Grow Your Brain With Guns!
We spend countless amounts of money getting in shape. We spend hours at the gym grunting and sweating. We eat foods like kale and tofu. All of this so that we live longer with the added bonus of attracting a mate. With all this health junk we do, when was the last time you did push-ups with your brain? I mean, what does it matter that you can bench press a car if your mind goes? Believe it or not, exercising your brain is just as important and, frankly, far easier than exercising your body.
There are a lot of mental exercises you can do to sharpen alertness and concentration. These usually involve a computer and such but, as it turns out, shooting actually exercises a lot of those things as well. Granted, it depends on the kind of shooting but there are some things you can do at the range to give your brain a boost.
First off, skeet shooting is probably one of the best shooting sports for your brain. Let’s take a look at the process. Your brain has to find the clay, focus on it and then figure out its trajectory. Then, it has to process the angle of the gun based off of the feedback from your hands and arms (remember, looking at the gun is bad when you’re shooting clays). These are the mental equivalent of cardio. It doesn’t really build muscle but it keeps things healthy. You burn a bunch mental calories so that you have that Oreo Cookie without guilt, metaphorically speaking of course. Keep in mind, no amount of mental conditioning will let you get through the Twilight movies with no lasting effects.
But what if you want giant, sexy biceps on your mind? You’re going to have to spend some time with the free weights. Believe it or not (or believe it because it’s true), learning new things is a great way to improve your mind. Now, going out and reading a book on quantum physics is never a bad thing but learning a new motor skill will actually create new neural pathways inside your brain. So learning to shoot a rifle or learning to shoot 3 gun will do wonders. What if I told you, however, that there’s an even easier thing you can do?
Learn to shoot with your other hand. That’s it. Studies have shown that learning to do things with your weak hand has an amazing number of benefits. First off, they’ve found it causes an overall increase in creativity. Because the right side of the brain is what handles our creative side, using your left hand can actually stimulates that part of the brain. According to the studies, it also works for people who are already left handed due to the fact that both sides of the brain are activated when using a non-dominant hand as opposed to only having one side working overtime when you use your dominant hand.
The benefits go beyond that, however. Getting proficient with the opposite hand actually increases the size of the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres. We’re talking a physical increase in size here. There are some experts that believe this increase in communication between the hemispheres can actually lead to increases in intelligence.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and say that using your weak hand to shoot will make you smarter. I’ll leave that to actual scientists. What I will say is that using your weak hand to do tasks has surprising benefits and you can exercise that part beyond just shooting. Try brushing your teeth with your opposite hand or forget convention and switch which hand you use for the fork and knife. Your brain will thank you. Remember: Smart is the new sexy. Work out that brain!
Image used courtesy of Wikipedia
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