Am I damaging my technique or learning a new skill?

[Pond James Pond]

Life is manic. I'm living to work these days and I barely ever have a minute to myself.

The upshot of this is that I have precious little time to go shooting.
My shooting is either practice time or competitions.

And right now, I'm having to choose. Since I have to shoot a certain number of competitions to stay in the IPSC league, competitions easily trump regular range time.

And here is the problem. This year, the only practice I've had has been in the context of those competitions meaning that my shooting is always done under pressure.

When I do shoot at my own pace, I am pretty accurate with my handgun, using the standard sight picture.

In competitions it seems I am, whilst under the pressure of the timer and onlooking peers, resorting to point shooting. I am looking at the target, not my FS and my gun, although raised, is not at eye level.

That said, I am not missing and am often getting double alphas. Only on longer shots do I aim with the sights.

I berate myself after every stage, but then do the same thing as soon as the timer beeped the start of my next stage and the need to speed comes into play.

So.... am I undermining my shooting technique with this, or am I honing a useful skill in making accurate hits with point shooting?

Thoughts?

 

[BillM]

If you are getting 90-95% of the available points on a stage, carry on with what you are doing. Less than 90%? Slow down a bit. Enos had some advise on short/medium/long
range sight focus in "Beyond Fundamentals".

 

[Wag]

It's quite valuable to go back and work the fundamentals in a slow, deliberate way. Do it when you can but if you can't, I wouldn't worry about it too terribly much at this point.

--Wag--