Drill of the Week: Acceleration

The last two DotW’s were all about accuracy, so now it’s time to transition to speed. We’re going to take the Press Out drill from earlier this year and put it on the clock, pushing the shooter to speed up. If you aren’t familiar with the Press Out drill, we suggest you take a look at it before continuing.

You’ll need a relatively large target (8″ plate, sheet of paper, etc.) and a shot timer. Set up the target at seven yards, and put your shot timer at a PAR time of 1.0 seconds.

Start position is the point where you normally make contact with your support hand during a draw. The gun will be relatively close in to your body, pointed at the target, both hands on the gun.

On the buzzer, press the gun out and press the trigger, working on your sight alignment and timing so the shot breaks at the moment you reach full extension of your arms. If you finish with plenty of time left, slow yourself down and work on breaking a more accurate shot without going over the PAR time. Go through one or two magazines depending on whether you have a double- or single-stack mag.

Next, put up a new target. Without changing the par time, do the same drill except fire two shots per iteration. This might be easy for you, or it might require you to push yourself to break that first shot a little faster. Again, the goal is to get the most accurate shots you can without going over PAR. Fire the same number of drills (so you’ll fire two times as many shots).

If you were getting two shots in the 1.0 seconds, next try three, then four, and keep going until you can no longer get all your hits within the PAR time. You’ll have to speed up a little more each time. This drill should take you from smooth accurate single shots to pushing yourself to the very limit of your speed & accuracy. Which is good, because next week we’ll be doing another drill submitted in our Design a Drill of the Week contest and you will need that speed!