Sniper School 101

Learning to feel your heartbeat can be a valuable tool in sniper school. For the long shot any uncontrollable muscle movement is going to throw you off.

Part 1: Before You Go to the Range

by SPC Ben Becker

Every sniper candidate in sniper school begins training without a rifle in his hand. If the most elite marksman start this way, how much more so someone who doesn’t have the time and finances to practice shooting day after day.

Whether the extent of your long or even medium range scope assisted shooting will bring you to the fall season of the whitetail, to a field of competition, or to the battlegrounds of Iraq or Afghanistan, your abilities as an elite marksman will start in the same place. They will start with breathing, heartbeat, trigger control and how you handle your rifle. Save yourself some money on match grade ammo and some embarrassing 3″ groups at the range with your competition rifle and try a few things at home to get you started.

The Sweet Spot

Find yourself an open spot to lie out and take up a prone position, without a weapon. Lay there and take deep breaths while paying attention to your heartbeat. The point of this exercise is to predict your heartbeat. Your optimal time to fire would be at the bottom of your breath, between heartbeats, because that is when your body has the least amount of movement. Don’t skip the prep and lie down to practice pulling the trigger when you have a space between breaths and your heartbeat. You may be a “natural” at this, but give yourself some time to “feel” what is called the “sweet spot.”

The bottom of your breath is naturally occurring. If you force it, it is useless for shooting purposes. That being said, you can work on calming your breathing down to the point where you feel completely relaxed, so you may focus completely on your target. You won’t be able to “clear your mind” in the sense of a yoga guru, but you are training to be a professional here, even if it is for deer season. The pressure to shoot a whitetail is not the same as a battlefield, but people are also different, and stress for one may not be stress for another. Try to clear your mind when you look down your rifle. Focus on your breath, try to hear for your heartbeat, and try to shut things out that don’t belong there in that moment, when all that matters is your target, your rifle, and your ability to control your body and your rifle.

If you try to control your breathing you will most likely just succeed in quickening your heart rate. Take the time to lay down and feel where your “sweet spot” is, for both your breathing and heart rate.

Predicting your breathing and heart rate is simpler than you think. Take a run around the block to bring up your heart rate, then without pause, lie on the floor in a prone position, position your hands in the same position they would be with a weapon in them. Calm your body down and clear your mind. Feel your breath and your heartbeat. Snap your fingers between every heartbeat and you will soon see that it becomes monotonous and mind numbing. You have now effectively found your rhythm when you can time your finger snap with the bottom of your breath. Now take what you have learned to feel and lie down with your rifle, dry firing in that “sweet spot” that you should now be able to feel. Make sure your gun is empty of course, and if you are concerned with work hardening the firing pin on your rifle by dry firing, buy a snap cap and dry fire with that.

The Death Grip

One of the most common mistakes I see at the range (or anywhere for that matter) is the way the rifle is held! Who started the notion that you need to keep a death drip on your rifle? All that does is give you a wider range of human error. Try holding anything in a death grip and staying still and see how that works for you. Try making fine movements. You can’t. How much more so for even a firmly rested rifle that you must keep excruciatingly still and be able to adjust and control with micro movements that make minute differences in shot placement hundreds of yards away. The tighter you grip your weapon, the harder it is going to be to keep still, and the harder it will be to make small movements and affect a trigger squeeze that doesn’t shake the rifle.

Let your rifle lay on your (left) hand, don’t close your hand around it and slightly pull your rifle toward your shoulder with your right hand so that the recoil doesn’t send it reeling into your chest like a ton of bricks. Practice your breathing, remember, the right shot only comes once. Once you have brought your heart rate down to a predictable level and you feel confident that you can get your

Using a Lead Sled by Caldwell to get you to release your death grip on your rifle is actually quite effective. It can teach you to feel that solid is all the rifle needs, and that muscle tension only throws off your shot.

shot off without disturbing your pattern, (dry) charge your weapon so that you can feel your finger press the trigger without disturbing your breathing. Now it’s time to bring the aforementioned breathing technique into play. This isn’t a race, so don’t rush yourself. When you feel comfortable let your finger do the walking. Practice this repeatedly to maintain proper stance and relaxation method. Once you have mastered this technique, you are ready get down to controlling your trigger.

Trigger Control

Trigger squeeze is fairly simple in technique, yet easily forgotten in the heat of the moment when you will tend towards more off a slap or jerk as opposed to a slow and sensitive squeeze. A slap or a jerk is going to be something of a violent and sudden motion, and this is going to throw off all of the work you have been doing to overcome the natural movement your body creates with breath and heartbeat. The simplest word to describe as regards trigger pull is “careful.” Be careful! Carefully depress the trigger with just the tip of your finger until you feel it start to engage the sear. You should be practicing with dry fires as much as possible, but live fire is worth its weight and expense here. When you know the gun is going to go bang at some point in the travel of the trigger you tend to be more careful. Find that spot in your breath and heart rate, line up your target, allow your eyes to adjust, and find the control of the travel of that trigger until you can feel where the gun goes bang.

Common with experienced and inexperienced shooters alike, is the tendency to anticipate the recoil of the weapon. Don’t do that. Give yourself ample time to relax between shots so that you aren’t putting your muscles through undue stress. This ties in nicely with breathing control, if you are calm then your muscles won’t be anticipating the recoil.

Where we separate the boys from the men and the ladies from girls is when it comes to recoil pads and rifle rests. This is the way it goes. If you want to go to the range and work on trigger control, men and ladies use a Past or similar recoil pad or even a Lead Sled (made by Caldwell). Little boys and little girls have to look tough at the range and allow themselves to get pummeled to hamburger by a deer rifle all afternoon. I strongly suggest that you purchase some form of recoil management before you go to the range, especially if you are shooting a fixed breach (ie: bolt rifle) firearm. The Lead Sled, or similar products, will take your body motion mostly out of the picture so that you can focus on your trigger, your ammo, or your sight picture.

Don’t worry about not being a natural at smooth trigger control. Don’t waste your ammo. Dry fire as much as you can in a very organized and aware manner, so you can note your improvement.

Shooting with a friend can be really helpful here, but it has to be a friend with a good poker face. Have him or her load your rifle for you and hand you either an empty rifle or one with a round in the chamber (and the safety on in both cases). When you fire the rifle you will see if you are jerking, anticipating the recoil. If you don’t have a friend to work with, our instructors in sniper school had us practice by balancing a pencil on the end of the rifle and if the pencil fell when we fired it was considered not good enough.

The last thing I’ll mention is shooting with one eye closed. They do this in the movies of course, but it isn’t going to serve you best in real shooting. When you drive you car, do you close one eye? NO, you don’t. The reason for that is that you only get true depth perception with both eyes open. This works for shooting too, and you be surprised at how your sight picture changes when you open your non-shooting eye.

Maybe snipers are born. Maybe they are just any other guys who find a way to get well trained and well rehearsed. I think it may be a little bit of both. These techniques are going to get you started on your way to learning to control your body and your weapon when you have to make that shot.

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SPC Ben Becker Joined the army in mid- 2005 fresh out of high school. After basic training and infantry training was deployed to Iraq for OIF 3. Upon returning, opted to enter sniper training and re-deployed for OIF 5 during which he spent most of his time in Baghdad. He did two 90 day deployments in Afghanistan, and was given an honorable discharge at the end of 2009.