When you practice, how often are you assessing your performance?
Are you looking at the target at the end of the day and saying, yay, I hit it a lot! Or are you shooting one Bill Drill and stopping to write down your hits and splits, rinse, & repeat?
If you read this site regularly, you know I’m a huge proponent of performance tracking. You can’t say you’re getting better unless you can look at data and show improvement. But that doesn’t mean you have to write down every single detail of every single drill. You’ll end up spending three quarters of your practice time scribbling in your notebook.
It doesn’t mean you ignore your results except for the runs you record, either, though. Every shot I fire has an expectation attached to it. There is a standard I’m trying to meet every drill.
As an example, I do a lot of AMRAP drills. Let’s say I’m going to shoot three mags’ worth of AMRAPs in 2-second runs on an 6″ circle. Normally, my standard is 90% on that target if I’m trying to push my speed. So I fire 45 shots and I expect to see 40-41 hits. If all my shots are hitting the center 50% of the target then I’m not pushing myself to be fast and I adjust what I’m doing. If half my shots are missing the circle altogether then I’m not controlling the gun well enough… and I adjust what I’m doing. But I count them up and see whether I’m making my standard or not.
It means pasting or replacing targets after each set. If I don’t know whether I’m getting my hits there’s nothing good coming from my practice. That’s one reason why things like paper plates and paper cards make such great targets. They cost next to nothing. You can get hours and hours of practice for a couple dollars of targets and you’re pretty much shooting clean targets every drill. A horizontal 3×5 card and a vertical 5×8 card make some pretty decent anatomically correct target zones, to boot.
Of course, personally I use my Q-PTC targets and just paste misses outside the scoring zone I’m using. So again, I see the number of misses each drill. I can usually do a 250-300 round practice session with a single target… though sometimes with a whole lot of pasters. 😎
Hold yourself to a standard when you shoot. Not just a standard of one great run to remember. Not just an end-of-day standard. If you’re throwing money down the bore, make it count.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
One of the lasting lessons I learned at AFHF was how to train myself long-term.
Thanks.
Makes perfect sense, the timer and the target will tell you the truth. What feels fast/slow often is not.
AMRAP is something I need to work on. Reaction to external stimuli is important.
Serious question, do you ever just shoot for the fun of it? Like go burn some rounds just because you want to try out a new gun or because you’re bummed?
I’m just wondering because all of this keeping track and trying to make progress stresses me out sometimes. My fun happy time relaxing hobby was starting to seriously stress me out because I wasn’t improving as fast as I thought I should. I had to take a step back and just learn to enjoy it again.
Matt — You have no idea how much that means to me.
JesseM — You know, that’s a good question and definitely makes me realize that often this site sounds like all work, no play.
Personally, I very rarely shoot without purpose. Because for me, that’s not fun. I genuinely enjoy the work of trying to improve. If you told me I could have 1,000 rounds to practice or 1,000 rounds to blow through a Glock 18 for fun, I’d put a couple mags down the Glock and then go practice.
But that doesn’t mean everyone should feel the same way. If a shooter is getting burned out then it’s time to make some kind of change. Maybe it’s a new gun (which I do just about every year… so there’s a newness I don’t even really think about but it’s a fun motivator) or maybe it’s taking a break or maybe it’s plinking or dirt shooting or whatever. Adults learn when they’re happy far better than when they’re unhappy.
Don’t let my “every shot counts” discourage you. Think of it as, “every shot when you’re seriously practicing.” What you do with the rest of your range time, and whether that’s 99% or 1% or anywhere in between, should be whatever you want it to be.