Jake Di Vita

What I'm guessing he's saying is if you cannot do this your accuracy is going to cost you a hefty sum of points on match day. This remains true at all skill levels. You likely should bias a good portion of your training to develop your accuracy until you can shoot at least a 4 inch or better group offhand at 25.

I can see it not mattering when shooting steel challenge from the low ready. You're already lined up on your first target, can it see peripherally, and your focal point is already close to the sights. I think it's likely a difference would be noticed if you were starting from the holster and looking at the gun. It's not something that concerns me in uspsa since ultimately it's the same for everyone. I'll start looking at the target if the option is available.

Sure. Even regular group shooting with one hand can be very valuable. Bill drills at various distance are also a solid option.

Great. Just don't start with burpees lol. Start slow. Do as much pain free movement throughout the day as possible and make reclaiming full range of motion the priority. Make sure you can do basic pushups pain free before you even attempt a burpee. How has your dryfire been going? Feel like a pro with the good arm?

Any updates?

It should be close, but it won't be a straight line from barrel to elbow. With a two handed grip the relationship between the gun and your dominant hand/arm will not exactly resemble the image you linked. There will be a slight angle between the gun and the bones of your forearm in a 2 handed grip. You should try to minimize the angle as much as is realistically possible, but don't worry about it too much.

If it's very difficult to take a break, might as well get back to work.

Ultimately, it really depends on what your goals are. If you compete as a hobby, then you for sure should take breaks whenever you feel like it. If you're doing it primarily for fun, it makes sense to take a break when it isn't fun. If you're taking it seriously, I don't think an off season from all training is a good thing. When you're training to become great at something I like the analogy of the endeavor being like moving a gigantic pile of dirt. Some days you'll feel like you're using a shovel, some days you'll feel like you're using a spoon. That doesn't matter. The important thing is that you move a little dirt every single day. This is especially true on the days you don't want to do it. I feel like an off season from competition makes sense because it provides you an opportunity to really push your limits in practice for an extended period of time. A lot of ground can be gained in that scenario.

I'm intrigued by the test. I've heard it's challenging but don't know what it entails. I'd like to give it a try sometime.

Why don't you like rotating the whole arm from the shoulder? I have found this to be more consistent than rotating from the elbow for me (I think there are fewer variables with this method) and it doesn't appear to be any slower at all. I get a dry grip, set the angle of my elbow, then rotate my arm as a unit.

I'm not getting defensive at all. I'm asking you direct questions. This might be true if the shooter is standing rigidly straight up. If the shooter has shifted their center of gravity forward and down and maintains good body tension they are not pushed around at all. Having relaxed arms doesn't just magically dissipate energy into thin air. There's more to it than that. When we are talking about how the body generates stability there are general rules that apply. I won't get into all of them at the moment as it would make for a very long post, but when you execute these rules you get something that looks like good posture. IE, the hips and spine are neutral, and the spine's position is supported by the musculature of the core. Actively stabilizing your spine by contracting the muscles that make up the core is a general rule for all humans. This is a large part of the fundamental function of these muscles. If we could teach everyone in the world to squeeze their belly while maintaining a neutral spine during all activity, back injuries would instantly plummet. There is no debate that this is the safest position for the spine to occupy both unloaded and under load. It just so happens that the safest position for the body to occupy is also the strongest position the body can occupy. My default posture is contracting those muscles at roughly 10% of max. If I am awake, I keep my belly just a little tight. If I'm weightlifting I'm squeezing that musculature as tight as possible for maximum stabilization. Shooting is somewhere between the two, which is where I came up with 50%. 50% isn't a hard rule, it's a reflection of being tighter than I would be if we were talking having a beer and less tight than I would be with a difficult lift. I do not accept the premise of this statement. You can't just say this without explaining what's physically going on behind it. How is the speed the recoil is absorbed effected by being relaxed or by being tense? The speed of the impulse from recoil is what it is regardless of what you do. It doesn't even make sense from a logic perspective that relaxing would cause you to drive the gun back to the target quicker. If you're driving the gun anywhere you are very explicitly not relaxing. Most people I know that talk about being relaxed believe you should just let the gun recoil and come back on it's own accord. I don't get how you can mentally justify driving the gun to target without contracting musculature to do it. I'm not trying to absorb recoil. I'm trying to create the best conditions I can to efficiently transfer that energy from the gun into the ground. Those conditions look like a grip as high on the gun as possible to minimize rotational leverage of the gun, tight arms to both bolster the strength of the grip and allow for effective transmission of energy, a tight core for primary stabilization of the shoulders and efficient transmission of energy from the arms to the legs, and a slight forward lean to create a more efficient line for the energy to travel from my arms to my legs and prevent the energy from going straight out the back of my shoulders which would push me around as you suggested earlier.

Can you actually refute the mechanics of what I said beyond never hearing other shooters talk about it? I told you why I disagree and briefly explained the mechanics behind it. Can you explain why you think it is better to relax from a bio mechanical perspective? What do you think is physically going on that makes your method more effective than what I'm saying? What exactly is your stance trying to achieve and how did you set your body up to achieve it? These are important questions that you should be able to answer conclusively. If you cannot, I highly suggest you take some time to have a deeper look into what you're doing and why. It needs to be more than "when I started incorporating a conscious relaxation into my shooting, everything improved". I have a rule that I use as a coach. If I can't explain to someone why they should do what I tell them to do, I should not be telling anyone to do it. You've studied great shooters....ok.....If that's how you want to approach this, I've been a gm and have studied great shooters for more than a decade before you joined USPSA. I didn't come to this conclusion lightly. 20 years of athletics, research, teaching, experimenting, and shooting has led me to what I use now and I'm perfectly willing to defend my methodology in depth to anyone. If you want to tell me I'm wrong that's fine, I'm perfectly open to being wrong, but you're gonna have to make a good case for it.

I don't agree at all. The reason I disagree is that I think a well developed stance should be geared towards directing as much of the energy from recoil into the ground at possible. Energy does not move through relaxed musculature nearly as well as it moves through tensed musculature. Forearms do a lot to apply pressure directly on the gun, but we also need upper arm and shoulder tension to keep consistent arm position. Behind that shoulder tension, we also use the muscles of our hips and torso to stabilize our bodies and further stabilize the position of the gun. This doesn't work if your muscles are relaxed. If I had to put a number to it, I'm contracting the majority of my body at about 50% of maximum for the entire duration that I'm shooting a stage.

The biggest issue for me is that the way the dyno measures grip strength is extremely dissimilar from how I apply force on the gun. The number the dyno reads is only loosely comparable to my grip pressure. I think it's just fine for getting a basic outline of general grip strength, but there are many different ways to diagnose a shooter as being too weak. I personally don't find it to be useful information because I gather that information from other sources. If that's someone's only way of figuring out they're weak then it's definitely more valuable. In my own training I don't define a specific strength target, I just try to get a little stronger every day and that's generally what I recommend to other shooters. My perspective is you are using the dyno as a pass/fail for someone who may need to get stronger. I just tell everyone they should train to be stronger regardless of what the dyno says. Ultimately we're going in the same direction, I'm just giving more of a blanket directive. I don't like to give grip pressure advice defined to a specific amount. What I generally tell people is to squeeze as hard as they can without allowing the gun to shake. This has the benefit of being a moving goal post that will apply to someone with 50kg grip pressure or 150kg grip pressure, and if they dryfire with this method consistently it will act as a stimulus to make them stronger over time. Obviously this is only half of the solution of an effective grip, but I appreciate where you're coming from as far as ensuring that someone can apply at least x amount of force. Thanks. Ultimately it's the difference between measuring total contractile potential and measuring productive application of force. Technique is what bridges that gap, and it's what we can't measure on the dyno.

Just double the kilos then add 10% to get pounds. 50kg X 2 = 100 +10% = 110 pounds. Easy to do in your head for pretty much anyone. The dyno is a cool tool, but it can't measure how I actually apply force to the gun so I doubt it's ultimate usefulness. It would be cool to get a 2011 frame set up with pressure sensors all over the frame to record the actual pressure on the gun from various points of the grip. Could probably run some real interesting experiments with that amount of data.

Absolutely, I agree. Not only high, but inward as well. Only inward pressure on the grip is not applying the force towards the barrel axis. The difference is the internal rotation needs to be done at the height of the thumbs to try and get the line of force as close to going through the very center of the barrel as possible. When you say skeletal leverage, I think what you're really trying to say is body position. The problem is you need muscle tension to achieve this position. I don't see the point in "relaxing" once you've gotten your body into the ideal position. First of all, if you relaxed you would instantly lose the position. Second of all, that's the best possible place to apply force. Third, you have to apply force to generate friction and more friction is a good thing. The problem is it is hard to apply that force consistently. That doesn't mean you stop and go to relax mode, it means there is more training to be done to make applying large amounts of force into the gun from the ideal position extremely consistent. It can be done. I have a piece of general advice I give to people that I teach....if you're comfortable, it's probably at the least less than ideal. You can become a really good shooter by operating with a relaxed methodology. I firmly believe it has a lower ceiling than a more active approach.

Ok. What is the goal of this position? Where on the gun are you applying the leverage and pressure? This is a critical piece of the interface between your hands and the gun. When it comes to recoil management, the ideal point of leverage on the gun is along the barrel axis near the tip of the barrel. Obviously, we cannot grip a gun there, so we make compromises on the grip to where it is practical, but still gets as close to that ideal leverage point as possible. You don't just end up there by magic. You need to put yourself into that position and then hold the integrity of it while shooting. That critical piece I referred to is it is not enough to just be contacting the gun at a good leverage point. You need to do something with that ideal position. We want to apply that force as close to the ideal leverage point as possible to have the best mechanical efficiency available. I don't think any of these points are negotiable. So from that perspective, do you think the nut cracker technique is consistent with the premise I outlined above?

I've seen them. Funny that people like you can never answer my questions. Best of luck in your future training and matches.

I'm sorry but this literally makes no sense at all from a bio mechanical position. How exactly do you think relaxed musculature is putting pressure into the gun? How exactly are you using your skeletal structure to add leverage and what are you adding leverage to? How do you think you are controlling skeletal position if you aren't tensing any muscles? How is relaxed muscle more consistent? How does relaxed muscle create more friction? What are you creating that friction against? Creates more friction? More than what? What data do you have that corroborates your position that what you're doing now is better than what you were doing before? How did transitions become "easier"? What was the problem you were having with them before? What does muscling the transitions mean? Create an energy dump? What does that even mean? You're using a bunch of funky terms to describe something without actually describing it at all. What class are you? Here's the thing. It's actually hard to learn to apply force into the gun in the correct way consistently. It takes consistent work over a long period of time. It sounds to me like you chucked it out the window prematurely. Don't delude yourself into believing that the easy way is the best way, as it almost never is. As of today I'm averaging 47 minutes per day of dryfire for the year. There is no optimal amount. 15 minutes a day is infinitely better than nothing.

I was asked by members for a Kel Tec pf9 division. But then where will the snub nose revolvers guys compete? We're gonna need a J Frame division too. I have a buddy that has interest in shooting his Desert Eagle in USPSA. Let's go ahead and create the Desert Eagle division. If you aren't interested in those divisions, don't even troll me by commenting. At what point does this become insanity? In order to create a new division you should have to petition something like 3000 signatures from actual members saying it would become their primary division. Anything less than that, pick a division and go shoot buttercup.

I've noticed something about nerves/jitters over the years. Everyone feels them. People who know they didn't prepare enough tend to be negatively effected by jitters. People who have put the time in tend to experience neutral or even positive effects. Set yourself up to succeed by dry firing everyday, do some dryfire the morning of the match to physically warm up the movement pathways, visualize the stage until it flows in your mind vividly and naturally, then go hit the middle of the targets. When you've adequately prepared, I think what used to be jitters becomes tuned alertness.

This is great stuff. Being proactive like this is is exactly what needs to happen and you'll be better at the end because of it. By the end of this you should be in a position where you shoot a strong hand only stage at a match and feast upon the available match points. I also think by the time you've healed and had a chance to train up your freestyle shooting you'll notice that the lessons and training from SHO all this time has translated very well to freestyle shooting. It's also a fantastic opportunity to practice your shot calling.

I think it allows for the highest possible expression of speed and accuracy and pushing the boundaries of human performance is what interests me. The nature of the equipment means also that mistakes are far more costly in open than in any other division. Razor thin margins at peak speed and accuracy is the epitome of racing to me.

Yes you're exactly right. It is extremely difficult to diagnose all faults across complex skills when executed quickly. But like any other skill, your ability to do this will get better with work and it becomes a shockingly effective tool when developed. The skill is your ability to process information quickly from all relevant inputs. Instead of focusing on the particulars of the movement like the examples you used, I go about it a different way. I develop a detailed picture of what a perfect rep is. Both the feel and the visual references of the flawlessly executed movement are burned into my mind and as such I now have a map to use for every rep. When I make a mistake in a rep, regardless of what that mistake is, I know it instantaneously because the combined tactile and visual references for each mistake are different. You have to train yourself to do this and really pay attention to your practice....it won't happen accidentally. The difference in our methodology ends up being that you are practicing based on the individual components of each skill while I am practicing based on the skill as a whole. My experience has led me to believe that often the whole movement is greater than the sum of the individual pieces. Complex yet irreducible. Executing the pieces individually is not the same as doing the whole thing. Again, exactly right. The question I have for you that I think answers your question is how in the world are you going to learn to move fast while moving slow? People like to say that practice should be perfect, but I don't think that's actually a practically useful idea. If you aren't making mistakes in practice you aren't challenging yourself. You must provide a stimulus to cause favorable adaptation. Your body will tend to give you what your actions tell it you want. If you don't practice moving/shooting fast consistently, it will be a disaster when you suddenly demand it during a match. It's just not possible to will it into being. It's not that you should trust your subconscious in practice necessarily. You should definitely rely on your subconscious to execute the skill, but you need to be open and tuned in to what you see and feel while your subconscious is executing the skill. Then make your adjustments on the fly to make the next rep look closer like the map of your perfect rep. An immutable law of training in all endeavors is that your training stimulus MUST EXCEED anything that you could potentially see on game day. If it does not, you are all but guaranteed to fail on game day. My match pace tends to be 10% - 20% slower than my average practice pace. Not because I'm trying to go slower, but because I'm demanding more refined information processing.

For sure. To be a little more specific it isn't enough to just do some reps at high intensity to cause failure. If you highlight an error and then slow down to try to fix it, you've changed the conditions that created the error. In order to actually expand abilities the trick is to fix the error at the same speed/intensity which caused the error in the first place. The reps that you can fix your problems without slowing down are the most productive reps in training. This is the general method I use for learning or teaching any skill: 1- Be able to execute a given skill with minimum or no intensity. 2- Add intensity until errors creep in. 3- Fix the errors at that same intensity. Repeat steps two and three indefinitely.