[Unclenick]

I hadn't heard of the short-stroke study, but having watched students stress up and start fumbling guns and cartridges under match pressure, I can believe it. Keeping "muscle memory" trained so you short-circuit extraneous thought takes a lot of practice, and some never make it work. The old rule of thumb an olympic boxing coach wrote about was 6000 repetitions to establish muscle memory for one action component, such as slipping a right cross. I don't have a minimum practice figure for keeping that memory working, but I know a lot of competitors report trigger control starts to deteriorate if they go more than 2 weeks without at least dry fire practice. I would assume this is variable with years of experience, but in principle probably applies to working the pump, bolt, lever, or whatever manual action your gun may have, in addtion to working the trigger.

Nick