Notes on the Drills
The material on this page is collected here for the benefit of shooters interested in improving their handgun skills and developing their own training structure.
I assume no liability for any use or misuse of this information.
This page does not teach technique and is not intended as a substitute for good firearms training. I assume you will seek out training from an instructor or knowledgeable shooter to learn the basics of any technique before setting them into your muscle memory. Drills practiced with poor technique will only reinforce bad habits.
Contributions to this page are welcome, and will be credited.
Cover
When it comes to the defensive use of firearms, the skill of not being
shot is at least as important as the skill of shooting. Moving to
cover and shooting from cover should be a constant part of handgun
drilling, but unfortunately, most exercises don't emphasize this
aspect of defense.
In a perfect world, the first shots a beginner fires would be from
behind cover. Seeking cover while drawing or firing should be an
instinct. You are training yourself every time you handle a gun, and
if you stand out in the open when shooting drills, you are training
yourself to stand out in the open when returning fire, an immobile and
easy target, as is very often observed in law enforcement
shootings.
The antidote is to shoot from cover from the very outset, and keep it
a constant part of your training. As law enforcement training shifts
to this paradigm, they observe that officers who come up for
qualification are uneasy firing in the open--they instinctively
prefer to shoot from behind cover when it is available.
There is very little use of cover in these drills, which is why I
mention it here. They can, however, be adapted. It is up to you to
give yourself the kind of training you want to have.
Target Systems
Most of the defensive drills are designed for use with the IPSC target.
These targets are available from many different suppliers, usually in lots of 25-50.
A rough substitute for the IPSC A-zone is a sheet of 8.5 x 11" paper.
This is the same height and just slightly wider than the A-zone. Most
of these drills can be practiced with a sheet of paper on a cardboard
backing if you don't have IPSC targets.
Variations: Some agencies tape 3x5 cards in the
center of a silhouette for many of these drills, and only count those
hits. The theory is that in an armed encounter your group sizes will
widen involuntarily, so practicing with a smaller-than-life stop zone
is better training.
I have a page on reactive targets
and the Poor Man's Target Frame.
Dry Fire Safety
Dry Fire Draw
Dry Fire Reload
Dry Fire Target Transitions
A Note on Visualization
Benchrest Shooting
Teaches: accuracy, ideal sight picture,
relaxation while shooting
Shooting from a pistol rest is the way to learn an ideal
sight picture, good trigger control, and to build confidence that your
gun shoots to point of aim. The NRA recommends starting all new
shooters from a rest, just so they can see an ideal sight picture and
understand that if the sights are aligned on the target when the gun
fires, the bullet will accurately hit the target. Once this
understanding is established, other kinds of shooting have a
foundation to build from.
Advanced shooters will find that by using a rest, they can shoot to
the gun's limit. It's an excellent way to observe the shooting
process, watching the sight lift, the slide operate, and the gun come
back into battery on the target.
Shooting 1/4" dots from a rest is a challenging way to test your
limits. Put 15 dots on a sheet of paper with a larger aiming circle
around each one. One shot per dot at 7 yards; bullet must break the
edge to score; anything over 10 is excellent.
Come back to benchrest shooting anytime you start thinking your
sights need adjusting. Chances are it's you, not the gun.
By shooting NRA
targets or measuring your
groups you can chart your progress.
Freestyle Group Shooting
Teaches: accuracy, ideal sight picture, making
every shot count.
Put a 1" target dot on a blank sheet of paper and run it out to 25,
50, 75, or 100 ft--whatever distance stretches your ability to put
them in the center when taking your best shot. Load ONLY ONE round
into the magazine and cylinder, and make the shot as precise as you
can, taking all the time you need. After every shot, step out of your
shooting position, collect the brass, or do something else to rest.
Put a new target out every 10 shots.
Try to call your shots. If you are perfectly focused on the front
sight at the moment the shot breaks, you will be able to tell if the
shot was high, low, or off to the side. Wherever the sight is when it
lifts, that's the direction the shot will go.
Handle the gun exactly as you would for more aggressive
shooting--loading the gun with the proper procedure and shooting from
your normal stance. Pay attention to how your stance and grip feel to
you; slow, careful shooting can show you where unwanted tension is
coming from. If you feel tired, take a break.
You can measure your groups with a
ruler or caliper. Date and file your best target to see how your
shooting changes over a period of months or years.
Variation: Shoot from a rest or sandbags.
Receding Bullseyes
Teaches: accuracy, best shots at various ranges,
settling into a shooting flow.
Put a 1.5" target dot on a blank sheet of paper and put it as close as
the range will allow. It should be relatively easy to put your rounds
straight into the bullseye with no flyers. Fire a small number of
shots, then move the target back just a little. Keep moving the
target back, bit by bit, to the point where it's difficult to keep it
in the bullseye.
You may be surprised at how you "lock on" to the bullseye doing this,
to the point where you might shoot a good group at longer distances
than usual. You might also become more aware of the shooting factors
that degrade accuracy and make it difficult to shoot precisely at
longer ranges.
Over time, you may find you can move it further and further back--
it's a good way to see your own progress.
The outdoor variant is to progressively retreat from your
target.
Dummy Round Drill
Teaches: flinch control and followthrough during
live fire.
Principle: If the hammer falls on an empty chamber during slow-fire shooting,
your gun shouldn't budge--sights should stay aligned and on target,
eye still clearly focused on the front sight. If the gun does dip (or
jump), you're anticipating the recoil.
Procedure: Have someone else load a magazine
for you, mixing live rounds with snap caps, or for a revolver, leave
one or more chambers empty. When you fire the gun, concentrate on
keeping the gun steady, sights on target, no matter what happens.
When the snap cap comes up you'll be able to check your flinch. If
you're doing well, the gun won't budge. If you're not doing well,
keep up with the drill until you are. Keep your sights aligned and on
target while you release the trigger just enough to reengage the sear
(proper followthrough).
You can do this yourself by loading several magazines and mixing
them up, or loading a magazine with your eyes closed, or rotating the
cylinder with your eyes shut before closing it.
Variations: if you have a laser or optical
sight, it's even more difficult to keep the dot perfectly on the
target when the snap cap comes up, and easier to diagnose the
direction your flinch is taking you.
Also known as: cap-and-ball drill,
ball-and-dummy drill.
Sensory Deprivation
Teaches: shooting kinethestics, flinch control.
Most of the flinch comes from anticipating the noise and flash of
shooting, not the recoil itself. Anyone who has hammered a nail has
handled more recoil in their hand than a handgun usually imparts.
Shooting blind, with heavy hearing protection, can help show a shooter
that the recoil is not difficult, as well focusing attention on the
internal feeling of stance and shooting. This aids in visualization
and kinesthetic awareness.
You can cut down on noise by using ear plugs in tandem with muffs.
Line up the gun on target, and close your eyes before taking the shot.
Important: your partner is there to
watch your muzzle. She should keep a hand on your shoulder as long as
you are pointed safely. If any unsafe range condition arises, she
should take the hand off your shoulder.
Variations: learn to tell when your slide locks
back by the feel of the recoil alone. Your partner loads a magazine
with an unknown number of rounds, and after each shot, you report
whether you think the gun is empty or not. Believe it or not, you
will be able to tell pretty quickly. You can also do a blind
emergency reload when you feel the last round go. Your partner will
need to keep a close eye on you for safety.
Caveats: besides the obvious safety
considerations, you should probably only do this infrequently. In
general, you want to train yourself to shoot with your eyes open.
Correcting Blinking
Many shooters blink when they fire the gun. This is a flinch response
to the noise (or anticipated noise) of shooting. If a shooter blinks,
she can't be watching the sights through recoil for a good
follow-through, and has to reaquire her visual index on the sight
before firing the next shot. Brian Enos writes that this is a
fundamental barrier to advanced shooting; you can't have a fast
visual control of the gun if you aren't watching the sight through
recoil.
Here is a method (Sandy Wylie's) to correct blinking. You have to
relax the shooter to the point where she can keep relaxed and absorb
the visual and physical input from the gun. This method is the short
route; the real answer is a Zen-type awareness.
If you have a safe berm that you can get close to, get within 5 yards.
You want to shoot into the berm without a formal target to get
comfortable with the gun. If you shoot iron sights, try just
looking over the top of the gun instead of at the sights.
Wear plugs and muffs to reduce the noise problem. You might find it
of benefit to start with a .22 as well. To help in keeping relaxed,
try to keep your facial muscles relaxed. Monitor this closely. I
work on relaxing the muscles behind my ears for best relaxation and
awareness. Use a relaxed grip on the gun and eventually work with
weak and strong hand shooting.
Repeat until you are comfortable keeping your eyes open while looking
over the sights, firing downrange into the berm without a
specific target.
Once you can keep your eyes open for the complete cycle, start
watching the sights and monitoring yourself closely. If you are
blinking, go back to no target and looking over the gun. After you
have achieved the ability to keep your eyes open and relax, you will
find a tremendous increase in awareness.
Credits to: Sandy Wylie.
Correcting Trigger Slap
Shooters moving from slowfire to rapid fire often move their trigger
fingers all the way off the trigger between shots. This has a couple
of negative effects. First, it takes time. Second, it leads to
inaccuracy because the tendency is to slap the trigger on the second
and subsequent shots.
To fix this, follow through on your shots with your trigger finger.
Hold the trigger back all the way through recoil. When the sights are
again aligned slowly release the trigger until the link re-engages.
Then press to make the next shot.
This is a great dry fire drill. Once you know how far to release
the trigger of your gun, both your accuracy and your speed go
up.
Credits to: Lee Winter.
Shooting with Both Eyes Open
Many shooters close or squint their weak eye in order to focus on
the front sight--but doing so impairs peripheral vision and depth
perception while increasing eye fatigue. Your target-to-target
transitions will be much quicker if you are using both your eyes, and
you can be more relaxed, which will improve your shooting in many
ways.
The problem is usually that the dominant eye is not much stronger
than the weak eye, so instead of seeing one image strongly and the
other faintly, you see both strongly. When focused on the front
sight, you see a confusing array of rear sights and targets, with no
way to coordinate them.
It is impossible to sort out the doubled images every time you take
a shot. Instead, you need to train your eye to simply "know" what a
good sight picture is in spite of the extranneous elements. With a
few months' worth of work, you can shoot as well as anyone else, with
complete periperal awareness, by learning not to "see" any doubling of
the sight picture.
The following is a four-step recovery program for shooters with eye
squinching problems:
Within a few months, you won't ever think about it again--your eyes
will "know" the sight picture and the non-dominant image will seem
like a pheripheral, ghostly superposition. This is because
attention is what makes the image strong. The steps above will
allow you to shoot as if the conflicting image didn't exist--and the
more you ignore it, the more it doesn't exist. The result is
no visual confusion, just a strong sight picture, normal depth
perception, and the full range of your natural peripheral vision.
Firing from Low Ready
Teaches: sight acquisition and rapid first shot.
A gun should be held at low ready when danger is probable but the
threat is not immediate. It gives the shooter a complete field of
vision while enabling her to get the gun quickly on target and
fire should it become necessary.
The "foot-shooting" low ready often seen on television is less than
optimal. You want to keep the gun just low enough to see well over
it, and no lower. If holding persons at gunpoint, you want to be low
enough to see their hands. Finger should be off the trigger,
gun decocked (DA/SA semi-autos) or safety engaged (SA semi-autos)
A gun is held at combat ready after shots have been fired,
and the immediate threat neutralized. The gun is in condition zero
(cocked, no safety engaged), held in the same stance as low ready,
while the shooter assesses the target and then breaks tunnel vision to
perform a scan of the area. This should be practiced until
instinctive. Don't reholster the gun until you have assessed your
surroundings and are satisfied that no further threat exists.
Some people advise decocking DA/SA semi-autos when returning to
ready. It's up to you, but keep in mind that in a defensive situation
the gun might not be pointing in a safe direction.
Drill: Tape a 3x5 card to a target at 7 yards.
On a signal (if you have one available to you), raise the gun from low
ready and put a round in the card.
Many indoor ranges prohibit drawing from a holster, but if you are
familiar with the drawing track, you can simulate the last half of the
draw by starting with the gun near your chest instead of at low ready.
If you are not familiar with the drawing track, this drill won't help
you. Do more dry-fire drawing first.
Variations: Low-ready/combat-ready reloading
drill. Load three rounds into each of your magazines (on your belt or
on a table), and two rounds in the mag in your gun. The drill is
then:
Miscellaneous Accuracy and Slowfire Tricks
Try these out and keep the ones you like.
Credits to Julius Chang, and several rec.gun
posters whose suggestions I have remembered, but whose names I
unfortunately haven't.
Consecutive Pairs
Teaches: shot-to-shot followthrough, visual and
kinesthetic awareness.
Shooters moving from slow-fire to rapid-fire often have trouble
keeping the gun controlled, or keeping a precise sight picture. This
exercise is designed to smooth out your shot-to-shot transitions.
Drill:
To isolate the mechanics of followthrough, don't set up a target.
Instead, fire into the berm. This will prevent you from looking
forward past the gun to see your shot placement. As long as the shots
will be stopped by the backstop, we don't care where they go. If
shooting at an indoor range, set up a target large and close enough
that it will catch your fire easily.
Load a full magazine or cylinder, and with a good sight alignment
(sights aligned, but not aimed at anything in particular), carefully
fire one shot into the berm. Watch the front sight move through the
arc of recoil and return to alignment, and fire a quick followup shot.
Pay attention to how the gun feels while shooting, and make sure you
aren't shifting your grip or lifting your finger off the trigger
between shots. You are letting the gun show you how to fire it
smoothly, letting it rise and snap back into alignment until it does
this all by itself, as if it were spring-loaded. Watch the front
sight, and don't worry about hitting a target--you're just learning
how to make your shots feel connected and continuous.
If something feels wrong, freeze the gun and look at what you are
doing. Look especially at your grip, your trigger finger, and where
your visual focus is. Correct it, pay attention to it, and keep
shooting.
Repeat this drill for a half hour, and you will have a lot more
awareness of how the gun fires and returns to the target. Come back
to this drill whenever you find yourself having trouble with
followthrough mechanics.
Also see section on correcting trigger slap .
Indoor Variation:
If you're shooting in a range that limits rapid-fire to a shot per
second, you can still learn smooth, quick followthrough by using a
small target. Practice the above drill (with no target) until you are
shooting as fast as the range will allow, and then move to aimed pairs
on a 3.5 card at 25-40 feet. Keep shooting pairs, watching the front
sight, paying attention to followthrough, and keep your shots on the
card. Verifying the sight picture will probably keep you within the
slow-fire limits.
Accelerated Pairs
Teaches: Top-speed accurate fire.
Some shooters get hung up on the difference between double-taps
(a.k.a. "hammers"--two shots fired from one sight picture) and
accelerated pairs (two shots, each with a sight picture). This
exercise will help you sort out the difference and realize that
sighted pairs can be as fast as unsighted ones. The trick is in
teaching your eye to follow the front sight through recoil and make an
instantaneous verification of the sight picture.
You might be shooting more slowly than you need to. The gun is in
battery and back on the target very quickly, but many shooters add
time checking the sight picture. This exercise will help you realize
that your body can shoot the gun very quickly once your eye knows what
to see.
Drill:
First, be sure of your backstop. You may get some very high shots in
the first portion of the drill--make sure they will be caught.
With an IPSC target or other large cardboard target three feet from
the muzzle of the gun, fire a double-tap as quickly as you physically
can. Watch the target, not the sights, during both shots. You
should be able to see your rounds go through the cardboard. Don't
worry about the sight picture, just see how quickly you can manage the
trigger and still feel like the gun is under control. Repeat at least
10 times.
After shooting enough top-speed pairs to have a feeling of
consistency, slow down enough to bring your shots within a
hand's-breadth of each other on your target. Taping a 4x6 card to the
target might help. Tape the target after every pair.
When you are consistently firing target-focus double-taps within
four inches or so of each other, switch to watching the front sight.
Follow the sight through the arc of recoil, and visually verify the
sight picture as the second shot breaks. But don't let this slow the
shot. You will see that an aimed shot can be fired in the same amount
of time as an unaimed one. If you are visually following the front
sight through recoil, sight verification is instantaneous.
Diagnostics: If you have trouble seeing what the
sight does during recoil, you may be blinking.
Otherwise, your eye is seeing something during the recoil cycle
of the gun--pay attention to what it is. Some people see the top of
the gun or ejection port; some people watch the muzzle flash or the
flash in the chamber. Lower the gun a bit so you see a tall front
sight and just watch what the front sight does in recoil for a while.
Follow the sight while looking over the gun first, then learn
to follow it from a conventional sight picture.
Reactive Targets
Teaches: target transitions, accuracy.
Reactive targets are excellent training tools--they are area rather
than point targets, and they give immediate feedback on your accuracy.
For beginners, reactive targets quickly illustrate that hitting your
target carefully is more efficient than firing quick misses.
The drawback is that beginners who can't call their shots won't be
able to tell where their misses are going.
The solution is to control the distance the shooter is from the
targets. Shooting steel is unsafe under 10 yards because of
backsplatter, but most other reactive targets (bowling pins, balloons,
blocks of wood, tin cans, etc) can be brought into close range. The
targets should be just far enough that it takes a careful shot to hit
each one. Twelve feet is a good place to start.
The best drill for refining your draw involves an array of reactive
targets. Draw and shoot one target; drop to low ready, assess, scan,
reholster. Repeat until out of targets, then reset and reload.
Intensive repetition will ingrain a smooth, accurate presentation.
The same drill can be adapted for reloading and for two-shot
target-to-target transitions.
Reactive targets are also useful for working on the double-action
to single-action transition on DA/SA semi-autos. Many shooters get a
flyer in their first shot-pair, and don't know whether it's the first
or second shot that's missing. By setting up two close targets, you
can tell which is which, and work on smoothing it out.
Arrays of reactive targets are great for simple competitions. See
who can knock down five bowling pins the fastest, or who can draw and
hit a swinging potato soonest. Simple things for simple minds.
See my other page on reactive
targets.
Failure Drill
This is a defensive drill (also known as the Mozambique) to prepare for the possibility
that an aggressor will not be stopped by shots to the chest. This
could be for a variety of reasons, from body armor to narcotic
intoxication to just bad luck. In the turmoil of an armed conflict
the shooter will probably not be able to tell why. The best defensive
response is not to diagnose the failure but to quickly remedy it with
a followup shot to the head.
Drill:
The standard failure-to-stop drill is two shots to the chest; assess;
one shot to the head if needed.
It is important that the head shot be a response to the aggressor's
continued threat, not just a rehearsed triple-tap. Taking a moment
for assessment also serves the purpose of changing pace from two quick
center-of-mass shots to a very deliberate and accurate single shot to
stop.
Any shooting drill on a silouette or IPSC target can be adapted as
a failure drill. The most common method is to have an instructor
shout "FAILURE" after the shooter has fired two shots to the chest.
The shooter understands this means the chest shots were ineffective
and the aggressor is still a threat. If the instructor is silent, the
shots are presumed to have stopped the threat.
You can perform this drill on your own with two shot-timers (if
timers are available to you at a club). Start both timers on a
five-second random delay, and when either goes off, draw and fire two
shots to the center of a target. If the second timer goes off during
the assessment phase, perform the failure drill. If the timer beeps
overlap, or are so close that you are still shooting when the second
timer goes off, your first shots were effective. This is a good
method, because the pacing of the "failure" cue is unpredictable--it
might come immediately after your chest shots, or up to two seconds
later.
More elaborate setups are possible with reactive target arrays.
Thunder Ranch uses targets that can be configured to only fall from
certain shot placements, depending on the instructor's preference
(documentation here.)
These are excellent for drilling the failure response.
Other instructors use balloons with some colored dye as the
center-of-mass target. Depending on the color of the dye, the student
will have to perform a failure drill or not.
Variations: After shooting any kind of
defensive scenario, a shooter should go to combat ready, assess all
targets, and scan the area for further threats. This is also a prime
time to drill a failure to stop.
Reload Drills
Your primary method of practicing reloads should be dry-fire, but live-fire is the final litmus test
for your technique.
There are three kinds of reloads: speed, emergency, and tactical.
Your drills can be adapted to exercise either one, but ideally the
circumstances of your practice should be appropriate to the reload
(i.e. tactical reload should be from behind cover, emergency reload
after firing to slide lock, etc).
Plaxco Academy Drill:
Malfunction Drills
Your primary method for learning malfunction clearance procedures
should be dryfire, but dryfire practice lacks an essential element of
real-life malfunctions: they are unexpected. Live-fire drills should
present the shooter with the problem of (1) recognizing that a
malfunction has occured, and (2) clearing it.
Any shooting drill can become a malfunction drill with the
judicious introduction of ammunition that won't fire. The most common
method is the surprise snap-cap (as in the Farnam
Drill). Other methods involve making the gun or the ammunition
temporarily less reliable:
Be sure you perform the proper clearance procedure even if you
"know" that it's only a snap cap. Don't evaluate the
malfunction--just clear it. The point is to ingrain the
Tap-Rack-Ready (and Lock-Rip-Rack-Load-Rack-Ready) procedure as an
automatic response to a gun that won't fire. Keep your focus on the
target, not the gun.
Be sure to keep unreliable ammunition marked and separate from
practice and defense ammo.
Simple IPSC Drill
Teaches: draw, reload, smoothness and economy
of motion.
This drill is commonly used among IPSC shooters to get their draws
and reloads as efficient and smooth as possible.
With an IPSC target at seven yards, draw and fire one shot into the
A zone. Speed reload, and then fire one more shot.
Variations: Vary the distance to learn the
tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Close for hyperspeed, farther
away for precision.
Bill Drill (after Bill Wilson)
Teaches: draw, grip, rapid-fire, recoil
control, "adequate" rather than "perfect" sight picture.
With one IPSC target 7 yards away, start from surrender position,
draw, and fire 6 shots into the A zone. If any shots miss the A zone,
the time does not count, so the emphasis is on accuracy before speed.
Brian Enos puts master-level time for this drill as 2.0 seconds.
Variations: for a beginner, bring the
target as close as 8 feet, or start from low ready instead of
holstered. Shoot as fast as you can while keeping the shots in the A
zone and keeping a feeling of control over the gun. The point is to
get used to the feeling of controlled rapid fire, learning to watch
the sight, and familiarizing yourself with rapidfire recoil
characteristics. When drawing from the holster, it helps guarantee
that you acquire a good shooting grip; otherwise the gun will start to
feel out of control. If you are missing the A-zone, you're making
mistakes. SLOW DOWN and do it right.
This drill can be a real ammo burner.
Tueller Drill (after Sgt. Dennis Tueller)
Teaches: speed draw and fire under stress.
The Tueller drill is essentially an exercise, under stress, to measure
your draw and first shot in terms of distance rather than time. The
area that a charging assailant is able to cover in the time it takes
you to draw and fire gives you a good idea of what a "safe distance"
threshold is.
At the time of the original drill, Gunsite expected a 1.5 second par
time for drawing from concealment and firing two shots at a 3-yard
target. Tueller found that the average distance an assailant could
travel in 1.5 seconds, starting from standing still, was about 21
feet. Any closer, and the assailant might start grappling before the
shot can go off.
There have been many arrangements of the Tueller drill. The simplest
is to have the "assailant" start back-to-back with the shooter. At
the signal, the runner runs and the shooter draws and fires at a
3-yard IPSC target. At the sound of the shot, the runner stops and
the distance is measured. If the shot was good (A-zone), the distance
counts as the shooter's "score."
A more stressful variation is to have the assailant begin 21 feet away
from the shooter, parallel to the firing line. At the signal, the
assailant runs toward the shooter and tries to touch her (gently!) on
the back as he passes. This is a pass/fail variation.
With ASP Red Guns (plastic guns that are holsterable and drawable),
the drill can become a full-contact exercise, with the assailant
charging directly at the shooter.
Variations: A useful variation is to have the
shooter sidestep while drawing and firing. Moving to the assailant's
45 degree area throws the charger off balance as he/she attempts to
correct and gives the shooter significantly more time to draw and
fire. The shooter is also out of the line of attack in the probable
event that the shots don't stop instantaneously.
Other variations are documented here.
Wounded Shooter Drills
Wounded shooter drills are more than just learning to fire one-handed,
as is usually adequate for competition. In a defensive encounter,
there is a chance you might be hurt immediately and have to draw your
weapon while injured. You may not immediately know where incoming
fire is coming from. So good wounded shooter drills are a combination
of one-handed handling skills, use of cover, and threat assessment.
Essentially, you'd like to be able to do anything while simulating an
injury that you practice for two-handed.
WARNING: One-handed techniques involve
operating the gun in unfamiliar ways, sometimes with the gun held much
closer to the body than usual. Safety is a big concern. For that
reason I highly recommend:
Wounded shooter skills include: To exercise these skills in drills, simply choose a drill from the
list and perform it while simulating an injury. Simulated injuries
can be anything from a disabled arm to disability of everything
but your arm.
Stressfire
Shooting under stress is the litmus test for any training. You get
to see what your instinctive reactions really are, and whether the
smoothly choreographed moves you rehearse in practice work so well in
real life. Shooters can become clumsy, hands will shake, vision
closes, the mind can go blank. All these things are part and parcel
of defensive pistolcraft, and a well-conditioned shooter will still
function under these conditions.
Massad Ayoob recommends always shooting under some stress, even if
it's just making a bet with someone or penalizing yourself in some way
for not meeting your shooting goals. I personally think there is also
a place for relaxed, no-penalty experimentation, but still, nothing
can hone your skills as much as learning to exercise them under
stress.
These are just some notes on what some people have done to create
stress for shooters. Take what you like.
Bullseye National Match
The National Match is a simple objective bullseye course of 30 rounds
fired on three targets. Official NRA targets are readily available,
calibrated to score consistently at a various distances (50 ft, 25
yds, or 75 yds).
Remember that official NRA bullseye is shot strong hand only.
Match Stages:
Scoring:
Any bullet hole crossing a scoring line is awarded the higher
score. A perfect score on all three targets is 300 points.
Official rankings are issued only by the NRA through sanctioned
matches. Shooting an Expert target under your own timer won't qualify
you as a Bullseye Expert.
More info on the National Match here
Postscript NRA targets available here.
El Presidente and Variations
El Presidente was designed by Jeff Cooper as a rough benchmark of
handgun skills. It is probably the most widely known handgun standard
around.
Setup: three IPSC targets, spaced one yard
apart, 10 yards distant.
Starting Position: gun holstered, spare
magazine on belt, hands held above shoulders (surrender position),
facing away (180 degrees) from targets.
Drill: At the signal, turn and draw, firing
two shots into the A-zone of each target. Reload, and fire two more
shots into each target.
As originally specified, the drill only counts if all shots are in the
A-zone. A missed A-zone counts as a missed target. But when shot in
competition, all hits on the target usually count, with standard IPSC
comstock scoring.
Par times (for a clean run):
Time is measured from the start signal to the last shot fired.
The original API (American Pistol Institute) par time was 10 seconds.
* These times were calculated using a GM time of 4.5 seconds for a
clean run (limited), broken down according to USPSA hit factor
percentages and checked against the scores of 30 ranked shooters at
Hill Country Practical Pistol Club. D-class par is the empirical
average of 7 D-class shooters' scores.
Variations:
Vice Presidente: three IPSC targets, one yard apart at 7 yards. Start
facing targets, hands above shoulders. At signal, draw, fire two
shots into each target, reload, and fire two more shots into each
target.
Demi Presidente: three IPSC targets, one yard apart at 10 yards.
Start facing away from targets (180 degrees), hands above shoulders.
At signal, turn, draw, and fire two shots into the center of each
target. Reload, and then fire ONE shot into the "head" (A/B zone) of
each target. Par times are identical to standard El Prez.
The IDPA classifier
is basically a sequence of variations on El Presidente
incorporating cover and movement. Likewise the
Central Texas Standards.
Farnam Drill (after John Farnam)
Setup: Target is an 8.5 x 11" sheet of paper
at 8 meters. Shooter begins with gun in the holster (concealed),
retention strap engaged if holster is so equipped.
Semi-auto: the gun has a round chambered, with four rounds and a dummy
round in the magazine. The dummy round may not be the first or last
round in the magazine, and the shooter is not to know which round is
the dummy. One magazine on the belt contains two live rounds.
Revolver: cylinder loaded to capacity, speedloader on the belt.
Drill: from interview position (hands at
sides, not touching gun), draw and fire into the target. When the
dummy round comes up, clear it with tap-rack. Continue firing until
you run dry, then speed load and fire the last two shots. Revolvers
just draw, shoot all rounds, reload, and then shoot two more.
All shots must hit the target to count, and all procedures
(draw, malfunction clearance, reload) must be done correctly. Any miss
or any failure to perform the correct procedure disqualifies you.
Par times:
Dry Fire
This section is under development.
Drills and Exercises
Requires: indoor range.
Requires: best with shooting partner, can be done
alone.
Requires: a partner and a backstop that will stop
your fire even if you significantly miss your target.
Repeat #1 and #2 until you are out of magazines. Tape up your target
after each drill so you are actively monitoring your accuracy.
Requires: High (or close) backstop.
Requires: outdoor range.
See also the simple IPSC drill, and the reload
variation of the low ready drill.
Requires: three people, or two people and a timer.
These should be practiced both strong-hand and weak-hand only.
Standards
Points Percentage Ranking Less than 255 pts Below 85% Marksman 255-269 pts 85%-89.99% Sharpshooter 270-284 pts 90%-94.99% Expert 285-290 pts 95%-96.99% Master 291 & up 97% & up High Master
D Class
15 seconds*
C Class
11.25 seconds
B Class
7.5 seconds
A Class
6.0 seconds
Master Class
5.3 seconds
Grandmaster
4.75 seconds
