The Drill Does Not Matter

Many people collect drills. Some take those drills to the range for their practice days, others use them to teach. We have a small collection of drills here at Pistol-Training.com, and it is one of the most viewed sections of the site. But does doing these drills, or any others, make you better?

For lots of people, the answer is no. The drill does not matter. What matters is how you do the drill.

If you practice your drills repeatedly, you will likely see some improvement, but it won’t usually be very much. When I train, I generally pick 2 or 3 skills I want to improve. I then select a drill or two for each of those skills. If I only have a short time to train, I might do one drill for each skill. A longer session might have me doing 2 or even 3 drills for each skill, but that is pretty rare. Now for the important part – how you do the drill.

If you are trying to learn a new technique or change an old technique to something new, you should probably be going slowly. This allows you to practice the mechanics more perfectly. There are exceptions, but it’s still a good rule. Many people (most?) can’t slow themselves down enough to work on perfect technique. They go too fast and never really learn the technique as well as they could. Press-outs are a great example of this, but there are many others. You have to be mindful when you are practicing so that you can catch errors and fix them.

Are there exceptions to this “go slow and learn it well” approach? Of course. Sometimes the mechanics you use when going slow are not representative of how you actually do it at speed. The draw is a good example of this. On the other hand, learning some kind of draw, slowly and reasonably correctly, is a good foundation to then go fast. You don’t have to do it this way, but it is a tried and true path.

When I say go slow, I’m not talking about months of slow practice, let alone years of daily slowness. I’m talking about going slow enough for long enough (usually a few weeks is enough) to learn the technique and then start pushing your speed without having everything fall apart. If you are really pushing your speed, something is going to fall apart regardless. That’s ok once you have some technique under your belt, but it doesn’t tend to get you where you want to be if you are new to drawing a gun.

I’m not sure why this is difficult to get across to people, there is almost nothing that you can learn at full speed from the start. Punching, driving, typing, and almost everything else requires a slow start and the more perfectly you make it at first, the better it will be down the road.

On the other hand, if you have good form already, and are trying to increase your ability to do something, then you probably need to push yourself. “Doing something”, mostly amounts to faster or more accurate, or both, as there isn’t really anything else to do with a gun. This type of practice requires the same mindfulness as going slow, but it is even harder to do. That should be obvious, as catching mistakes at high speed is harder to do than at slow speed. You can’t just run through a drill, you have to pay attention to everything that you are doing so that you can catch mistakes and fix them.

This is one reason why going slow is a real benefit. It helps you learn how to be effectively mindful and gives you experience with it so that you can then attempt to catch and fix mistakes at higher speeds. Every shot of every drill requires your attention in the here and now. It is not enough to look at the target afterward and then extrapolate what happened. CSI is a tv show, not a method for efficient improvement. You have to see what your sight is doing. You have to feel what your gun and muscles are doing. You have to know where your eyes are focused. Don’t depend on the target to tell you everything.

If everything works out every time, then you are not pushing yourself. You want to have things fall apart so that you can fix them. Then hopefully next time that thing doesn’t fall apart but something else does, so you fix that. Improvement is a never-ending process, which is part of why I love to shoot and train.

Train hard and stay safe!