When you go to a class, do you go for the social aspect or the learning? For hard training, or for fun? In a 2 day class, it is impossible to cover everything for everyone, but I don’t think a class should be a brief overview of everything under the sun. It is tempting for many instructors to try to tell you everything they know in 2 days. It is better to identify weaknesses that are fairly consistent in the class and then work to address them in a more detailed way.
2 days is not enough time to see meaningful change in most cases, but a class that hits the really important stuff over and over will at least give the students a good idea of what they need to work on and how to work on it. What is the really important stuff that most people need work on? Grip, trigger control, tension, acceptable sight picture, target focus, draws and multiple shots are the big ones. Many are interrelated, but note that speed and accuracy are not on the list. Speed and accuracy are what we want, the list above is how we get them. If you are a competition focused shooter, there are other important aspects that matter. If you are defensive minded, there are other things that matter as well. For the guy who wants to be really good at any kind of shooting though, those skills cover an awful lot of ground. They are the groundwork for performance shooting that can be built on in whatever direction the owner of those skills wishes.
Ownership is the issue here. No one shooting today at a high level got there in a vacuum. All of us, at almost all skill levels, learned some or most of what we know from people who went before. I think it is important to give credit where it is due, but once you have learned something, you have to make it yours. Trying to mimic your favorite instructor’s technique, style or look, is not a terrible way to start, but it is limiting. You have to own the material so that it isn’t something you were taught, it is simply something you do. That means it will be very slightly different for you than it is for anyone else. It also means that you can actually do it, not just talk about it or warm up to it on a good day.
Once you have some basic skills down pat, competition is a very useful tool for driving improvement. I don’t care much about competition in the big picture, but as a training tool, it is hard to beat. Anyone who wants to be a better shooter should be shooting some kind of competition as they are able to. You don’t need to focus on one type, you don’t need to shoot it every weekend or even every month. Obviously you will get better at a sport by focusing on that sport and doing it regularly. That is fine if success in competition is what you want. If instead you want broad competency in shooting, try a few different ones. Speedy ones, precise ones, pistol, rifle shotgun, whatever. Use it to discover areas of weakness and work on those in training. If you have no real weaknesses (congratulations!), use the competition to drive your on demand performance and ability to perform under stress.
I find that I have about a 10% drop in performance in competition compared to what I can do in the comfort of my private range. Which brings me to the final point of this already long winded post. What you can do on the range with friends or by yourself is pretty meaningless and does not give you an accurate idea of what you can actually do. You have to get out of your comfort zone and push yourself. There are a lot of high ranking sport shooters who cannot deliver those scores in competition. The rank you hold means little if lower ranked shooters are regularly beating you in competition. What matters is that you are working to get better and not simply believing that you will have arrived when you achieve a certain arbitrary status. That applies to winning also. We all like to win, but not winning gives you more things to work on and more incentive to work on them. I have to go now and work on a bunch of my weaknesses.