Pacing

One of the most fascinating parts of the Porsche class last week was realizing the tremendous number of parallels between how they teach high performance driving and how good instructors teach high performance shooting. Every chance I got, I was grabbing an instructor offline and asking him questions about pedagogy.

In particular, the subject of pacing really stood out to me. There were students in the class who flew way past their envelope and made major mistakes. There were students who never tried to go beyond what was normal and comfortable and puttered around the track. And then there were the guys who pushed themselves outside their comfort zone and actually improved. From what I saw, maybe 25% fell into that last category. But talking with the students after class, almost 100% said they fell into that 25%!

Shooting classes are the same way. To get the most out of your investment of time, money, and effort you need to go at a pace where learning occurs. One of the most frustrating things I see as an instructor is a hard working, well meaning student who just cannot slow himself down enough to fix bad habits. He knows he can perform his draw or reload at a certain speed and when confronted with a new approach or technique he tries to maintain that speed, hoping the new stuff will just integrate naturally.

It won’t.

Once you take a step back and accept that doing it the right way for the first time might not work as well as doing it the wrong way for the thousandth time, you have reached an important milestone. There’s no shame in going back to the beginning. There’s no shame in sacrificing performance in the short term during training if it means breaking through a plateau in the long term.

Last week during the Culpeper Aim Fast Hit Fast class, two students exemplified the polar opposites of the issue.

Student #1 was an accomplished shooter and easily one of the best performers in class. But he has an absolutely abysmal reload that is literally infested with ravenous bad habits eating away at his time. He knows his reload needs work. We discussed exactly what to change — and how to accomplish it — more than a dozen times. But every time he performed a reload, he did it the old way… because he did it at full speed. No matter how many times I admonished him to pause and take the reload slowly to make sure he was doing it right, no matter how many times he nodded and said, “Yes, sir,” when it came time to shoot a drill he just couldn’t let himself be slower than the guys to his right and left. So he spent the weekend practicing his bad reload.

Student #2 was a good shooter and a full time police officer. He paid attention during the section of the class where we discuss the press-out and a lightbulb went on in his head. For the next two days, he had a draw that was so ridiculously slow you might have thought he was standing still at times. But rather than worry whether he was shooting as fast as the other students, rather than worry whether he was shooting as fast as he normally did, he put 100% effort into doing the press-out perfectly time after time after time. He spent the weekend practicing a perfect press-out.

At the end of the weekend, guess who had the most improvement? Duh.

Trust me, folks, I’ve been there. When I started shooting, I was brought up as a diehard Weaver guy. I was taught that running a gun empty was second only to blaspheming Cooper as a mortal sin. I was told that using the slide release lever during a reload would cause cancer. But I’d hit a plateau and no matter how much I practiced, “my way” wasn’t getting better. At the same time, all around me were other shooters — many of whom didn’t practice nearly as much — kicking my butt using “the other way.” It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that breaking through that plateau meant changing some core aspects of my shooting. Making those changes required putting my ego on the back burner for a while. It required a lot of painstakingly slow reprogramming of some deeply ingrained habits. It sucked.

Changing each of those things took time. Changing your grip is hard. Changing the stance you acquire preconsciously is hard. Each time I made one of those changes, I had to accept that I was going to get worse before I got better. Speed went down. Accuracy suffered. It was uncomfortable. Everything looked and felt wrong. And worst of all, I didn’t look as cool on the range as I used to.

Getting better often involves admitting things need to change. Changing things often involves slow, uncool, unimpressive repetition of new technique until it overcomes ingrained habit. It means changing your pace to match your skill level … not your skill level overall, but your skill level with the new technique.

Doing that in a class means shutting out what you hear (other shooters) and focusing on what you see (your sights). Don’t try to be the best guy in class. Try to be the guy who learns the most.

Then next year, you’ll be the best guy in class.

Train hard & stay safe! ToddG