stabilize and focus. This is slightly different for your heart rate. Because you may have to do a little sprint or climb a couple of rocks and shoot almost immediately, you barely have the time to wait for your heart rate to go down.
Do a lot of exercise and practice shooting at a high heart rate to get accustomed to shooting at this level.
5. Improve Your Positioning
Practicing your positions will make you more comfortable when shooting. Your comfort is almost directly proportional to the accuracy you can produce.
In all your shooting positions, make sure you’re getting bone support instead of just muscle support. You want to be as comfortable as possible.
Two positions you can practice are the sitting with legs crossed “Buddha style” position and the kneeling position.
The crossed legs position keeps your center of gravity low but needs a lot of flexibility. When practicing the kneeling position, you will have to deal with your rifle swinging from 3 to 9 o’clock and back.
Summary
Several factors can affect your shooting accuracy when you go hunting but these 5 tips can help you improve your accuracy and make hunting more successful.
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I like that you talked about how scopes would be able to increase accuracy when you shoot from a distance. I guess this is one of the things my husband has to get when he tries hunting as a hobby with his friends. There should be various components he needs to learn as well such as CZ scope rings and types of ammunition to get the best and safest experience for all of them.