Prone should be the easiest position in shooting. You are lying down, the ground holds most of you, and the rifle weighs almost nothing when the position is right. Yet plenty of shooters drop points in prone every match, usually because they built the position by feel instead of by structure. This guide walks through a 50m prone shooting position the way a club coach would: body first, sling second, sights last.
A quick word on where this position earns its keep. The 50m prone event, the old English Match, is 60 shots with a .22 LR rifle, and since 2013 the match runs 50 minutes on electronic targets with 15 minutes of preparation and sighting time before it (60 minutes for match firing on paper targets). It is no longer on the Olympic program, but it lives on at World Championships and continental events, and prone is one third of the 50m rifle 3 positions program every smallbore shooter faces. Getting prone right pays off across the whole discipline.
What makes a good 50m prone shooting position?
Bone support, the sling, and natural point of aim. When your skeleton is stacked so the ground absorbs recoil, when the sling carries the rifle rather than your muscles, and when the rifle points at the target without any muscular steering, wobble shrinks to a few millimetres at 50m. Muscle out, bone in: that is the whole philosophy.
Everything below serves those three pillars.
Setting up: mat, body angle, and legs
Start with the mat. Lay it at a slight angle to the firing line, maybe 10 to 20 degrees off it, and lie down so the line from rifle to hips to feet points the same way. That small angle lets recoil push the rifle straight back into your shoulder instead of rolling you sideways. A body square to the line looks tidy and shoots badly.
Now the legs, for a right-handed shooter. Right leg straight behind you, foot rolled so the outside edge rests on the ground, toes pointing outward or naturally flat. Draw the left knee up, roughly level with the left elbow, angled out to the side. Drawing the knee up does three quiet jobs: it drops the chest flatter, lifts the diaphragm off the mat so pulse and breathing disturb the sights less, and it creates a stable tripod of elbows, chest, and drawn knee. Left-handed shooters mirror the whole arrangement.
Your jacket belongs in this setup too. The thick shooting jacket and its stiffness are part of the platform, not just comfort; if you are new to smallbore gear, the guide to choosing your first rifle shooting jacket and trousers covers what actually matters. Buttons done up, collar settled, glove on the front hand.
Getting the sling right
The sling is the engine of the prone position, and most shooters run it too loose.
Put it high on the upper arm, above the biceps, with the padding of the jacket between sling and arm so it does not bite. The sling must run flat, no twists, from arm to hand-stop or fore-end. Then shorten it, hole by hole, until the sling alone supports the rifle's weight. Your left hand stops the fore-end sliding backward; it does not grip, lift, or squeeze. Open the fingers slightly. If the forearm muscles are burning after a few minutes, the sling is slack and the arm is doing the sling's job.
Numb or tingly fingers mean the sling is twisted or cutting across the wrong spot. Reset it rather than shooting through it; a dead hand feeds you garbage on trigger feel.
Elbow placement comes next. The left elbow sits under or slightly forward of the hand, planted so the bone of the elbow, not the soft point, digs into the ground. Planted once, it does not move for the rest of the string. If you have to shuffle the elbow between shots, the whole platform was never settled.
The trigger-side arm lies relaxed, elbow dropped comfortably on or off the mat, wrist straight, trigger finger working alone. Grip pressure on the pistol grip is light and identical every shot.
Finding your natural point of aim
Here is where most points are lost, quietly, for an hour.
Settle into the position, mount the rifle, and look through the sights. They are probably not on the target centre. Do not fix it with your shoulder. Close your eyes, breathe out low and calm, let everything relax, then open them. Wherever the sights sit now is your natural point of aim, the place the rifle wants to point when no muscle interferes.
If it is off, stand up (yes, fully) and adjust the whole body: shuffle left or right, rotate the hips a fraction, settle again, recheck. Nudging with the arms or holding the rifle on target with shoulder pressure works for exactly as long as your muscles cooperate, which is not 60 shots. A prone position with the natural point of aim genuinely on target holds the centre almost on its own.
Verify it at the start of every string and after any change of rifle, sling, or mat position. The kneeling post in the positions series covers the same check in how to build a kneeling position; the principle transfers, only the geometry changes.
Breathing and trigger work in prone
With the platform built, breathing becomes small. Breathe low, into the belly rather than the chest, and take the shot in the natural pause after exhaling. Do not hold until your vision dims; two or three seconds of calm pause, shot inside it or reset.
The trigger press in prone is the same as anywhere, but the feedback differs. With the sling taking the weight, the front sight barely moves, so the temptation is to snatch at a good-looking sight picture. Trust the position. A smooth, uninterrupted press beats a fast one every time at 50m.
Watch for cant, the rifle rolling a few degrees off level. At 50m even a small cant pushes shots sideways at the top and bottom of your wobble, and it is invisible from behind the rifle without a spirit level on the foresight. If your groups string horizontally for no obvious reason, check level first.
Common 50m prone shooting position mistakes and their fixes
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Shots drift left or right as the string goes on | Natural point of aim off, shoulder steering early on | Recheck NPA after every series; move the body, not the arms |
| Front sight dips with each heartbeat | Chest collapsed onto the mat, diaphragm compressed | Draw the left knee up more, flatten and lengthen the torso |
| Numb front-hand fingers | Sling twisted or too tight | Reset the sling flat, padding between sling and arm |
| Muzzle jumps in recoil | Body square to the line, or elbow creeping backward | Re-angle 10 to 20 degrees, replant the elbow forward |
| Horizontal stringing | Cant, or elbow skating on a hard mat | Fit a foresight level, use an elbow pad |
Most of these are position resets, not technique rewrites. That is the nature of prone: the fixes are boring and they work.
Practising prone without burning ammunition
Prone responds well to dry fire because the position, not trigger speed, does the scoring. Ten minutes of settling, NPA check, and dry press teaches you more than fifty rushed live shots. It also builds the habit of rebuilding the position from zero, which is exactly what you do when a match puts you on a cold mat with 15 minutes of preparation time.
When you do shoot, score honestly and look at group shape, not just the total. A phone scoring app makes that painless on paper targets, and reviewing shot placement right after the string, while you still remember how the position felt, is where the learning happens; TargetLog scores your paper targets from a photo so the feedback loop stays tight.
Build the position properly once and prone stops being the place you hope nothing goes wrong. It becomes the bank you deposit points in before standing takes some back.
faq
How long does it take to build a reliable prone position from scratch?
Most shooters get a functional position in one or two coached sessions, but a position that survives a full 60-shot match usually takes a few weeks of deliberate practice. The bottleneck is learning to reset the natural point of aim instead of steering, and that only beds in through repetition.
Is prone in 3 positions shot the same way as the standalone prone event?
Broadly, yes: same body geometry, same sling work, same natural point of aim discipline. The differences are practical rather than structural. In 3 positions you build prone after kneeling with the clock running, so being able to construct the position quickly and consistently matters more than squeezing out the last millimetre of stability.
