Happy shooting in sportswear? This isn't for you.

We’ve all seen it on the layouts and truthfully, most of us have done it because we have to.

When you’ve had enough of feeling like a 19th-century gamekeeper in heavy tweed, the natural reaction when you’re getting dressed for the range is to grab your sports gear.

It’s light, it’s modern and you’ve probably already got plenty of it.

But here’s the truth: shooting in generic sports kit is a risky strategy. There’s loads of reasons why, so let’s take a look at the main drawbacks.

In clay shooting, there are some very specific movements needed for the win. Movements that other sports don’t really need to consider – so freedom of movement is everything. Let’s take gym gear as one comparison.

It’s designed for a number of purposes: sweat wicking, anti-static, to minimise snagging on equipment and in many cases for looking good in the mirror. A lot of it is designed to be tight-fitting to show off curves or give compression when you’re lifting, which is the exact opposite of what shooters need when we mount and swing our guns.

Every time that Lycra resists your shoulder or pulls across your back it’s a distraction. A limitation to your movement. Just a nano-second of pull or tightness around the torso or a few millimetres of impeded movement can cause massive problems when you’re aiming for a fast moving target 60 yards out.

These irritations increase your chances of registering a miss when, up to that point, you’ve been moving fluidly to the break point.

Shooting in gym gear means we’re fighting our clothing instead of locking horns with the target. Which naturally impacts our scorecards.

We’re clay shooters first. When golfers and cyclists compete in their sports, they wear gear that identifies them as part of their tribe (and helps them perform better).

By wearing general sports clothes, we’re essentially participating in our passion in disguise.

Gym clothes are for athletes who identify as gym people whether they’re in the gym, on the way to the gym or just casually out and about. Their clothing states “I do and therefore I belong“. It tells people “I’m a gym bunny” without words.

The same is true for many other sports. When cyclists aren’t on their bikes, the chances are you’ll still see them in a Rapha hoodie, proudly displaying their passion to the world.

Us clay shooters are no different. We want apparel that performs when we’re on the stands and identifies us as members of the shooting community when we’re not.

PAIR DEAD is here to give our sport that tribe. To provide the gear that shows the world we’re not actually heading to a spin class but instead are passionate participants in a mentally and technically challenging sport.

Let’s talk materials: Most sports kit is built for the climate-controlled four walls of a fitness centre. Cycling gear, unless it’s for the velodrome, does tick off some of the outdoor requirements but turning up the ground in Lycra shorts and a zip-up skin isn’t going to help us shoot better. And let’s not even think about the stick we’d get from the squad if we approached Stand 1 in a pair of Bib Shorts.

More importantly, a lot of sports gear on sale today is a cocktail of non-sustainable materials and synthetics.

We love the outdoors, it’s our playground. So wearing any clothes that aren’t made with the natural world in mind feels wrong. Because it is wrong. We don’t want the planet to suffer because of the creation of products, nor do we want it to suffer further when the garment reaches the end of its life – you’ve heard of microplastics right?

That’s precisely why we’ve gone completely the other way – using only organic and regenerative cotton, TENCEL threads and recycled silicones, buttons made not from plastic but from nuts and much more.

We’ve thoughtfully engineered every element of our technical shooting apparel with the planet in mind.

To us, sustainability isn’t a buzz word or a bit of marketing greenwash, it’s who we are.

Simply put, it’s the right way.

To wrap up, wearing generic sports clothes means shooters are missing out on the shooting-specific engineering that actually helps them perform better. These clothes don’t have:

• Subtly flared elbows to allow for a full range of motion during the swing.
• Sleeve constructs that actively prevent a ‘seam-on-seam’ scenario where the sweater seam catches on the t-shirt seam, pulling the swing and causing a miss.
• Distraction-reducing fabrics and finishes that keep the focus entirely on the targets.
• And the list goes on…

It’s time to stop making do with gear designed for other sports and start wearing kit precision engineered for the stands. It’s time for PAIR DEAD.