Efficient Training

Most of us have less time to spend on the range training than we would like. If you teach, you also have less time with your students than you might like. Efficient training becomes essential if you want to see improvement in your skills.

When I was young, I had basically unlimited range time and ammo. Even then, efficiency was still important, as I wanted to get better as quickly as possible, but real efficiency is often a product of necessity. When you never run out of bullets or time, it is easy to think you are being efficient, when what you are actually doing is substituting volume for efficiency.

Today, I am still very fortunate that ammo is not really an issue, but time certainly is. We all have families we want to see and things we need to do. In order to spend less time on the range, people sometimes latch onto drills that purport to work on multiple things at once.

If you want to test higher-level people, by all means, run tests that cover multiple areas. If you want to make higher-level shooters better, if you want to make lower-level shooters better, if you want to make anyone better at almost anything, then you need to focus on just one thing. Humans are incapable of true multi-tasking, and their attention span is short. Shooting is 90% mental and the other 10% is in your head. That means that you have a limited amount of concentration available to you and if you shoot a drill that requires concentration on every aspect every step of the way, most people will fail to benefit from it. If you break that awesome-sounding drill down to its component parts and require that people only concentrate on one part for a while, you will get better results.

You can reset and focus on part two when they have gotten all they will get from part one. That said, I find that one of the best ways to be efficient, is not to take larger drills and break them down. I divide shooting practice into three main aspects. Accuracy, speed, and pure weapons handling. Focus on one aspect for a bit, say speed. In that case, you might work a drill that focuses on speed from the ready position. After getting enough reps on that, you might focus on a different aspect, like accuracy. That might look like a walk-back drill on a small target. These two examples are just that, and many other options are available to you.

The point is to keep changing the aspect being practiced while keeping the focus on a small part of shooting. By changing from speed drills to accuracy drills, you make it easier for the shooter to train well at the moment, as well as train longer for the session. I like to constantly go between speed and accuracy drills so that no one gets burned out on just one thing. Of course, it’s all relative, as even speed drills need accuracy.

Pure weapons handling practice is not something I practice, on its own, every session. It is mostly for new shooters learning to handle their weapon, experienced shooters trying to work through a kink or plateau, or people who need to relearn parts of their technique, like when you switch to a red dot pistol.

If you pick a drill that requires work on stance, work on drawing, work on gripping, work on recoil control, work on tac loads, work on gripping again, work on recoil control again, work on speed loads, work on gripping again, work on accuracy again… I think you see my point. That stuff is acceptable for the already accomplished shooter. Not so for the student still learning each of those areas at a conscious level.

Next time you have 50 rds to spend and you’re tempted to work a bunch of stuff at once, try just focusing on one aspect. I bet you’ll find greater improvement by narrowing your focus.