Being able to hit your targets is one of the most important first steps in learning to shoot well. A great drill that I’ve done during almost every practice session is to either start or finish with group shooting.I learned a lot from this short bit of advice, and I took it to my "Introduction to USPSA" class last weekend.
1.) Shooting groups is a slow-fire drill. You’re trying to hit the target — not go fast.
2.) You should shoot groups at lots of different distances. I suggest starting at 5 yards and moving out to 25. At 5 yards, you’re looking for accuracy. At 25 yards, you’re looking to keep all of your bullet holes in a space about the size of the palm of your hand.
3.) Trigger control is as important as sight alignment. To make sure that you’re squeezing the trigger and not jerking, dry fire a few rounds before live fire and after. While dry firing, the gun should stay perfectly still during the entire trigger pull.
The first drill wasn't just the ordinary "shoot one shot at the target" that I've been using for the past few years; instead, I outlined the Upper A-zone area of the target and challenged the four class members to actually HIT their (very small) .... 2" x 4" .... aiming point.
Two of the four shooters managed it the first pass; the other two needed a couple of tries before the cut the perf of the Upper A-zone on a "Metric" target at five yards.
This gave me a simple way to evaluate the accuracy of my students; I wanted to encourage them to shoot for ACCURACY first, which doesn't always happen when the class is focused on shooting FAST!
(They usually have preconceptions about IPSC competition, and it's difficult to change their mindset from FAST to ACCURATE.)
Then .. after I got them focused on actually hitting the target, I immediately switched them to shooting FAST.
The second drill was to shoot five shots as quickly as they could. And I put an IPSC ("Metric") target in front of them ... but I didn't require that they actually shoot at the target. They just assumed that was The Thing To Do. Kewl!
WTF?
It may or may not have been obvious to you, from the previous description, but what I was trying to do was to counter the previous misconceptions of my students in last weekend's Introduction to USPSA class. Many of my students have actually visited the range at ARPC (Albany Rifle and Pistol Club; Albany, Oregon) and in their observation they have got the impression that the thing to do is to shoot just as fast as you can.
Well ... yes. But they have usually missed the perception that the people who shoot fast, and accurately, have a lot more experience. The Very Good Shooters have learned how to shoot accurately, and eventually learned how to do so 'quickly'. New shooters think it looks easy, and try to do what they have seen. The thing to do, is to dissuade them from the "Spray And Pray" school of IPSC shooting, and convince them that they need to learn how to shoot accurately, all the time.
The speed? That will come to them. Later.
Much later.
So what we did was to encourage them to shoot as fast as they could, at a target, consistent with actually hitting the damn target! Fortunately, I didn't have any "Goofy Guys" in the class, so they all were more focused on hitting the brown-boards rather than looking good on the timer. (I DID run the timer .. but I didn't tell them what their times were.)
The good news: they all shot safely!
The bad news: they were discouraged when my volunteer "Demonstrator" (Michael M.) made them all look like grandmothers.
The VERY good news was .. the demonstrator was a 'graduate' of the previous month's class, who had shot exactly ONE match! This showed the class members that a Quantum Leap in competence was within their grasp, and the ability to shoot much better than they did during the class was merely a matter of experience.
That's important in teaching an Introductory class.
I've given up trying to be my own "Demonstrator". I can shoot better, faster, more accurately than most of my students ... and I am a mediocre shooter, at best. I don't want to discourage my students; it's a positive experience when they see one "new shooter" with a minimum of experience, who has learned so much from a single match that he ... well, he doesn't actually make them look bad, but he shows them how quickly they will learn from experience.
The "Final Exam", the last half-hour of the class, is always when I challenge the students to shoot the "El Presidente" stage. I cheat a bit ... I don't tell them that it's a Virginia Count stage. But nobody takes an extra shot, because they already know that "stage time" is important.
So it's not a surprise when my Demonstrator, with one match under his belt, does so much better than ANY of my class members do on the El Presidente Stage.
He's the hero of the day. He knows what it's like, and he has the experience (one match!) which makes all the difference in the world.
All they have to do, they see, is to get "One Match" under their belt, and they will be GOLDEN!
Well, they will be a helluva lot better shooters than they were when the walked onto the range this weekend.
That is; if they don't DQ, because the sad truth is that half of the New Shooters will DQ on their first match.
Either they can't remember to keep their finger off the trigger when reloading (or moving), or they break the 180.
But for those who can survive the embarrassment of the Evil DQ, they usually come back again and shoot safely on subsequent matches.
Which is why I don't shoot a lot of IPSC matches any more; because frankly, I just don't have the heart to DQ new shooters.
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