Shooting faster, and better

golfnutrlv

New member
Hello everyone,

Do you have any tips, tricks, etc to help me learn to shoot better at higher speed?

The situation I am after is a tactical fun shoot, similar to IDPA, or USPSA. I love running these tactical shoots for training and fun, but my accuracy suffers unless I am very slow and deliberate, and if I do that, my time suffers.

I am not looking to become Todd Jarett by any means, I wuld just like to do a better and rank a little higher up the list. I would say that the biggest thing I need work on is trigger pull, but I am open to other suggestions.

Thanks all!
 
Video shooting games can help with hand eye co-ordination as well as target acquisition and peripheral vision as you learn to seek out the target earlier which in your case allows you to mentally prepare for the next target as soon as you plink the last.
In unpopulated areas I like to tack gobs of paper targets to trees and "run the course" with a .22. Then run it backwards etc.
But I am not a very good/fast shooter. I settled on the slow=fast theory to offset my inadequacies... :o
Brent
 
Put a laser on your gun and dry-fire at home using your laser. This will help you to learn to point and shoot the gun. Make sure you don't "jerk" the trigger, which the laser will show if you are.

Stay smooth and concentrate on smooth. "Fast is smooth, smooth is fast."

Biker
 
"How do I shoot faster" is probably the most commonly asked question in action shooting. A lot of people say "practice", which is good advice but only if you know what to practice. A more complete answer would include an examination of what techniques will help you shoot faster.

1. The first item that will help you shoot faster is to develop your recoil control skills, which are primarily a function of your grip and stance. For stance, all of the top competitive pros use the modified isosceles stance, which keeps your knees soft (bent) and your body "forward" so you're "on the gun". The second component of recoil control is your grip. Todd Jarrett likes to say "grip the gun 20% tighter", a technique which (I think) Mas Ayoob refers as the "crush grip". To establish your optimum grip pressure, hold the gun in your firing grip and grip the pistol until the front sight starts to bounce and shake from your grip pressure, then relax your grip until the sight stops bouncing rapidly - that's your "ideal" grip pressure for rapid shooting. The 3rd aspect of recoil control is strength - holding the gun that tight takes a considerable amount of grip strength, so I recommend looking into training exercises for your upper body/forearms.

2. The second aspect of "shooting faster" is trigger control. Your average semi-auto cycles in something like 0.06 seconds, which means that the gun is always waiting on you. When you're shooting fast, you want your trigger finger to come all the way off the trigger of the gun, and then re-engage the trigger, especially if you're using a revolver or striker-fired pistol. Jerry Miculek keeps the return springs in his revolver at an "unusually" high weight, as he wants his finger to come just off the trigger in between shots. Some guys feel like you should "ride the reset" on the trigger, which means let just enough off for the gun to reset and keep constant contact with the trigger. The problem with riding the reset is that you're depending on an extremely fine muscle skill to know when that trigger's reset, and for speed it's much easier to just come off the trigger in between shots.

3. The third aspect of effective speed shooting is the draw. Back to quoting Todd Jarrett: "If you blow the draw, you blog the string". So true. Practice your draw at home, using a "progressive draw drill". That will allow you to up your speed on the draw in a controlled environment.

There are a lot more tips and tricks to shooting fast and accurate, however these three fundamentals never get old, and are always areas in which you can go faster.
 
Trigger control
Follow-through
Calling the shot
Prepping the trigger
Seeing the sight lift
Mastering grip and stance

Once you have all that down pat, you can teach the rest of us!!
 
Get cheap, mid-sized targets (IPSC "A" zone size preferably), then practice firing as quick as you can while NOT missing. You will notice, there is a speed where you lose the ability to hit the A zone (too fast for your current ability). Practice this drill at multiple distances to find how perfect your sight picture needs to be for different distances.
At a distance of 5yds or less, you can easily hit an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper without even using the sights, if you practice a little and have a consistent grip and stance.

Many of the above mentioned tips are also very important.
 
One very important thing here, the infamous "take-your-time-in-a-hurry."

Make sure you take enough time to find your sights from the draw before you shoot. At the action shoots I've seen, and even just shooting in general for some people, they just point and shoot without taking time to properly line up the gun first. As you can imagine, their shots are all over the place. You want to make sure you line up the first shot and then roll from there. Once you have the gun in proper grip/pointing, you'll have a much better chance.

Most action shoots penalize you for every non-center hit, and really hit you for misses. You'll score much better by slowing down a bit and making good/decent hits than trying to blaze through as quick as possible.

Develop good recoil management, learn to point shoot, and always be aware of your front sight to start.
 
NRAhab nailed it. Nice post, Ahab.

It is amazing to me, the number of experienced shooters who believe they have good trigger control, but who either don't understand what is meant by that, or simply cannot control the trigger when the action speeds up.

pax
 
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