Jake Di Vita

If I were you, I'd work on keeping good tension and learn how to stop the gun effectively with that tension. "Relaxed" has little to no place in any athletic movement.

That's like asking why would you use a long range rifle when you can just walk up to someone and club them with a bat.

sub 2.5 with 6 alphas is pretty decent.

Nevermind....I should just go on with my SOP of ignoring threads like these.

This. Tomato juice is pretty much worthless for skunk smell. Fortunately my dog was so miserable the time he got sprayed, the next time he smelled a skunk outside he went running the opposite way. Poor bastard took it right in the face the first time.

More dry fire before you live fire to make sure your hands get warmed up and ready for action, and more starting live fire practice at match speed. No group shooting to warm up, that goes completely against what we are trying to achieve. You'll never have the opportunity to do that in a match.

My standard make ready routine: Optic is on before the make ready Draw to first target plus first transition Adjust dot brightness if needed Perhaps a 2nd draw to first target if I didn't like the first one Load One last Sight picture Holster Turn camera on if I'm filming the run Visualize (if I mess something up in my visualization, I'll restart it) A couple dry grips Nod The time all that takes varies on the stage. Sometimes it's shorter, sometimes it's longer. I've only had maybe one RO say something to me in 10-15 years and that didn't go over very well. To be bluntly honest, I don't care if my make ready routine annoys anyone. Until it is against the rules that is what I'm going to do. I'm not trying to take a lot of time or annoy someone, I'm trying to set myself up for the best performance I can muster. I also know for certain I am no where near the slowest out there and it doesn't bother me when someone takes more time than I do.

I agree, but one thing I'd like to add on this: The purpose of why I take my time during make ready isn't because the stage isn't well dissected or understood. It is the very last moment I have to deeply visualize what I am about to do. I've tested it enough to know for a fact my scores are better when I visualize one last time after make ready than if I don't.

Well a possible explanation is that shooters of lower classification are taking longer during make ready than they were 7-10ish years ago when most of my experience from the supersquad is (although I didn't see that at any matches I shot this year). Another possible explanation is the particular stages you may be working aren't considered super complex by those guys. I do completely agree that what happens between make ready and if clear is not what slows a match down. And likewise, giving squads 3 minutes instead of 5 for a walk through is a terrible idea in my opinion for the same reason. Stage reset is almost always going to be the largest chunk of time in a match. You only need one backlogged stage to screw an entire match up. I remember walking up to a stage at a very big match years ago and having 4 goddamn squads in front of mine. Spent almost 5 hours on that bay.

In my experience, the best shooters in the world don't take any more time than any other serious shooter, and they are far less likely to be unprepared when it is their turn. The supersquad runs through a stage smooth like buttah. From my experience of shooting with them on more occasions than I can remember and speaking with them, I disagree. I've also RO'd major matches and seen a noticeable difference in time. Good shooters don't take their time during make ready because they are unprepared, that could be true with lower skilled shooters, but certainly not with the supersquad. This is especially true on more complex stages. Sure they might not take any more time than joe blow on el prez, but get them on a field course with movers and tricky sequencing and you'll see a gargantuan difference in time taken.

I bet you could graph time taken during make ready against match performance and you'd get some pretty telling results. There's a reason that the best shooters in the world take their time here. I don't take anywhere near a minute, but I'm certainly not going to be rushed by some impatient range officer that thinks I'm taking too much time. The more complex the stage is, the more time I'm going to take during make ready. There are less skilled shooters that take longer to shoot the stage than I do to prep it in my head and shoot it, should we start rushing them as well? We should also berate people who have targets pulled for the RM to double check, since that takes more than a minute and we can't have people holding the match up.

I understand, the whole natural talent thing is just a real hot button with me. Sorry that I kind of jumped on your back. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't recommend doing what I did, I was just trying to illustrate my point. Yes I made a large amount of progress in those 9 months but it was at great cost to other areas of my life. If you can consistently do an hour a day 6 days a week, it won't take 15 years. If you've been doing that for awhile now (6 months at least) and still aren't happy with your progress, it might be time to switch things up a little bit and see if that won't help you break through the plateau. I know with me I would see plateaus in my training, then after a little while all of a sudden something would click and I'd jump 3 or 4 steps forward. I think that you can get really damn good at an hour a day..

Not sure if you were asking me or not but I'll throw my two cents in. I did have Steve's book many years ago, but Ben's didn't exist before I got the G. I picked up copies of Ben's stuff in the last year or two and I think he's done a phenomenal job. People that follow the stuff he's put out there will get better. No doubt about it. It turns out that for me I don't react great to real regimented structure as far as practice programming goes. The way I decide what to practice usually depends on a few things. The first thing is anything I may have ran into at a match that gave me trouble. If I run into a shooting position and have to take extra shots because I couldn't get stable, you can bet I'll be practicing that same exact position in dry fire at home. Ditto goes for if I throw a mike or no shoot at a match, I'll throw some dry fire of the same scenario in there. The second thing that factors into my decision is how dry-fire has been going. If I notice I'm having real bad issues with something as I start practicing, I'm usually going to just drill away at that thing maybe to the exclusion of everything else if I'm not happy with how progress is going. The third thing is I try to set a overarching yearly goal that I put work into every session. This year that goal is transitions to steel. I'm just too damn slow and inconsistent there so I work on it daily. The last thing is I like to devote like 10 minutes a day to just random dry fire. I'll walk or run through my dry fire area or even the rest of the house and just use anything that jumps out at me as a target. I'll throw in random draws, reloads, and start positions. I've done a lot on the stairs. It'll be completely random and it's fun, but I think it's a way to give some exposure to stuff that I wouldn't get with just regular segmented practice. When we talk about training smarter and getting more bang for the buck, with me that ended up meaning I need to train at very high speed. This is risky as bad habits have a tendency to creep in doing this. I think I'm uniquely suited for this because of the amount of time I've spent training my eyes to absorb information. I coached crossfit for more than 10 years, that was a lot of 1 on 1 / small groups and 5 years in a gym setting (yes I know people hate crossfit, please God let this not turn into that circlejerk). I take a lot of pride in my ability to coach human movement, I wasn't one of those coaches who would say "there's the workout" and then sit down and stare at my phone. When I would coach a class of 20 people by myself at 530 in the morning I would have to be able to see tiny faults out of the corner of my eye from across the room and be able to see them clearly enough that I can shout an actionable cue immediately. After doing this for thousands of hours and developing a pretty good ability to direct attention, there just isn't a ton that slips by me anymore and I think this is what allows me to train really fast all the time and still be able to notice and address the mistakes I'm making. As far as the amount of work I'll do on specific skills, I usually just kinda go til it feels like I'm ready to move on. It's super subjective, but like I said, I don't do real well with ordered programming. I hardly even use a timer anymore. I don't need par times much because I'm always trying to be right on that edge. That ended up a lot more than two cents lol. These are my absolute favorite kinds of stories, where years of struggle are spent chasing a goal. Its especially cool when considering the level of skills you've developed after all that work (I like the vid where you catch the mag!) Thanks for showing shooters like me (who are still way back on the skills curve) that it can be done. Thank you, that means a lot. It absolutely can be done, just keep workin.

fair enough. for sure talent and no work will not get you very far. It is clear from your posts that you put alot of thought and effort into your shooting and have done so for years, and I appreciate your willingness to share what you have learned. At the same time I can totally sympathize with nimitz because I've watched people who seemed to be working less make more progress than me. I can only conclude that I was not working smart enough at that time. I can agree with that and I appreciate it. Working smart is absolutely important, it's also hard to tell just how much work someone is putting in to something. Compared to most GM's, I haven't put a fraction of the live fire work in that they have, but I've probably dry fired orders of magnitude more which is the only reason I can even hang anywhere close.

If I came into this at a M or GM level, I might agree with you, but I didn't. I sucked as a shooter for many years and I'm sure some people would say I still do. Trust me, it did NOT come naturally or easily. It's not like you need world class reactions or vision to become a GM. Not even close really. In this particular endeavor of action pistol shooting, work matters a whole hell of a lot more than anything else. In most cases in this sport, the guy that puts more time in (whether daily or over the course of years) will outperform the other guy. Sure, talent exists but no amount of talent can replace effort and I'm not willing to say talent has that large of a role in how well I can shoot a pistol. I've seen too many talented people fail miserably and I've seen too many shooters who had no talent but worked their balls off and got good.

No offense to you and Moto but given how "little" actual shooting training you do relative to what I do, and how much better both of your are than me, that's obviously natural talent whether you're comfortable admitting it or not. In the past I could have probably explained away the difference to just not knowing what I was doing WRT training correctly but I don't have that excuse anymore. And don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying you guys aren't working hard, but so am I and I don't come close to matching your results ... Considering your uspsa number and the first match you shot being in 2012, I'd be comfortable saying I have dry fired 10x as much as you have without a sweat, and that's being conservative because it's likely a lot more than that. There was a span of 9 months where I dry fired for 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entirety of the 9 months. Not a single day off. And this was all done before you even touched a gun in uspsa competition. My hands have bled from dry firing more than once, have yours? I'd be surprised if your entire life of dry fire matched what I did in less than a year, and I've been dry firing for over 15 years now. So no, it isn't obviously natural talent and my comfort has nothing to do with it. There was nothing natural about me being able to shoot. There was a metric f--- ton of work with most of it being done after midnight or before 7 am when most sane people are sleeping. I didn't want to go here but saying my ability is due to natural talent is offensive to someone who has worked as hard as I have and I'm not willing to take it. You don't come close to matching my results because you haven't come close to matching my work.

Remember that ultimately the only thing that matters for accuracy is where the gun is pointed when the bullet leaves the barrel. It doesn't matter how you pull the trigger if you can keep the gun still while doing it until the bullet is out of the barrel. The problem in your life fire is more than likely present in your dry fire, you just have to be disciplined and aware enough to see it.

I started out in C class and spent about 2 years in B class. I don't have much natural talent either. I've also probably shot a grand total of 60,000 - 75,000 rounds over the course of 15 years with the majority of them being in a 2 or 3 year span. I think the most I ever shot in a year was only something like 15,000. I shot about 5,000 rounds last year and every one of them was in a match. I have however done a rather obscene amount of dry fire. It'd be nice to get 8 hours a night, but I have too much crap I need to work on to be able to sleep that long.

I'm working or training while most people are sleeping, spending time with friends, or relaxing.

I always got more out of Brian's book when I viewed the term "relaxed" from only a mental perspective. Being relaxed physically just doesn't work for me in theory or practice. That being said, it's not surprising to see innovations as our collective knowledge, experience, and general access to information improves. We've learned a lot in the 25 years since Brian published his book (which I still love by the way).

That's absolutely true, but I intentionally use climbing to train for grip strength so I end up campusing up a lot of easier overhanging bouldering routes which is obviously more grip and strength intensive than skill. I'm also a good bit heavier than the average climber so there is that added stress to my hands. Even if you climb with great skill, the positions your hands are put in by the different types of holds does something for your grip that I don't know if you can really attain easily elsewhere. Ultimately there aren't alot of hands free rests so even though you aren't really trying to squeeze hard per se, the sheer stamina that is gained just makes the act of gripping the gun well and consistently a lot less challenging for me.

Kind of. Everyone starts somewhere man. I've coached a hell of a lot of people that started in a really bad place. I don't care how weak or out of shape someone is, I just care that they want to be better and will put in the work to get there. I'll never snicker at an out of shape dude trying to change his life that wants to give rock climbing a try. My primary climbing partner is 6'5 and about 260 pounds. No it is not fun belaying for him being 5'8 and 190. I don't see anyone his size on the wall, but I wish there were more people his size there.

I've posted this before (maybe even earlier in this thread now that I think about it). Rock climbing once or twice a week will strengthen your hands and fingers in ways you didn't know were possible. I was closing the 2.5 CoC with both hands and my first time climbing left my hands and forearms trashed in a way I have never experienced otherwise. It also happens to be a hell of a lot of fun.

that sounds reasonable, and obviously it is working for you. How do you judge success in that scenario? What do you do if the excercise does not result in success? Well match pace is usually a pretty comfortable pace for me so I'm rarely throwing shots and failing the drill. At 50 yards I'm looking for 1 C at the worst somewhere under 3 sec.If I do fail to score that though, it doesn't shake my confidence or anything. I'm not one of those guys who feels you have to end your practice on a good run. I rarely have any disasters there though. I'll usually run it a few times and just call it good.

I like the idea of finishing a practice session with 25-50 yard (depending on ability) bill drills at match pace instead of pure group shooting. It will accomplish most of the same things and still be very relevant to match day skills.