Maximizing Training

Lazer Focus

When I started in USPSA back in 2014, "training" meant setting up El Presidente or Accelerator and then shooting as much as possible. I put a lot of emphasis on shooting drills I saw famous shooters shooting, and trying to pile up an impressive round count.

What I was doing was helping a little, but it was like going to the gym and piling up all the weights in the middle of the room and trying to push them around. It was better than nothing but was destined to never really produce results.

BUY A TRAINING BOOK FROM A REPUTABLE SOURCE

Step one should be to buy a training book from a reputable source. I use Ben Stoeger's "Dry Fire Reloaded", but there are a many good books out there by Steve Anderson and Brian Enos, for example. Read your book and actually think your way through the drills. My favorite part of "Dry Fire Reloaded" is that the drills in that book really hammer on developing your technical skills individually. This will become very handy as you develop the skill of diagnosing your own shooting because you can then adjust your training accordingly. For a true noob, I would suggest giving pretty equal time to everything, with an emphasis on developing safe gun handling habits.

HONEST ASSESSMENT OF YOUR SKILLS

Step two is an honest assessment of your skills. Shooting a level 2 or 3 USPSA match is usually a pretty good gauge of where your skills are on a national level and running through the numbers can let you know where you're failing if it's not immediately obvious.

I'll use my own results as an example. I shot the Utah State Championship a couple of weeks ago and got 3rd Carry Optics and 23/184 overall. Running through the numbers, I shot 290 A, 57 C, 3 D, 1 M in a total time of 226.93 seconds. Not bad at first glance, but as I looked at the names above mine, I noticed that I was slow. Really slow. My marksmanship wasn't bad, although I really wish I could have that one miss back. Only around six people actually shot more alphas than me, but I just wasn't fast enough. Shaving 2.2 seconds off per stage would have taken me from 23rd overall to about 4th. That's a substantial difference. So while I still dry fire primarily fundamental skills (draw, reload, trigger control, transitions), my live-fire training has been primarily movement-centric. It's critical to remember that even if you're focusing on cleaning up one aspect of your shooting, you must continue to practice everything else!

IMPROVING MY MOVEMENT SKILLS

Recently, I went out with my usual training buddies and we set up a mini-stage to try and get me moving faster. I set this mini-stage up so that it could be shot many different ways without moving targets around. If I train alone, I set up a maximum of 3 targets so I don't waste time pasting. With a bigger group, a bigger array becomes less impractical.

Practice Stage

In this case, I set the shooting area up so that I could do a short 8-round left to right or right to left dash with mirror image targets on either side. I also did this with a center start and added in 2-3 plates on the plate rack to try and engage while moving and negating the need for a third shooting position. With this one stage, I was able to work on split starts, entry, and exit, and shooting on the move.

If we'd had more time and ammo, I would have introduced partials. But since my emphasis was on raw speed, open targets made more sense to start with. USPSA Hi-Cap Nationals are about a week away, so we'll see if this helped with my lazy movement.

DON'T BURN YOURSELF OUT

Finally, don't burn yourself out. Don't beat yourself up if you can't match Ben Stoeger's "Four Aces" time. And certainly, don't waste ammo trying to chase that time. Also, don't JUST shoot classifiers in hopes of getting a classification bump. There's a lot more to USPSA than classifiers, and I can't think of a worse fate than to finally make GM only to land in the middle of B class in the overall. Aside from maybe shooting PCC. PCC is the Coast Guard of divisions.

If you can honestly and critically analyze your shooting, adjusting your training will help you make massive gains.