Jake Di Vita

I can see where you're coming from. It's just like shot calling. Ultimately the information you are trying to get with the dummy round drill is what is the gun doing as it fires. If you're able to call your shots the dummy round test doesn't show you anything that you aren't seeing in every other aspect of your training. I also think this flaw shows itself in dryfire IF you are pushing the intensity of your practice. You should be shot calling every time you pull the trigger in dryfire. If someone is just going through the motions they are not creating the conditions that their skills will be exposed to on match day or even live fire practice day. If you dryfire at a higher intensity than when you shoot, the flaws you have in your live fire will show themselves more readily. It's a similar concept that I use when I coach lifting. Watching someone take 30 minutes to set up perfectly for a lift while fresh shows you the current best possible version of the athlete. This is great, but if I'm trying to make someone better I need to see where they break down...the first place that fails is what I need to shore up. If I want to see someone's true ability to control their body or the outside world I don't want to see them move fresh, I want to see them move when they're breathing hard. The way this translates to shooting is that flaws are exposed when the intensity is increased. If you have a flinch it will rear it's ugly head when you're pushing your par times down in dryfire. It's up to you to see it. Anyway, that's a long winded way of saying you shouldn't need a special drill to check your flinch as that should be happening continuously throughout the vast majority of your training. Obviously shot calling is required for this. But let's be real, if someone can't call their shots they should do nothing else until they can (which a dot also helps a ton). I don't find the habit of focusing on the target with a dot to be a problem with irons. I think most people's problem with shot calling is getting a feel for the speed and timing of when the sight moves and being able to visually process the information fast enough to have a snapshot of the sight position at the instant of lift. The reason why the dot is awesome is it slaps you in the face with this information. Once you know what to look for I think it translates perfectly to iron sighted shooting.

Couldn't agree more. Doing things like drifting the sights to make up for crappy shooting ability is extremely short sighted. Setting your gun up to where a well executed pull of the trigger makes you miss due to the drifted sights requires laughably poor decision making skills. The sooner you decide to fix the shooting error the better off you'll be even if it means having an immediate short term struggle. I see this drill posted all the time, but I think it is generally a bad idea because it doesn't differentiate between movement that happens before the bullet would have exited the barrel (accuracy inhibiting, aka a flinch) and movement that happens after the bullet would have left the barrel (no effect on accuracy, simple compensation for recoil). I think a dot is a significantly better strategic choice to highlight your problems.

There is a distinct smell of snake oil in my nose. I briefly read through the first three papers they have under the science section and did not see anything that looked like evidence that this thing makes you learn better or faster. We're talking measured increases of a half of a percent, which I'm not even sure is fair to attribute to the equipment. I didn't see them talk about how controlled the experiment was (IE are all athletes using the same methodology for the duration of the test), this is obviously a tiny sample size, and there are just differences from person to person that will impact how they react to training stimuli. A couple P values show that there COULD be something statistically significant in SOME of the measurements, but the research is far too young to draw any reliable conclusions that there is a real benefit. On a side note, seeing the picture of Coley doing a 255 snatch is legit. If you want to have a good finish at nationals, the tried and true method of hard and consistent work is where it's at.

Someone with a gun that does not hit where the sights are aimed have something wrong with either the equipment or the shooter's ability to execute a shot. If the gun is working properly and the shooter is working properly, the bullet will go where the sights were pointed at the instant the bullet exits the barrel. There is no such thing as perfectly working equipment and a perfectly working shooter that shoots left. If a M class shooter hits left with glocks, he's making a mistake somewhere. It's the shooter's fault frequently enough to be logical to attribute all errors to the shooter. I'd have to be having trouble for a good long time to even consider the gun being at fault.

Pay more attention to what is going on in dryfire. The flaw is there, it's up to you to be perceptive enough to see it. Just the fact that you only recently started dryfiring is a red flag. There is no substitute for putting the work in every single day for extended periods of time. I tend to tell people in your situation to dryfire every day for 6 months and then come back to me if you're still having the same problem. As a side note, I can't recommend a dot highly enough for this particular problem. It is far and away the best tool for highlighting your mistakes.

Of course. As a B shooter there are certainly skills to work on which will save you more time than the draw. No doubt about that. I'm saying don't judge the value of training a skill solely based on the available time you can shave off it in a match. I'm not saying practice the draw at the expense of other skills. By all means, you absolutely always have to work on calling shots, transitions, movement, etc all the time. My point is to do that while also putting work into things often seen as less valuable such as draws, splits, reloads, etc. This is one of the reasons why I don't think isolation of skills (such as the thread title) is an efficient training methodology after you have learned the basics of that skill. I try to combine multiple skills into all drills I do in a method that resembles what actual match shooting looks like. This has the benefit of forcing you to combine several technical actions into something seamless and as a result allows you to work on the entirety of your game as a unit. The trick is being perceptive enough to notice small faults in your execution in the wide variety of skills you're practicing and to take actionable steps to correct those faults for the whole duration of every practice session. One of my favorite drills the last few months has been a diagonal draw step to 3 partials following by a single lateral step reload to 3 more partials. There's a lot to pay attention to, but you're learning to integrate everything together. As such I don't worry about spending more time on one skill or another as most skills get equal reps daily. If there's a particular area I'm trying to improve, I'll still do several other skills like the draw and reload along with the focus skill but I'll find a way through drill design or emphasis to accentuate the stress onto the predetermined focus area.

Why choose? It's more than just cool and impressive, it's still faster/more accurate/more consistent. If your goal is to win, every little bit matters. There is also a less acknowledged benefit to feverishly practicing the draw....this is where the quality of your grip is established. It's hard to quantify what this means to your score but I think it's safe to say a poor grip will likely negatively impact your score and a perfect grip will set you up to best execute to the level of your ability. Everything must be worked on all the time. No skill is nor will ever be good enough to neglect practicing. I get the low hanging fruit argument and that working on some areas will yield more benefit than others, but I don't think that is a valid reason to not work to have a killer world class draw (or insert any shooting skill).

Seriously consider a third, fourth, or even fifth opinion if you have any concern whatsoever about the diagnosis you've been given. There's obviously a problem when you know there is something wrong and doctors are not able to find it. If I were in your position I would continue seeking other opinions until I found a doctor that gave me a diagnosis that I felt was reliable and explained what I was feeling. If it is a soft tissue injury a MRI could be helpful in determining what's going on. This doesn't sound like a soft tissue injury, but it's certainly possible. You may also want to look into getting a consultation for stem cell injection to the effected area. No problem. It is too easy to allow problems to road block us. Sometimes we need reminders to keep our mind focused on moving forward in spite of life trying hard to stop you. You now have an opportunity to develop truly formidable strong hand only abilities. Take advantage of it.

Dull is not a bad thing. Some of your most valuable practice sessions will happen while doing stuff you think is boring. Don't worry about single hand specific drills, just pick something challenging and do it. I'm trying to figure out how diving under a wall caused you to fracture your wrist. Sounds like that type of movement is something you need to train up when you're healed as you should be able to maneuver under a wall in a hurry reliably without breaking something. I understand there were extenuating circumstances like not wanting to be staring down the barrel of a gun, but those types of extenuating circumstances are exactly the reason to train things like this. Lessons have a cost that goes along with them, and good lessons cost a lot. A multi month injury carries with it a lesson that you should not ignore. I'll leave you with Jocko to put this in perspective to keep your focus in the right direction.

I don't think hat-cams are very good for video analysis. It will work for some of the points you listed, but a third person view of your entire body during the stage is by far the best analytical tool when it comes to video. As far as critiquing yourself, I think the best method for this is comparing what you visualized your execution of the stage to be compared with what you actually did. What you visualize should be your ideal match pace run under the circumstances at your current skill level. The more detailed your visualization the better. You should be able to see in your mind every single thing that will happen in the stage. When you shoot, If you're paying attention, you should then notice all the little things that did not go exactly the way you visualized. If your focus is really dialed in here you'll notice things you do that are just a little off as you shoot that are invisible in video. Keep a notebook in your range bag and after each stage just note the things that did not go as cleanly as you visualized them going. From that list you should be able to formulate a large majority of your practice until the next match.

You are not saying the same thing. The conscious thought you describe is not what you should be doing during a stage. Everything that you are saying to yourself during the stage needs to be pre-programmed in your practice/visualization so that it happens automatically.

I like to enter and exit on the easier targets because it means I can usually start leaving the position earlier or shooting earlier before I'm set up. Ultimately you need to be able to enter and exit on all targets whether they are easy or crazy difficult, but when the option is available it tends to optimize the speed at which I can leave a position.

There's a lot to unpack here. On the face this seems weird that you can execute a visual process (shot calling) by feel instead of vision. I think this is true but it's not something that you try to do. It's a consequence of thousands of hours of work. You don't just go from seeing nothing to shot calling nirvana. The literal aspect of shot calling, meaning what you actually see the sights do, provides more input than just visual. When you're really seeing what's going on in front of you with the gun, you're able to develop kind of a neurological road map where you'll intuitively know how the gun is performing by how it feels because you'll have the data bank of what you're feeling means visually from the thousands of reps you have seen in the past. In my view, the only way you can learn to call shots by feel is to call tens of thousands of shots by vision and connect what you're seeing to what you're feeling at the same time. In other words, keep focusing on vision and there's a good chance this is what your shot calling will morph into when you master it, as Ben and JJ clearly have.

What do you mean when you say this? To me, motivation means that you want to do something. Wanting to do something is good, but the nature of the beast is sometimes you will be less motivated than other times and sometimes you will have no motivation for an extended period. If you depend on motivation, there's a high likelihood of faltering here. Discipline means you will do something regardless of how you feel whether you want to or not and death is the only thing that's going to stop you. Motivation requires inspiration. Discipline only requires a decision.

It's very simple. A 1.2 reload in a match is going to feel way different to someone who's best reload in practice is 1.1 than it is to someone who's best reload in practice is .6. And that principle is true for any skill that gets used in USPSA. You aren't practicing a .6 reload because you want to do a .6 reload in the match. You're practicing a .6 reload to extend your comfort zone and hopefully learn something that you might not have learned had you never pushed that pace. No one is saying do hyper fast draws and reloads to the point of exclusion of skills that make up a higher representation of your match score. Do both. Always try to expand your ability. Don't ever think a skill is good enough. Of course we want to eliminate weaknesses, but we also want to bolster strengths. Is it actually useless to train draws and reloads at the limit of your ability to function, or is the benefit just not in your face obvious from the outside so it gets easy to overlook? Even if the only benefit were fractions of a second, shaving a tenth here or 5 hundredths there is no a fools errand in a sport where hundredths of a second can be the difference between winning and losing. This is even more true in Open where you see the highest form of speed and accuracy that exists. Not everything you practice is going to have a gigantic impact on your scores, but many tiny improvements over time will add up just as well.

Yes. Tons of them. It doesn't just sound good on the surface. I know many people like that who are highly successful. If you have discipline, you don't need motivation. You will just do what you know needs to be done without any extra fluff on the side. People who rely on motivation or inspiration to get things done always run out at some point. The very nature of discipline means it is inexhaustible. Like Husker said, wrestling is a great example of this. Another great example is new years weight loss resolutions. The gyms are filled with motivated people in early January. That doesn't last long. The motivation fades and the undisciplined go right back to their couches. People who need motivation almost never do as well as people who slog through the work everyday no matter how unmotivated they are.

It's gonna take a bit for me to unpack this, but I've been wanting to consolidate my thoughts on this for awhile and you guys get to suffer through it. Everyone is going to be a little different but ultimately there is a mechanically ideal way for every person to manage recoil. Some things like exact arm position, extension, tension, weight distribution, lean, etc will be most of the variance between people. Some principles that do seem to ring true from the leverage point of view is it is generally better for pressure on the gun to be as close to the bore axis as possible while also inward towards the bore axis, and to have friction on the gun as far forward toward the end of the barrel as is reasonable. If you could squeeze the gun right at the tip of the barrel, that's the theoretical maximum amount of leverage you can have on the gun as far as I can figure. Obviously we can't do that, but that's the same principle that drives people to slide their support hand forward under the trigger guard/cam their wrist forward and get as high on the beavertail as possible. This is also why thumb "rests" can be an effective tool for recoil management...high forward pressure with plenty of friction. Where most people fall short is they place their hands in a good position, but don't use that position to apply pressure where it will most benefit them. Ideal grip pressure is going to be another individual variable, but in general it's usually safe to say grip harder than you think is necessary. More importantly, I want grip pressure to follow the same guidelines as grip position: high, forward, inward towards the barrel axis. Leverage, friction, and pressure is the holy trinity of recoil management. The downside of this is it's very difficult to learn how to not push the gun all over the place and crunch shots with all this pressure and squeezing coming from different directions. It's also quite difficult/hard on your body to force yourself to do consistently in practice, especially if you're dry firing every day like you should be. Again, this is my general guideline for maximizing recoil management, I'm not saying this is what everyone should do. There are plenty of people that decide to let recoil happen and still put up extremely good scores. After all that, the reason why I think this is valuable is the idea that more recoil management gives you a higher ceiling for speed and accuracy than less recoil management, and my practice data confirms this is true for me. You'll have to decide for yourself what you want your grip and stance to accomplish, and it's critical to log long term data to see if you're happy with the results. Just a couple thoughts. I'm exhausted so sorry if I explained it poorly.

Discipline is a million times more valuable than motivation.

Cool. Good stuff. Since you are on the fence about it and it is so close, I would say skip Space City and work the dot til April 1, then go full back to Limited. That gives you almost 4 weeks to readjust, which I think you'll find to be more than enough. I think the two things you focus on for the next 2 months with the dot is shot calling and shooting on the move. I think the dot is uniquely valuable to those two skills and you'll probably get the most out of your time if you practice with a bias towards them. The month you'd have before Texas State Open would then be spent applying what you learned to irons. Just my suggestion.

Why would you take the dot off for JJ's class? I feel like you haven't put in enough hours behind the dot for it to have taught you very much yet. It's still only February. If I were you I would keep working with the dot at least until April or May (I don't know your match schedule obviously). It won't be as hard as you think to switch back to irons. You've taken quite a few classes now haven't you? Remember the class isn't what makes you better. Applying what you learned from the class in practice is. You can obviously do whatever you want, but as someone that's been helping you from afar for awhile, I think your time, money, and effort would be much better spent in practice rather than instruction at this point. You already possess most of the knowledge you need, now it's just a matter of experience and training age....hours behind the gun. What does your major match schedule look like this year?

I don't really experience it this way. I think if you're maximizing the efficiency of grip and stance the dot settles up really fast. When I'm shooting at my best it's almost like the dot snaps back to the target and looks fully still to me by the time the next shot fires, even though the split may be in the low teens. To your point, waiting for it to be still would be bad, but I think the goal should be to force the dot to be still the instant it is back on target. I feel like that's a better direction to go rather than settling for the dot being blurry on closer targets. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly not bad to have the skill to hit what you want with a lot of dot movement. There are bound to be times where the setup of the position requires compromising your recoil management but probably not a lot of them in a given match.

Don't worry, your IT guy hands will toughen up over time and it doesn't even take that long to build calluses. Don't let a little discomfort distract you. It's just skin, it'll grow back.

They can be useful for some people. I prefer to develop hand strength more as a by product of training. Between deadlifting, oly lifting, pull ups, climbing rope/rock climbing, and dryfire my hands get plenty of work. Unlike with captains of crush, the benefit of the training goes beyond the hands while still having enough stimulus to force them to get strong. My general advice for a shooter would be to focus on squeezing hard in dry fire and dry fire every single day with that focus for a few months. This will build some strength, but primarily it's going to get the neurological system more efficient at applying force in the way you decide to with the gun. Ultimately all the grip strength in the world doesn't matter if you aren't applying it effectively. After that if the shooter still feels like grip strength is holding them back in some way, they can look at captains of crush or some of the other things I outlined that I like to do.

That's going to be true of anyone who is trying to improve. I screw up all the time and I've been a GM for over 10 years. If you aren't making mistakes in practice you aren't challenging yourself. If you don't challenge yourself you don't get better. Reloading has always been a large part of my dry fire even when shooting open because I think general gun handling skills are so critical and it's one of the fundamental things you do with a gun. I can't think of any conditions that would have me as a coach say "ok your reloads are good enough, focus on something else." I think the fundamental actions of shooting must always be a focus of practice. There are very few dryfire drills I do that don't have a draw and reload in them. It's something I have to work on every single day.

The better you are the less time you need. People with a well developed index can change between irons and a dot in as little as half a dryfire session. If you're newer to the dot and/or are younger in training age it can take some time because you need to initially develop the ability to be keenly aware of where the gun will be pointed. The goal is to be able to draw or look at anything and have the gun appear with the dot rock steady in the center of the glass at exactly the place on the target where you want it to be with no adjustment. As you improve at this, you'll notice you won't need to find the dot anymore. It will just go where you want it to go. What helped me early on was to point in at the target, take a mental snap shot of what I felt about my body position, then try to recreate that body position precisely on the next draw. When you extend to the target and are not aimed exactly where you want to be, take note of the error and try to correct it on the next rep. A common series of events will happen where you'll be off, then you'll over correct, then you'll under correct, then you'll find the sweet spot. Once you're there see how many times you can do it before you're off again. I've found this to be a valuable strategy in dryfire.