I can’t comment on the 10,000 hours but your question about hunting I can.
I think that the gun and bow are eaisier to hunt with because they’re both deadly and accurate at a longer distance than a sling if all you had was 20hours practice. However let’s change the scenario a little.
If you want to hunt what are we hunting?
Elephants???
Or mice????
Where are we getting our money/ammunition??
Or time to actually hunt?

The sling has many great properties as a tool and they can be implemented into hunting but no one tool does every job.

10,000 hours is a stupid rule.

It’s based on Malcolm Gladwell’s misinterpretation of K Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise. In the book “Peak”, Ericsson specifically addresses the 10,000 hour “rule” and why it’s wrong.

The short version is that you can spend 10,000 hours doing something and actually get worse if you practice the wrong way. Plus, there is no evidence that you have “arrived” after 10,000 hours. It’s an arbitrary round number.

with something that relies so much on hand eye coordination - it depends an awful lot on the actual slinger.

Some peoiple will spend a lifetime slinging and never get close to being able to hunt.

Some might master in inside a couple of months.

The sling is unique among projectile weapons in that there is nothing to aim with and you don't store energy and then release (well technically the windup is where the eneryby is created and 'stored' and the release or throw is where it is released).

Yes all thrown weapons are like this. But the sling is the only weapon that throws a seperate projectile where the conditions of aiming and energy storing are so extreme.

You can argue that an atlatl is in the same category.
But it's actually much easier to aim an atlatl. It pretty much travels in a straight kline and you can usually see the tip of the spear before you throw and aim with it.

Slings are pure muscle memory and raw brain calculation.

It;s why someone who has been slinging for 20 odd years - but never at a fixed target - will struggle with throwing at a fixed target.
It requires a lot more initial thought than just instinct throwing at a moving or random size/distance target.

For something like balearic target shooting you actually have to re-educate your muscle memory and establish a whole new set.

But even there - it's down to the individual slinger.
You see this all the time at the international. There are balearic slingers who have been slinging their whole lives - some of them might hit the target only once in a blue moon.

The second worst slinger I've ever seen is the guy who runs the soler slinging club and has been slinging for decades, he's even got his own range.
In 5 years I only ever saw him hit the target once !

A natural slinger - someone with very good hand eye coordination - can become an amazing slinger - but even they need a LOT of practice.
Jaegoor and Luis pons - two great examples.

They are both amazing to watch. But they both put in hours and hours and hours of training.

Some people are even more gifted and can stay accurate without the long hours of prqactice.
Mar Cuesta Olivares - is a great example.
One of the best female balearic slingers - hell one of the best regardless of gender, and a very hard throwing slinger.

These days she reckons she mainly slings just at competitions and does very little training.
I would not bet against her in a competition  

So slinging is not really a skill that can be easily quantified.

Yes more practive will usually produce better results - but not always

In an interview, Malcolm Gladwell qualified the 10,000 hour rule by saying that the number doesn’t matter, but if you want to become an expert, those 10,000 hours are spent not doing other things, which means that you can’t be an expert in everything and other people will probably have to pick up the slack for you in other areas if you are that focused. In other words... not even Gladwell believes in the rule! It was just a literary device.

I am a big fan of the Mike Boyd school of skill building. He rarely spends even 20 hours on a new skill, but he sets specific goals and achieves impressive feats usually in less than 10 hours.

@Shakli, I understand what you’re saying though, and the answer depends a lot on the details.  Whether it’s 5 hours, 20 hours, or 10,000... if you decide to learn a skill, set a specific goal, then break it down. If the goal is “hunting”, then are you talking about a deer? A squirrel? A bird?  Among birds, a dove is probably going to be easier to hit than a duck, but you need to hunt a lot more of them to feed your family. You might not need extreme accuracy if you are throwing at a flock of birds on the ground in an open field, and maybe you can get enough food even if you’re only successful 10% of the time. If you’re talking about modern hunting for sport instead of survival... then the important thing is that you go out in the woods and drink a lot of beer, and you don’t actually have to hit anything at all

Curious Aardvark wrote on Aug 28^th, 2020 at 12:29pm:


This pretty much says it all.

You can train something a million times.  If you train it wrong, you'll make this mistake a million times wrong.  You need a corrective.  That can be a teacher.  A realization.  I have students who hit a flying target after just six months.  Slingen is a long way off for most people today.  We think technically.  We need to know how much power a sling develops.  What angles, etc. That's all interesting.  But that doesn't make you a better slinger.

Tomas wrote on Nov 5^th, 2020 at 11:03pm:

Sometimes the spurts are backwards.

I have found that target shooting has messed up my slinging which was usually at variable heights. Focusing on one height seems to be messing up all the others. And realistically for hunting, human head height is not at all useful.

Normally I'd sling upwards into trees, or low to the ground on different horizontal planes or level with slopes without thinking about it. Now everything is trying to go target height unless I think about it.