Once you've shot enough rounds that the five posts feel like five different problems instead of one, the next thing worth tightening is where your gun is pointed before you ever call for the clay. That starting position has a name — your hold — and it's the single biggest thing you can adjust between shots without changing your swing, your mount, or your gun.
Hold is not the same as where the clay will be. The clay hasn't been thrown yet. Hold is where the muzzle is parked while you wait, so that when the bird does fly, the move from your starting point to the break point is as short and as straight as possible. Long, panicky swings come from holds that are nowhere near the work the bird is about to ask you to do. Short, calm swings come from holds that sit on the bird's likely highway.
The principle, before the posts
Picture every clay the trap can throw from your post as a fan of possible lines fanning up and outward from the house. Your hold wants to sit above that fan and along its middle, not under it and not behind it. Two reasons:
The first is height. If you hold low — say, with the bead on the roof of the house — every clay rises above your muzzle the instant it leaves. You're now swinging up through the bird before you can swing with it. That's extra motion, and extra motion is where misses live. If you hold too high, the opposite problem: the bird never reaches your muzzle, you have to chase it down, and gravity is doing the same to your barrel as it's doing to the clay. A touch above the roof line is what most shooters settle on. Fast-mounters who like to swing up to the bird can hold a hair lower; slow, deliberate mounters tend to creep their hold up. Find your own.
The second is width — how far left or right of the house centerline your bead sits. This is the part that changes from post to post, because the angles the machine is most likely to throw from your perspective change as you walk down the arc.
A small note before the post-by-post
Hold points are personal. Two intermediate shooters standing on the same post can hold half a clay-width apart and both be right, because their mounts, their dominant eye, and their swing styles are different. What follows is a starting framework — the principle of which side of the house your hold belongs on at each post, and roughly how far. Treat it as a place to begin tuning, not a formula. The shooters who plateau are usually the ones who never re-tune.
A second small note: avoid the rookie habit of holding on the trap house itself, where the clay is born. It feels natural — that's where the clay comes from, so look there. But by the time you actually see the clay clearly enough to react, it has already left the house and is into its line. If your bead is still on the roof, the bird is now in front of you, and you're playing catch-up. Hold ahead of where the clay will be when you first see it, not where it starts.
Post by post
P1. From the far left of the arc, the trap house is off to your right. Most of the angles the machine can throw will send the target away to your left or straight out from your toes; the hardest right-angle clays the trap can throw still arrive as gentle right-quarterers. Your hold belongs left of the house centerline, sitting roughly along the line a left-angled clay would take if it left right now.
P2. A step to the right and the geometry rotates. Straightaways become the most common line; lefts are still real, rights are becoming real. Your hold drifts a touch closer to center but is still slightly left of the house centerline. Think of it as splitting the difference between P1 and P3.
P3. Dead center. From here the trap machine's full cone fans out symmetrically in front of you. Extreme lefts, extreme rights, straightaways — every angle the machine can throw is equally likely from your perspective. Your hold belongs on the house centerline, on the line that splits the field. P3 is the post that punishes a biased hold the most, because anything you favour one way means you're starting wrong half the time.
P4. A mirror of P2. Rights dominate, lefts arrive as quartering birds. Your hold sits slightly right of the house centerline, roughly the mirror image of where it sat on P2.
P5. A mirror of P1. The trap house is off to your left, most clays head out to your right or away from you, and even the hardest left-angle birds arrive as gentle left-quarterers. Your hold belongs right of the house centerline, along the line a right-angled clay would take.
What changes, what stays
Hold height stays roughly the same across all five posts — the bird leaves the house at the same height every time, so the vertical part of the problem isn't really moving. What rotates from P1 to P5 is the width of the hold: the side of the house your rib is pointed past, and how far past it. Your mount, your eye behind the rib, and your swing pattern don't change. Only the starting line of the muzzle changes, and only by a little.
The reason this is worth caring about is that hold is one of the only things you fully control before the bird flies. Wind, machine wear, the angle the trap happens to throw — none of those are yours. The position your gun is in when you call "pull" is entirely yours. Tuning it costs you nothing but attention.
If your scorecard tells you one specific post is bleeding birds, the hold is the first knob to turn before you go looking at your swing or your gun fit. Move it a clay-width, shoot a round, look at the card. The post-by-post layout of the game is also the post-by-post diagnostic of your hold.