You’ve no doubt noticed that long-range shooting is all the rage — every firearm manufacturer, it seems, is marketing a bolt-action rifle made for reaching way out there. How far is too far to shoot at an animal? That’s not for me to tell you; you’ll have to explore your own limits at the range and make your peace with the ethics involved.

Being off an inch or two at close range can translate to a complete miss at long range. Try these tips to dial in your accuracy. Image by Godwin Photography

If you’re trying to stretch your hunting capabilities to several hundred yards and up, you’d better have your act together. You’ll probably be shooting at 1,000 yards at the range, even if you won’t shoot at game that far, and at those distances, any little flaws in your technique that you might have gotten away with at 100 yards will start to show up as wider and wider misses. It’s time to drill down into the details of precision rifle shooting to help you make the best shot possible. Avoiding bad habits that you might have picked up over the years will go a long way to tightening up those long-distance groups.

Accepting the Wobble

You probably know that when you’re shooting offhand or from simple sticks, things will never be completely still. Your sight picture will have a little movement in it, and we often tell hunters to try to control that wobble in the shape of concentrically smaller circles or in a figure 8 surrounding their desired point of impact. That technique works well to a certain point, but in long-range shooting, your margin of error on the target doesn’t allow for any wobble. You simply must get a rock-solid rest — using a tripod, or going prone using a bipod or a backpack for a stable platform — for precision shooting.

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Holding Your Breath

Many of us were taught to control our breath when we squeeze the trigger, either by holding our breath or by taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly while we squeeze. Both of these techniques are fine at short ranges, but they can absolutely torpedo your long-distance precision shooting.

When you’re shooting at distance, you want to impart as little movement to the gun as possible. That includes the movement your body makes when you breathe, so the whole concept of letting your breath out while you slowly squeeze the trigger is a non-starter. But you don’t want to actively hold your breath, either, because that very quickly begins to deprive your muscles of oxygen, causing them to quiver. You’ll feel rushed to take the shot so you can let that big breath out.

Instead of holding your breath, try timing your shot to fall at the end of your natural breath cycle. Image by Godwin Photography

Instead, you want to squeeze off the shot during your natural respiratory break — that is, at the end of one normal exhale before you start the next inhale. Your body is naturally at rest, at its most still and relaxed point, for at least a couple of seconds at the bottom of your breath cycle. Take the shot then if you’re ready, but don’t artificially hold off the next inhale in order to get everything perfect. Keep breathing and wait for the next exhale.

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Jerking or Slapping the Trigger

The body subconsciously wants to get away from the noise and the recoil of a gun going off. You have to train this impulse away in several different ways, and your trigger finger is one of them. Letting your finger fly off the trigger after the shot is a habit that can easily turn into jerking or slapping the trigger during the shot, and both of those actions impart additional movement into the gun. Let your trigger pull be a true squeeze, not agonizingly slow (a product of that “let the gun going off be a surprise” training many of us received), but steady and firm with the same amount of pressure from start to finish. Hold the trigger back for a second after the shot. It takes a lot of practice to remember to do this consistently, but it’s an important part of follow-through. Keeping the trigger still makes a difference in how the gun moves during recoil, which affects where that shot goes downrange.

Firm, steady trigger control is crucial to long range accuracy. Image by Godwin Photography

Gunsite Academy instructor Il Ling New advises students to use a cheap, click-to-write pen as a trigger trainer. Just click it with a steady, deliberate trigger finger over and over and practice holding it down after it “breaks.”

Coming Off the Gun

We all have a tendency to pull our faces off the gun immediately following the shot for two reasons: First, we’re subconsciously getting away from the noise and recoil as mentioned above, and second, we’re just dying to know where that shot went, so we want to look at the target. You have to train out both impulses. For one thing, you’re imparting more movement into the gun again, and for another thing, if you come off the gun, you’ve made it much more difficult to get back on target and make a quick follow-up shot if one is needed.

Practice staying on the gun through the shot so that you aren’t lifting your head and imparting movement to the rifle just as the shot fires. Image by Godwin Photography.

Instead, as you train holding the trigger back in your follow-through, also train keeping your face on the stock and reacquiring the target in your scope before you do anything else. This lets you evaluate where your shot went while keeping you in position to shoot again quickly if needed (you’ll also want to train running the bolt while your face is on the stock, which is easier in some positions than others). This is another good reason to shoot with the lowest amount of magnification in your scope necessary — you’ll have a much wider field of view to get back on target quickly, especially in the field if the animal is still moving.

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Not Taking Range and Bullet Drop Seriously

You have to know what your projectile is doing at every potential distance you might shoot at on a hunt. And in order to make use of that knowledge, you’ve got to know the distance to your target, no guesswork allowed. A rangefinder is a non-negotiable tool for the long-range hunter.

Before I head out on a hunt where I want to be prepared to shoot at beyond-center-hold ranges, I run a drop chart on my ballistics app (I use Hornady’s app, but there are plenty of other great ones) using my specific gun and load. Then I memorize the range at which I can hold dead center with only a few inches of rise or drop — on my last elk hunt, using a 7mm PRC, it was about 250 yards. I memorize the drop in inches at 275, 300, 325 and 350 yards, where the drop with that particular load was enough that I’d have to hold in the air above the animal’s back, which is a no-go for me. Then I jot down the come-up in MOA at 375, 400, 425 and 450 (my self-imposed hunting limit on elk-sized game) and tape it to my stock so I can dial the elevation turret on my scope as needed.

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The point is, if you’ve spent your whole life shooting whitetails at 100 yards, you’ve never had to worry about bullet drop, but it becomes a very big factor very quickly once you get past a few hundred yards. Kentucky windage worked for Daniel Boone, but we can do better now. Know your numbers so you know exactly where to hold or how to dial. The drop numbers printed on the ammo box aren’t exact, so run your own tables and don’t guess at the yardage. An animal that wanders just 25 yards farther away from you while you’re waiting for the right angle can change the bullet drop by several inches. You owe it to the animal to be ready to compensate precisely without estimating.

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