A recent post by Caleb over at Gun Nuts (Run it until the wheels fall off) got me thinking about the different approaches people take to shooting fast & accurately.
As I’ve mentioned before (Permission to Miss), at a certain point it becomes necessary to miss if you want to shoot faster. More specifically, you have to push your speed to the point where you miss once in a while if you’re going to learn how to move your fingers and eyeballs at a speed beyond what you can accomplish otherwise. If you go out and shoot 100% hits every day on every target, you won’t see the kind of improvement in speed that you would if you were pushing yourself to the point where you were instead getting, say, 90% of your hits.
On the other hand, you can take that approach too far. We’ll use Caleb’s example of the IDPA Classifier. Over the course of the Classifier you fire eighteen rounds at the 20yd line for a total of 90 points. Before I’d worry about how fast I can shoot those targets I’d worry about simply being able to hit them. If you slow down, can you score all 90 points? If not, it’s probably not time to speed up, now is it?
If you blast away at those targets so fast that you didn’t even make contact with the cardboard — if you had a complete miss on the target — then I wouldn’t call that “shooting ’til the wheels fell off.” I’d call that “shooting until the wheels fell off, the transmission dropped out, and the engine exploded.” Shooting wildly doesn’t improve your skill. Any fool can make noise really fast. Shooting to the point of failure only helps you if you can assess what was and wasn’t working. “Too fast, didn’t see anything” doesn’t tell you a heck of a lot.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
This has been my problem so far. I can blaze away at the easy steel challenge stages, but no matter how much I slow down I have accuracy issues on the long stages. Problem is that my accuracy at speed and my accuracy in slow fire are practically identical 🙁
Need to find a drill to practice accuracy that doesn’t feel so boring.
Mike — Sounds to me like what you need is a mental shift more than anything. Slow fire marksmanship may not be as much “fun” as blazing away, but it’s a foundation of good shooting. Being more accurate is just as challenging as being faster, uses less ammo to improve, and pays dividends in all of your shooting both fast & slow.
This + “Permission to Miss” + AFHF has taken me very far in improving. Drills like 3,2,1 has taught me how to speed up, slow down, and my eyes and trigger finger work in a way – and it’s all conscious. Yes, very good. I wish I had heard this years ago.
Thanks, Matt! It’s just part of the equation but I’m glad it’s helping.
Nice post. This approach applies to a number of skills. My partner and I have used this principal in the past with boxing students for example.
Teach a simple punch or combination. Using a metronome, find where the student is performing the combo with correct mechanics about 90% of the time. When they are able to execute correctly 100% of the time, increase the tempo on the metronome until they are back in the 90% “sweet spot”. That is the speed at which we had them perform any drill relating to the skill we were trying to teach at the time.
We found that this approach allowed the students to attain skills that were effective and useable under pressure in a shorter period of time. They were pressured enough to grow, but not so much that they were overwhelmed and reduced to random flailing.
Very effective… although, as you said, just one part of the equation.
” “Too fast, didn’t see anything” doesn’t tell you a heck of a lot.” did to me… told me don´t do it again… no free lunches in practical shooting, work hard then get better; as you get better the harder you have to work…
Pushing students to improve with allowing them to miss is okay, as long as they don’t go so fast that they miss easy hits.
Slow is fast, and hits matter in a real gunfight.
We trained to only go as fast as you could guarantee the hit. With our targets, any hit in the center mass counted, so it didn’t matter if the hits were 8″ apart, just as long as they were on center mass. Once you got all the hits on center mass, then you could practice on smaller groups going faster and faster until you could get them all in the middle circle.
Hard work, focus and practice like you play will pay off for any shooter’s performance.
Todd, will you agree on a “Delta” free for moderate out of control ??? Tnx…
afs001 — Say again?
I will be the first person to say that my approach to the classifier was definitely not for everyone; and I had a very specific purpose in mind based on my own knowledge of my weak points and areas for improvement.
Most shooters won’t benefit from doing what I did and would just end up wasting ammo.
Sorry not being clear, really appreciate your input… I´m trying to know if shooting “deltas” is out of control by the moderation statement you are suggesting… for me at my current level (intermediate shooter) is hard to know how fast is to fast…
PS: I´m understanding/working on shot calling but at this time it seems like a Jedi trick….
afs001 — OK, I see where you’re coming from.
Is a D a hit you want? If yes, then it’s a hit. If no, then it’s a miss. Personally, I think targets should be all or nothing. Either you get a hit you want, or it’s a miss. So if I was going to shoot an IPSC target ten times, I’d want ten A’s. If I got nine A’s and one C, or one D, or one complete miss of the target, I still only got 9 A’s.
It’s certainly worth understanding how severe a miss was (a C versus missing the cardboard altogether, for example) but it’s a miss regardless.
tnx… really appreciated.