I want to share some tips, tricks, and drills with you to take your range day up a notch.
As an Instructor I am constantly preaching about how you train. I believe that there are two ways you train.
1. Fundamentals and Accuracy...Grip, Sight Picture, Trigger Press, these three things are of upmost importance to accuracy. They are also what everything in your skillset hinges on, if these are not solid then everything you do beyond these basics can fall apart. You have to be able to aim the gun and press the trigger without the sights moving, and to do that you have to be able to grip the gun. This can be accomplished in a static position meaning we are not moving much, feet firmly planted focusing on grip, sights, and trigger.
2.Self defense shooting...this involves movement, drawing from the holster, cover, concealment, malfunction clearances, increased stress level, heart rate, breathing and target acquisition. All of these things won't matter if your grip, sight picture, and trigger press is bad. Point being you do everything right move to cover and engage a threat at 10 yards and you shoot into the dirt at 8 yards.
So I break this into different training regimens. Think: crawl, walk, run. Always work to get your hits, so we start with grip, sights, and trigger. I always have my students start a range session with a 5 shot group, this is our baseline and our goal at the end of our training day is to shoot a better 5 shot group.
This is as close to perfection as I have ever been, that is 4 rounds in one hole and a "flyer". This means that my fundamentals are pretty solid and repeatable.
So when you go to the range set goals and have a plan. Do not just shoot at a target make every round count.
If this is your target work to hold yourself to a higher standard...effective hits on target in this image yes, higher risk of missing with these shots, under stress, YES!
You need to know where your rounds are going and the only way to know that is proper grip, sight picture, and trigger press, when you learn those then you can, absolutely, call your shots on a target. From that point onward we can now work on draw, movement, multiple targets, etc. Because we know where we are putting rounds when we press our trigger. Understand our cone of vision is small and we are putting sights into that cone and aligning a target with those sights. This takes practice, our eyes are doing a lot of work to make accurate shots, independent of what we are telling our hands to do, independent of what our trigger finger is doing. It is a beautiful thing when all of those things work together, it looks smooth and easy from the outside. Inside our brain is doing minute calculations at the speed of a supercomputer. This is why we have to set goals and baselines in training. Small goals accomplished leads to big goals accomplished.
The next drill I like to work is a 3 shot drill....1 round both hands on the gun, 1 round strong hand only, 1 round support hand only. The goal is to put all 3 rounds in the same hole. When I put all 3 touching or in the same hole this means my sight picture, trigger press, and grip are solid.
Why this drill? well most people that I work with have never fired a gun support hand only. Why is this important? What happens if your strong hand is injured? Can you get accurate hits on target, can you keep the tool you are depending on to save your life, running, meaning keep your gun going, work through malfunctions, reloads etc.
So you can see as we add more complications into our shooting our brain has to work harder to overcome those. If our fundamentals are solid our brain, almost, does them with no input from you. You see danger and tell your hand to draw and boom, the handgun appears in your line of sight and your trigger is prepped and ready until your sights are aligned and it happens in around 2 seconds for most people. The more we practice "correctly" the faster our draw happens, to a point, then it becomes increasingly hard to find more speed. Biomechanicly we as humans only have so much fast twitch muscle fiber and this what gives us speed. Slow twitch gives us endurance. So the body has a predetermined speed at which we can move and to go beyond that is extremely strenuous and time consuming. Point here is no matter how fast or slow, work to get your hits. You can be fast as lightning but if you can't hit a 10 ft by 10ft wall it's useless speed.
Until next time,
Always Learning Always Evolving
Scott
Sweating Bullets Firearms Training
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