The tension inside the Fuyang Yinhu Sports Centre’s indoor shooting halls is palpable each time a final takes place. Every shooter’s pulse rate and heartbeat rises and falls with each shot. It is to deal with this exact scenario that the National Rifle Association of India’s High Performance Director Pierre Beauchamp has introduced the War Room. 

“IT is a unique concept developed by our High Performance Director (HPD), who is also a sports science expert. Here, we create a room at the range [Karni Singh Range in Delhi] using a picture or videos of the actual competition venue as a backdrop and make our athletes dry shoot [shooting without bullets]. The shooters are wired and as we create situations that could occur in a final, we accordingly measure the shooter’s pulse rate and heartbeat rate as the final progresses. Later, we analyse how the shooter has reacted to these different situations and these findings help the shooter to react better during competition,” India’s pistol shooting coach Ronak Pandit explained on Friday.