I am a member of the big game rifle club and regularly shoot large calibre rifles. However, most of our shooting is off-hand (thank God!). But it has been my experience that recoil is something that you learn to take with both practice and a desire to shoot rifles with higher recoil levels.



I have had a couple of long sessions on the bench while working up loads for various heavy kicking rifles. I once fired about 40 .375s and then 25 .470s off the bench. I didn't have too many problems while I was shooting but decided to give it away when I felt that my brain was sloshing around in my head and once I had decided to stop I don't think I could have fired another shot for that day - not even from a .22.



Sometimes when I shoot the larger calibres the muscles in my shoulder start to twitch and pulsate. While the rifle hasn't hurt me, it has affected the muscles and the twitching makes it damn hard to keep the sights on the target!!!! These rifles were never really meant for long shooting sessions - just a handful of shots in the heat of 'battle' followed by a couple of gin and tonics while the 'boys' cape out the beast.



But I am a sucker for big guns and in my cupboard you'll find a .35 Whelan, 375H&H, 9.3x74R, .405Win, .404 Jeffrey, .416 Rigby, .470NE and under construction is a .500 Jeffrey and a .585 Nyati.



I also shoot military rifle with the SSAA at Malabar and do not even notice the recoil of my No1 MkIII - not even following a 'mad minute'. I am just used to more recoil.



However, recoil can become a problem if you 'perceive' it to be a problem. While I shoot a lot of large calibre rifles, the one rifle I did not really enjoy shooting was a Ruger M77 .300Win Mag with one of those older Ruger Synthetic stocks which were too light and with way too thin a recoil pad. It never really hurt me but it just seemed to have way too much recoil for what it was - so I sold it and replaced it with a .308 Norma Magnum with a proper stock on it.

While live capturing, in the excitement of the moment, I made the mistake of putting a .303 conversion three barrel net gun to my shoulder, instead of from the hip.
Now there's my recoil tolerance