Aiming Strategies in Shooting Sports*

In shooting sports, champions develop an aiming strategy in order to maximize the precision of their shot.
We study experimentally the aiming dynamics of different shooting sports such as archery, riffle and laser-run, with international level athletes. We observe that the movement of the arm exhibits notable differences among the shooting sports, according to the particular constraints of the sport. We build a simple mechanical model for the control of an aiming movement. This model shows that the movement naturally chosen by the athletes corresponds to an optimal trajectory for their sport. In shooting sports where athletes have to shoot fast, such as laser run or speed shooting, it minimizes the shooting time. In contrary, in archery where the force needed to lengthen the bow string is quite large, it minimizes the energy spent in the movement.