There is an idea in shooting instruction that there is no such thing as advanced techniques, just the same fundamentals applied faster.

There are two possible reasons that I can think of that someone would say this. The first, more charitable one, is the emphasis that fundamentals don’t change and there are no secret ninja tricks. If you want to get good, you have to have good fundamentals. And, as far as it goes, I think that’s true.

But there are some “fundamental” techniques that just don’t come in to play if you’re trying to shoot fast in a USPSA context. Being able to shoot 2″ groups at 25 yards is a good skill to have to build confidence in your gun and ammo, but that particular mode of shooting will never be tested on the clock at a match.

The second, less charitable, justification would be that the person speaking hasn’t mastered any advanced techniques themselves, and wants you to think they don’t exist so you don’t ask them about things they can’t do.

I think that the first justification is actually not far off, although if you think someone is using the second justification then just turn and walk away.

But, yes, shooting fast requires strong fundamentals. If you are jerking the trigger or anticipating recoil or shooting without the right amount of sight picture appropriate to the target no advanced technique can fix the lack of that proper technique. To put it another way, shooting really fast requires, but is not entirely composed of, good fundamentals.

The best example of this is the idea of confirming your sights. I consider shooting without confirming your sights an advanced technique.

What that means is this: it takes the average human somewhere between .25 and .50 of a second to react to stimulus. (Prove this to yourself by setting your shot timer on random delay, holding it in one hand, with your other hand two inches away; at the beep, slap the timer near the microphone to register a “shot”; with a few practice runs your times should be in the .25-.50 range.)

Let’s say that the average USPSA shooter, without too much of practice, can get the gun out of their holster and pointed at the target in under a second. The gun is out there, let’s say, at .90 after the start signal. But it takes .30 for their eyes to register the sights overlaid on the target and get the signal to the trigger finger to pull the trigger. First shot time: 1.20.

Let’s say you want a sub-second draw. If we take the .30 reaction time as a given (that’s a tough one to really reliably lower) then your eyeballs have to see the sights aligned at .70 to start the chain of events to pull the trigger.

That’s fundamentals.

The “advanced” technique? Don’t wait for the sights to be confirmed. Pulling the trigger becomes a pre-programmed part of the draw. There is no pause to clean up the sight picture once the gun is at full extension. Hands come together to grip the gun, arms extend to the target, weak hand clamps, as soon as the gun reaches the end of its travel, bang.

If someone is drawing and breaking their first shot on a target in under a second, I guarantee you they are not confirming their sight picture before deciding to pull the trigger. This is not to say they aren’t seeing the sights and calling the shot after the fact. They just aren’t waiting to see the sights before making the decision to pull.

There is no pause to wait and see if the sights are aligned. They are trusting that just like a thousand times before in dry fire the sights will be there and the shot will be an alpha. If they aren’t there, they’ll just fire a makeup shot at the end. (Which, if the makeup shot is a .30 split, ends up with a final time that would be exactly the same as if they had waited the .30 before breaking the first shot. This makes not confirming the sights a viable strategy in a competition setting.)

When is this useful? In most cases, not very often. On a 32 round field course, the .30 to confirm your sight picture on the draw doesn’t really matter. One makeup shot later in the stage could easily eat up anything you’ve earned by shooting without confirming the sights.

But on a classifier, it can be quite helpful. Especially if you can avoid spending the .30 on the draw and again when you finish the reload: mag seated in the gun, hands come together, gun goes back out to the target, no pause to confirm, and bang, sub-second reload.

If we take the old Production El Prez HHF of 10.24, that’s 12 alphas in 5.8 seconds or 10A, 2C in 5.4 seconds. (More than 2Cs is going to stack up too quick against you shooting Minor.) Assuming the math for the 2C run, shaving that .6 of a second to go from 6.0 to 5.4 results in going from a 91% classifier (mid-Master) to a 100%.

If you’re struggling to break out of B-class and have never shot an El Prez draw or reload in under a second, you might be confirming your sights, and learning to trust your index and not require confirming the sights might be helpful for breaking out of that rut.

Or, if your dry fire isn’t consistent and thus your index out of the holster is bad, you might just start breaking the shot with no sight picture at all and start racking up uncalled misses. So, caveat shooter. But that’s an example of an advanced technique.

The post “Just fundamentals faster” appeared first on Berry Shooting.

In my experience, the main problem with dry fire practice is that I try to do too much all at once. I want to work on five different deficiencies. I want to work on things on the move before I have made progress standing still. I tell myself I should dry fire for long stretches of time, and I end up putting it off until it’s too late in the evening to even put the belt on.

The only solution that I’ve found to this is organization and planning. Write down (on paper, not your phone) a list of the five things you want to work on and pick which one to work on today. Work on it for 20 minutes and call that good enough. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

The good news is, tomorrow you have a list of things to work on. Over time, on paper or in your head, that list of deficiencies will change into a list of drills to work on to improve each area. Now, without having to decide what to practice, you’ve written it out ahead of time. Just put on the gear, set your timer, and work. When you learn to trust some problems to yourself in the future, you stop feeling the pressure to fix everything all at once.

When you practice, if you notice something else you want to work on, make a note of it. If you notice some technique change you’re curious to try, or some gear modification to make, make a note of it. Don’t stop practicing. Don’t get distracted. Delay gratification and finish the practice session. Then tinker with your gear. Maybe experiment with the technique change, but tomorrow. Not today. Finish the practice session you set out to start. If you’re constantly changing course every five minutes, you’ll never get anywhere. Better to power through and make progress in some direction–any direction–than to wander around not getting anything accomplished.

That’s it.

For me, the 2021 season starts now. (More on that in a few days.)

Let’s go.

The post Dry Fire Goals – January 2021 appeared first on Berry Shooting.

At a match last weekend, while our squad was shooting the classifier, a friend who practices a lot but only gets to shoot one match a month asked me: “How do you guys reload like that? I try and practice reloads, and mine are never that smooth.” and then he mimed fumbling a reload as I started to consider what he was asking. “What do you do?” he asked. “Just more reps?”

Now, I don’t know what other guys do, just what’s worked for me. But here’s what I told him:

More reps won’t fix doing the wrong thing.

All that more reps can accomplish is to let you take take a technique that you do correctly while you’re thinking about it and be able to do it correctly without thinking about it. That’s it.

When I’ve had breakthroughs, it’s always been by figuring out exactly where to direct my attention at the right time.

When I relax my hands and get ready to draw, figuring out what feeling I should hold in my head of what I want my hand on the gun to feel like as soon as the buzzer goes off.

When I start to do a reload, figuring out what feeling I want to have of the basepad of the new magazine in my left hand.

I used to have slow reloads because when I started doing the reload I thought about the right hand first and focused on ejecting the magazine straight down while I let my left hand go on autopilot to grab the magazine. Eventually I realized that dropping the old magazine requires very little precision, but I was having bad reloads because of a sloppy grip on the new magazine. Because the limiting factor of the speed of a reload is the time to get the new mag to the gun, by prioritizing that aspect of the reload, the entire movement got faster. I also started getting a more precise grip on the magazine, because I was giving my mind a higher resolution picture of the result I wanted. Having a better grip on the mag immediately helped make inserting it more consistent.

So for me, improvements are always about focus. Figuring out exactly what to focus on in exactly the right order. That’s where the breakthroughs come from.

Once you figure out what to focus on, you dry fire and think about those focus points while you practice. Then on match day, you just trust them to happen. When I’m actually shooting a stage, I’m not thinking about those focus points. Right before the buzzer I’ll think about the grip I want to have, but after that it’s just letting the visualization happen, watching the sights, and calling the shots.

So, no. If you have an inefficient or imprecise technique, don’t try to make it better just by throwing more reps at it, trying to make it better.

Instead, spend your reps trying to make it different. Experiment to try to figure out what you’re missing. In the case of a reload, try reloading with the gun higher, or lower. Further out or further in. Start with the fresh magazine already in your hand. When you bang the magazine off the magwell, pause and look at how the magazine is sitting in your hand. Rewind your motions and try to see exactly how you grabbed the magazine out of the pouch that led that bad result.

If all else fails, put on some music and do reps for five minutes and try to see the patterns between good and bad reps. Push yourself to do it two tenths faster than your normal par time just to force the wheels to fall off, then observe what happens when they do. Try to solve backwards and figure out based on where the failure happened where the flaw is in your technique.

It’s like pressure testing a compressor. Keep pumping more and more air into the tank until it starts leaking out. Find out where the leak is, reinforce or replace that part, and keep repeating.

There are no magic foolproof techniques that the best shooters have figured out. Even at the top of the sport, the guys that are still improving are going through this exact process of identifying the leaks and plugging them. Their leaks are just smaller. But they’re not different people than you or me, they just started sooner and plugged all the big leaks already.

So decide what technique you want to improve and follow this process. Iterate until you find the right combination of mental focus points to produce better results.

And, as an aside, one bonus of this approach is that it even works for skills you don’t use all that often. For example, if you spend a few weeks practicing shooting weak-hand and find the right set of mental focus points to do it well, then just remember those. Even if you haven’t practiced that skill regularly and you come up to a stage where you have to use it, just remember those focus points and work them into your visualization. It works a lot better than just trying to shoot a bunch of rounds on that particular skill when you see it in the match book for an upcoming major.

Again, all I know is what’s in my head, but I would bet good money that this is, in one form or another, what the successful high end shooters are doing. They don’t shoot until they get a subjective “feel” for how something should go. They shoot until they find the set of repeatable focus points to produce a given result. And then they remember them. Before a big match, they might go and refresh them, just make sure they are remembering everything clearly. But they’re not trying to “memorize” the right speed. Just refresh their memory of the focus points.

The post More Reps? appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This summer, one of the changes I’m making to my practice is to live fire at least one evening a week. Last year, I would live fire every weekend I wasn’t shooting a match, which was two practice sessions most months. This new schedule gives me four a month, with as many as six if I go on the weekends. This is much more in line with the typical practice schedule for someone who wants to be competitive at the GM level.

The First Practice

Last Friday, June 22nd, was the second week of this new routine. It had been a tiring day at work, and I didn’t feel motivated or energized to go. But I went anyway because, well, that’s the new routine.

What made things interesting about this particular practice is that it also worked out for me to be back on the range practicing again the very next day as well, since there was a USPSA RO class going on at the range. I volunteered to help the NC Section Coordinator (who I’m married to) by picking up lunch and bringing it to the class.

But Friday’s practice did not go particularly well. I started the session by shooting a variant of Practical Accuracy that I’d shot in sessions past, and just trying to deliver the same performance that I’d had in the past. Just reproduce that performance, my plan went, and then move on to working on new skills.

But I couldn’t do it. I spent all 400 rounds just trying to figure out what I was doing wrong on this one drill. I never really made any progress. I figured out a few small things, but never did achieve the standard I started out the session trying to hit. I was so worn down that I didn’t have any creativity left to figure out the problem. So I shot my rounds and went home.

That evening, I spent an hour or so writing my first post on PSTG about this experience, in a sort of long, rambling, impromptu range diary. I think I just needed to blow off some steam about the experience and thought it would be interesting to get things in writing, as a snapshot before the practice the next day.

The Second Practice

And so Saturday’s practice came. It was slightly better, but only because I gave up. After 200 rounds on the same drill from Friday I was frustrated. I was trying everything I could think of and getting bad hits on the target and slow times. In retrospect, the way I would phrase it is that the harder I tried to make the technique changes the worse the result got. Putting it like that makes it clear the solution was to stop and do something else, but in the moment I didn’t think about it like that.

So instead of just packing up and going home or spending the rest of the session stuck in this rut, I moved on to my planned second drill of the day. I set up an 8-shot mini-stage and started to shoot it. Even there, I was frustrated with the results. The harder I tried, the worse the results. I diagnosed a few small things that were going wrong with my technique and really shifted around my grip pressure on the gun, this time making a real emphasis to crush with my left hand and leave my right hand loose enough to run the trigger straight back. At the very end of the session I started to see some gains from that.

So when I got home, I wrote another, equally long follow up post in the PSTG thread. I had gotten my thoughts off my chest, and writing the post, like writing these blog posts, helped me try to organize my thoughts. So, I wasn’t really expecting anything to happen after the second post, but I got a few interesting responses.

Two very good shooters, Cody Axon (of the Shoot Fast Podcast) and Tyler Turner (occasional guest on Practical Shooting After Dark) both chimed in with essentially the same message: Stop overthinking things. Stop analyzing things to death. Stop trying to make judgements and adjustments after every run. Stop shooting so many pass/fail, objective-standards drills.

Just go shoot, they told me. Set up some targets and shoot them and just see what happens. Observe yourself shooting.

For example, one bad habit I had developed was trying to score the targets between runs. For efficiency, I had adopted the common practice of shooting a given drill 4 or 5 times between going downrange to paste. The advantage of this is that you can get in a groove and shoot a few runs back to back to feel the small differences between them, as well as just saving you a lot of time and energy. But I would try to look for holes on the target between runs. If I saw a delta or mike, I might consciously change my focus on the next iteration of the drill.

This, of course, was defeating the point. Instead of shooting five runs in the same mindset and then seeing a sort of “average” performance on the targets, I was constantly trying to course correct between reps, and so the multiple runs overlaid on each other were just a confusing mixture of multiple different approaches to the drill.

The antidote, they helped me realize, is to give up on wanting to know the result of every single shot. Stop looking so close at trees and try to see the shape of the forest.

The Third Practice

Taking that attitude into evening practice this past week really made a difference. The hardest part was forcing myself not to look at the targets between runs. When I was done shooting, I would deliberately keep my eyes looking down at the ground or focused at front sight distance so I wasn’t looking for holes on the first target.

One obvious-in-hindsight side effect of this was that it made me call my shots more. Since I wasn’t looking at the targets after every run, I had to actually watch the sights and notice what they were doing if I wanted to have an idea of where the hits went from one run to another. I didn’t realize the extent to which looking at the hits after each rep was becoming a crutch to let me shoot without really seeing my sights and just hoping the hits were there.

The second side effect of this was that practice was just more enjoyable and productive. Instead of constantly changing things and flailing around, by shooting multiple runs and making smaller tweaks in between, I was counter-intuitively able to make more progress in a single session than I had in a long time. I got in a groove, shot well, and made small, incremental gains.

The First Match

And so, this weekend, a week and a half after that first forum post, I shot my first match with the “Just Go Shoot” mindset.

One mental shift that carried over almost directly from practice to the match was changing the way I evaluated my performance on each stage. I used to look at each individual stage as an independent event. After I shot each stage, I would sit down and write notes in a little notebook about what went well and what went poorly.

My goal of taking notes was always to gather and preserve the data for later analysis, but I found I actually rarely ended up going back to the notebook and referring to it. Instead, all I was doing was prematurely judging the results of a particular target or position as good or bad and trying to speculate on the cause. Shot high right on third target in the first position, due to overtransitioning. Fumbled reload because distracted looking for holes in last target. That sort of thing.

Instead, I reserved judgement and just tried to observe patterns and trends throughout the day. And I think doing that managed to making the match both more enjoyable and more productive. I learned a few things and noticed a few patterns. I’ll admit, probably fewer things than if I had tried to make thorough notes. But you can only hold a few priorities in your head at a time anyway. Trying to turn every stage of every match into thorough study of all the flaws in my shooting was, to borrow a word from Tyler, exhausting.

It was also vulnerable to being distracted by one-off freak events. Often times I would remember the single oddest events all day, which are usually the least statistically representative of my actual skill. Instead of seeing the subtle pattern re-appearing on three or four stages, I would end up paying attention to the weird thing that happened on just one stage, which was a complete distraction. Focusing on it and chasing it would of course be a wild goose chase. Exhausting.

So I went to the match. I got my video, but I didn’t take any notes. But somehow despite not having written anything down, I have clear mental pictures of the three biggest fish to fry coming out of the match. And so I can work on them. I spent less time sitting and writing, and kept more of an open mind. I spent less time dwelling on errors and trying to diagnose and judge them in the moment, and more time just enjoying being out shooting.

Going Forward

One of the other common themes from what Cody and Tyler told me, which gels with previous conversations I’ve had with Cody and others is: don’t work so hard. This is supposed to be fun. Sure you won’t always be excited to do it every single day, but in general the idea of investing time in the sport should be appealing, in a way that it really hadn’t been for a while.

With their help and the video resources on PSTG, I feel like the fun is back. Nationals is still four months away. I feel like I’ve made some technique breakthroughs on grip, as well as process breakthroughs about practicing during the week, not to mention the mental breakthrough of “Just Go Shoot”. It’s going to be a good season.

All photos in this post courtesy of Bradley, aka @trigger_pull.

The post “Just Go Shoot” appeared first on Berry Shooting.

Technically this run on Ben Stoeger’s Practical Accuracy was all 6 hits, none even really cutting it close. And the time was fast. A few hundredths faster than the runs before it.

But it was also sloppy and bad technique. I felt myself pulling the trigger with my whole hand, and so it’s no coincidence that 4 of the 6 shots clustered low left. So for the next rep, I focused on gripping the gun front-to-back and pulling the trigger straight back to the rear. Doing that wasn’t quite as fast, but the hits were a nice circle in the middle of the A instead of this mutated Big Dipper of crap.

If I had just scored the drill by time and points, I would have thought the result in the photo was good. But I stayed observant of my shooting and read the pattern in the hits, not just the score. It was a small victory.

The post Lesson From Practice appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about the ways that ego can get in the way of developing yourself as a shooter.

The post #63: Ego In Competition appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about what keeps me in the sport and the lessons that have transferred from competition over in to my life off the range.

The post #62: Why I Compete appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week, I talk about my experience with making speed gains, and why they usually don’t come just by trying hard or trying to go faster.

The post #60: Do Not Try To Go Faster appeared first on Berry Shooting.

But in the targets I shot, I saw an interesting example of the value of reading the pattern in the targets, not just scoring them. (Also a major theme of Ben Stoeger’s “Breakthrough Marksmanship” book.) Here are the first and last sheets I shot of the day:

The first sheet is all over the place. You could generously score it as 29/36. But I didn’t clean a single dot. I had at least one shot out on every dot.

The second sheet is the same score, 29/36. But the individual dots are very different. I cleaned three of the six dots. If I only looked at the aggregate score, this seems like a failure. But as I was shooting it, I could feel the difference between the process that led to the clean dots and the bad ones.

This is important because this is how progress happens sometimes. It’s not a linear process where you creep up tenth by tenth. In my experience it’s usually much more this kind of breakthrough where you go from being consistently mediocre to erratically excellent. The challenge becomes to dissect and reproduce the circumstances that lead to the excellent performances and the pitfalls that trip you up from achieving it. Once you know those two things, excellence just becomes a simple matter of consistently doing the correct things and avoiding the unproductive behaviors.

The post Reading Targets in Practice appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about having breakthroughs when you realize that something you took for granted turned out to be wrong, or at least only true in some contexts.

I post videos from my matches at youtube.com/BenBerryUSPSA.
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The post #58: Half Of What You Know is Wrong appeared first on Berry Shooting.