Jake Di Vita

The best example of this I think is TGO. He's not very fleet of foot, but he usually gains more than he loses in shooting when exiting and very early when entering. Obviously we want to have both, but as usual athleticism alone rarely beats skill.

This is one reason why I like to get the reload done as early in movement as possible. That way my eyes are free to look at the spot my lead foot is going to land. Usually I look at that spot until I'm about 3 steps out, then I shift my eyes to finding the target and trust my feet to operate on auto pilot. As far as really sprinting between positions, again I think doing this effectively depends on getting the reload done ideally within the first step of movement. Ultimately the only thing that matters is how quick you are able to shoot when you reach the new position. Someone who is full out sprinting but lacks the ability to enter into position and shoot effectively can still lose to someone that doesn't run very fast but gets there ready.

First off, you can call me Jake. And you are who exactly? What, so you're telling me that rational discourse is a waste of time? Did you do any research at all about me before you insinuated that I can't back up what I'm saying with ability? Why don't you tell me exactly what qualifies to you as "showing" that I'm not full of shit. There are technical differences among a great many of the top shooters nationwide. Are you saying that Ron and "top shooters nationwide" (a meaningless claim without names) have come to some consensus and are all in total agreement? I''m not claiming I'm superior. I'll be the first to tell you that I'm far from the best shooter in the world. What I'm doing is voicing criticisms about what I've heard about what your company teaches. Criticisms that coincidentally have still not been addressed by anyone in a well thought out fashion. Instead of professionally and logically addressing those claims, you lazily challenged that I just don't know what I'm talking about and probably can't shoot good. That bit of laziness on your part is not going to work out well for you. Why am I not on the national team? Not that it's any of your actual business, but that would be because I have other things going on in my life that I'm not willing to sacrifice to do so. Remind me what national team you are on? This ad hominem crap is not what I was after, I just wanted to talk about shooting. I'm not overly interested in a slot. Since you're all about showing that these things work in a practical sense, how about you and I (and whomever else you want) compete at a major match together with a gentleman's wager on the line and we'll see who performs better than who where the results can be seen by everyone. If that for some reason isn't good enough for you and you insist on testing me in your class setting, you will not only be providing the slot, but also the hotel, gas, car, and food expenses. Then if I'm unable to satisfy whatever criteria for skill that we predetermine, I will be happy to foot the bill. Since you started this by challenging my shooting ability rather than talking to me, I would not be coming to receive instruction from you. I would be coming to place your foot squarely into your mouth. Or we can just talk like adults, which is all I wanted in the first place. It's up to you, but you really shouldn't underestimate me.

I used to post a random dryfire drill every day on my old blog site. Came up with some real challenging drills that way I probably never would have done otherwise. Only problem with them is they required somewhat of a lot of space and often took some effort to set up.

My opinion is that you should have them adopt their normal firing grip, tell them to squeeze like they would if they were shooting, then take measurements for both left hand and right hand. Your overall grip strength won't be as good of an indicator as the amount of pressure that you actually apply while you are shooting. I believe what you want to measure is their productive application of force, not their total contractile potential. In order to measure productive application of force, you need to introduce technique...which in this case is their normal firing grip.

I'd be happy to as long as the terms for what your expectations are spelled out specifically in advance. I think it'd be a whole lot easier to just have a grown up conversation about it, but if you want to challenge my ability to shoot, I'm more than happy to oblige.

Great. Thank you for actually starting a decent conversation on the subject. Well, it's really hard to tell via video how much recoil there actually is. And yes, the camming action on the gun will assist in recovering the gun from recoil to the target. I'm not arguing that it is pretty fast, I'm arguing that it isn't ideal. As I said before, I think Ron is a very good shooter, but I don't think the technique he is espousing is maximizing the ability to run a gun quickly and accurately. It's very common to find a pretty good shooter that isn't using pristine fundamentals. I've been testing and re-testing methods for real close to 20 years now. I've been a gm for almost 15 years. Since making gm, I've had 4 or 5 complete and total overhauls of my technique. I've tried letting the gun recoil and I can't produce times or hits with that method anywhere close to the method I'm using now. To take an example from my personal training, my best bill drill using the let the gun recoil technique is right around 1.5. That is still reasonably fast using what I consider flawed technique. My best bill drill using my current methodology of not letting the gun do whatever it wants is 1.26. Quite a significant difference. Sure. I've heard this before. I think it has validity for some shooters but it certainly isn't an immutable truth. To me, you shooting low on follow up shots isn't necessarily because you are tense. If we break the problem down to it's most basic fundamental, you are simply crunching the gun down at some point during the execution of the shot. If you are compensating for recoil prematurely, we call that a flinch. There are other ways to correct a flinch beyond relaxing and letting recoil happen. You may be prematurely pushing the gun down by only a hundredth of a second. Timing issues like that are certainly fixable without letting recoil happen. Recoil from one shot does not directly effect the shot placement of the next shot. All shots fired are independent of each other. The cycling and recovery action of recoil is done long before you actually start pulling the trigger for the next shot. The difference in what he recommends and what I do is that I am always aggressively driving the gun to the target, even during the execution of the shot. I don't want to drive the gun down from recoil, I want to drive the gun forward right back to the target. I think this is a distinct difference that gets lost on people. Conflating recoil compensation with poor execution of the next shot is over simplifying what is going on in that process. But in the image from him it directly says "let recoil happen". I also think that image is fundamentally incorrect since it says calling the shot happens after recoil. Calling the shot happens at the precise instant that recoil starts. I'm a bit surprised he would publish that image with such a glaring error. That's irrelevant to the subject at hand. We could spend all day finding popular firearms instructors teaching flawed technique. Some students (as we've seen in this thread) become so entrenched in their favorite instructor's dogma that they never branch outward to expand their abilities. Yes, there are a bunch of people that swear by him. That in no way means what he is teaching is the most efficient way of accurately and quickly manipulating a firearm.

And that ladies and gentlemen is a textbook example of the red herring logical fallacy. Low effort on the troll....shame..

I just don't understand yet you're the one who can't explain anything or have a halfway intelligent conversation on the subject. The extent of your knowledge on the subject seems to be "Ron told me so". You're a funny guy. I'll no longer be responding to you unless you can somehow manage to come up with a coherent and thought out post. I won't be holding my breath.

If by argue you mean have a conversation where we logically discuss our points of view and where we disagree, then yes that is exactly what I want. I think it's pretty cowardly to tell me I'm wrong and talk to me like I'm a fool then hide behind "I don't need to give you a reason" and "I'm not good enough to debate you". We're all talking about shooting here and trying to get better. At least that's what I'm trying to do. You seem completely unwilling to have any sort of discussion with substance. Throughout my life as a coach one principle I've tried to live by is that if I can't explain WHY someone should do something, then I'm not going to tell them to do that thing. That ideal has served me well, perhaps you should give it a try.

But hey, at least you're good enough to tell me that I"m wrong and that I don't understand. I figured you had some meat behind that. Guess not. I'm 100% open to being wrong, but if the best argument you're bringing is "you don't fully understand his teachings" you aren't going to get very far with me. That sounds like one of those McDojo guys defending his teacher after watching him get wrecked in a bar fight. I'm willing to debate anyone on the subject and I'm willing to change everything I do if I am shown better information. I'm not going to chase anyone to debate them. If he's interested, I'm right here. You come in and post that video, I say that I fundamentally disagree with what I believe to be his principles, you say I'm wrong and have a nice day. This has happened a couple times now. Either tell me why or send someone else who will.

I prefer my ideas to be able to hold up to debate. If you don't care about that....well that says a lot to me. You have a nice day as well.

I'm willing to accept that, but until someone comes and explains how I'm wrong in a logical way that refutes what I'm saying I'm not going to change my mind. I have high standards for what I think is impressive. A lot of those standards require the person to be faster than me. I've never seen Ron do anything that I can't do rather easily, so no I don't find his speed or accuracy while going full speed particularly impressive. He's a very good shooter. I'm sure he's a very good instructor. He has won some matches. All of that is possible while using less than ideal technique. Your assertion that these things somehow make him right is a poor foundation to base your argument on.

I don't need to meet him to be able to critically think about his ideas or technique. I'd be happy to debate him on the subject on this forum.

To my knowledge, Ron is a let the gun recoil kind of guy. I think that is a far less than ideal approach. I've never met anyone that just lets the gun recoil that has impressive speed / accuracy at speed.

At this point I envision you as Gollum squatting in a dark corner petting and drooling on your USB drive that has your "research project" on it, trying to bite anyone that glances at your Precious. I hate to break it to you, but the reason no one else is traveling to matches asking good shooters to squeeze their ball is because the information just isn't very valuable. I thought it would be interesting to take a glance at but that's about the extent of it. It's funny that you keep saying you won't give it away for free but then when someone actually offered to pay, you just give a snarky response in return. While you apparently enjoy calling people lazy who won't do it (which ironically is a pretty lazy way of categorizing people), I won't do it because I already know that applying a lot of force into the gun is a good thing. I don't need to mimic what you did to discover that nor would I pay even a single dollar to you for it. My passing interest left quite quickly when you hyper inflated the value of your little experiment. At this point I have to fight a strong impulse to roll my eyes whenever I see a new comment from you on the subject. We all get it....everyone that doesn't do their own research project is lazy. Moving on..... Doubt it would be relevant information since everyone in the sports you listed are swinging one object at another object. In our sport we have a different set of demands to satisfy.

Yeah. So are my legs. That doesn't mean I can effectively use them to apply force to the gun. Duration without fatigue is hardly a consideration for USPSA shooting. If you can't squeeze the gun tight for the duration of a USPSA stage, "use your chest" would not be my go to solution for that problem. The ends do not justify the means in my opinion, especially since as you said it's not going to be even close to the majority of force applied. Using your chest to control a pistol sounds like a lot of unnecessary complication for what would amount to be at best a tiny benefit. I'm no where near convinced there is any benefit at all over what I recommend. I advocate that. To be more specific, I advocate torquing pressure inwards towards the barrel axis. The way I do this is by using my shoulders to anchor my elbows to a stable position then I create the inward torque from my wrists. Just inward pressure isn't nearly as effective as inward pressure specifically towards the barrel axis. In order to effectively apply inward force with from your chest you're going to want your elbows to be on the same plane as your hands. This creates that crappy internally rotated shoulder position we talked about earlier. In my eyes that's one step forward followed by two steps backward. Got video? I'd like to see what that looks like. Even better if you also have video of before you started using this methodology so I can see the before and after of what this huge improvement looks like. Anthropometry could have an effect here. It's hard for me to go by you noticing a huge improvement when I don't know what it was like before. It's possible it could be a lot better than what you were doing before while at the same time still not being optimal.

Impossible is a damn strong word. Very difficult? Yes. Impossible? Hell no. Back when I first started shooting I thought 1 second reloads were impossible. Since then the fastest reload I've recorded in live fire is quite a bit faster than 1 second.. Impossible, within the realm of reason, is just something you create in your head.

My chest muscles are not going to have much of any impact on the amount of force I'm applying to my grip. The only way the chest muscles would be able to have an impact on force applied to the gun is if you're compressing the gun from the sides using what mimics a fly motion. I don't think that's an effective way to apply force to the gun. I want my arms to be mostly straight and tight which makes the transfer of energy through the arms more efficient. Under load it is much easier to manage that load with the arms mostly straight than more bent. If you want wider elbows your choices are either bend your arms more or internally rotate the shoulder (a very poor position in flexion) to lift the elbows. Neither of those options are mechanically efficient.

I think this is on the right track. The reason you were taught to keep your elbows in most likely stems from not bumping them into things. The reason I keep my elbows in is because it sets my shoulders into an externally rotated position which is the most stable position for the shoulder in all ranges of flexion. I have no issues with recoil management, accuracy, sight tracking etc while using an elbows in position. I'd suggest you look at your grip as being the primary culprit of your problems. There are lots of threads on here that go into detail about it. I'd suggest you do some searching. I disagree with this. Can you explain to me why you think wider elbows are mechanically more efficient?

As with everything else, it depends. Something important to note is that this primarily applies to positions that you would use a drop step (aka split step) to leave the position which in general is a very difficult shot or a position where your balance is heavily shifted to one side at the end of the array. I think the reload is a pretty fine motor function skill. Even with a magwell shooting double stacked mags the margin for error between a successful reload and a miss is not that much. The tip of the magazine has to hit wholly within about a 2x2 inch square. When I'm running at full speed it's a lot more difficult to consistently hit that 2x2 inch area. I flubb way more mag changes when I'm running than when I'm mostly stationary. I've tested this extensively with myself and others. The majority of the time, the reload suffers when done at a full run. The way a lot of people avoid this is slower/smoother movement. Since I'd really prefer to not slow my running speed down, that means I need to either reload at the beginning or the end of movement. I don't want to reload at the end of my movement because if anything goes awry I'm burning time hard by standing still and fiddling with my gun. That leaves reloading at the beginning of movement. When executed well, the entire reload can be completed before the completion of your drop step. If we're talking short distance movement where you can't really get moving fast, or when I leave a position that I don't need to drop step from, I'm all for reloading on the move. I still want to always complete the reload as early as I can though just so I can correct any goofs to make sure I'm ready to shoot when I get to the next position. I'll always try to get the reload done in one step of movement. It's possible you're just not running hard enough. If I'm not moving very fast when I don't reload I wouldn't notice much of a difference adding a reload in either. If you're moving at what is your legitimate top speed and still don't see a difference, that's great. For me though, there's a difference. I'm measurably consistently at least a couple tenths slower when covering 10 yards between reloading and not reloading. Add another .1 - .3 if I'm trying to reload at a gallop.

Ya, absolutely. If your match pace is 85% of your max speed, I'd much rather be working at 85% of .7 rather than 85% of 1.2. You're never done improving any skill. We hear all the time that you need to work on the low hanging fruit. There's definitely validity to this but it implies you no longer work on areas where you're already strong. I want to improve my weaknesses but I also want to bolster my strengths.

Yep, that's fine. Fortunately this is one of those sports where there's no reason you can't be highly competitive deep into the 50s and maybe beyond with the proper maintenance. I think you're in a good place for 4 years...I'm pretty sure I was still B class 4 years into shooting.

Maybe, but at the top level those tenths of a second matter big time. I've lost matches by a tenth of a match point before more than once. I don't think one should ever use reasoning along the lines of "well it doesn't matter that much" as a reason to not have uncommonly good ability in a mundane skill. Reloading is one of many fundamentals of USPSA. Usually the shooter who executes the fundamentals the best over the course of a match will win that match. If you want to compete at the elite level all fundamentals need to be highly developed.

An excellent reload is something that signifies to me high level gun handling ability, which is obviously a significant factor for match performance. No you usually don't win a match based off reload ability, but generally if you have a crappy reload there's a pretty good chance the rest of your gun handling ability is kind of crappy too.