Nimitz

For all of you out there who are wondering what an Action Steel match looks like, I just posted video of my last stage from todya's match at my club ...

a constant training routine that you can stick to is the key! It doesn't really matter if it's 15 mins or 1 hr, what'd critical it that you do it on a regular basis. remember what the US Olympic training team has said: in order to get better at a skill you must work on it at least 4 times a week, more is better. At 3 or less/week you will only be able to maintain whatever skills you have ... this is one of the reasons most shooters never really get any better. they don't understand how much constant effort is required ... Keep at it, I know you'll make it!

Thanks Mike -- you're check is in the mail ...

I've had a last minute cancellation in this class that I'm hosting on 2/3 April .... PM me if you are interested & I'll send you the details ...

ok, I'll post this in the 'training classes' sub forum as well but I wanted to hit the widest audience possible since there's not much time left ... I've had a last minute cancellation in the 'Skills & Drills' Ben Stoeger class I'm hosting on 2/3 April (Mon/Tues). First person by time stamp who emails me gets the slot ... PM me for the details ...

120 lbs

ok, thx

Now that i have my tax stamp for my SBR I plan to take it with me for some out-of-state competitions later this year. Does anyone know what you put in block 7 (transporting to) to indicate that you plan to travel to multiple states? I thought there was a single statement you could put in that block so you didn't have to try & list all states you planned to go to. Similar to block 5 (reason for transporting) where you can put in a statement like "for all lawful purposes" instead of trying to be too specific. Thx!

here's what it looks like ...

Dynometer.... available at .... where else, Amazon!. And when you do it you must use your normal shooting grip, not just some leveraged ultimate death grip which doesn’t resemble how you grip a gun. In fact, my ultimate, max grip strength is 131 lbs ...

apparently .... lol. I'm going to talk about it in an upcoming podcast but the short answer is if you have a proper grip it's not needed. My measured "shooting grip" strength in my weak hand is 115 lbs. That's more than enough to eliminate any muzzle movement without the aid of a Comp ...

It's all good ... that's just the way Ben is. Also, remember, he's not a Steel Challenge shooter and has no real interest in the sport ....

Several people have told me he mentioned my book on his latest podcast ... I need to go listen to it to hear what he said ... Must be positive as folks ar buying the book this week ... Lol. If I can get a tenth of the number of subscribers he has for my podcast I'll be thrilled ... good luck with your shooting , Steel Challenge can be very additive ?

Just returned from my monthly local match and although I had all kinds of equipment issues with my Buckmark I was able to borrow my buddy's rimfire rifle again. Luckily I know what the issue was so I should be easily able to correct it and get back to just focusing on shooting. I also have an X-ring rifle from TacSol being built but it will be a couple of weeks I suspect before I get it. I managed to shoot new personal bests on Outer Limits, Speed Option, 5 To Go & Smoke & Hope which easily pushed my classification to 96.07%. I'm probably going to start shooting both PCCO & RFRO at majors in addition to RFPO and see how far I can get against the Rifle Master Award at those matches ... I also got most of the initial batch of my podcasts recorded and so I plan to have the first one air on schedule on Monday, 5 Feb. Tandemkross has come on board as my tile sponsor and I'll be providing a discount code for them during the podcast. I'll also be evaluating some of their products from time to time. The first of these product reviews will be aired on podcast #3 and will be about their new Buckmark racegun kit. Since teh show is mostly about answering shooter questions please don't hesitate to send any Steel Challenge question to me. You can just PM me here as well .... all names are kept anonymous and I just focus on the question, not the shooter ...

shiny brass doesn't really concern me ..... I only need it clean so I can reload it ... zzt: do you clean the rice? If so, how?

thx all. That should get me going. 3gunDQ: Might have to look into a wet tumbler ... what's the 'booster' you mentioned? I stopped that 6-8 hr tumbling nonsense a long time ago as well ... discovered after about 3 hrs brass was as shiny at it was ever going to get but < hr would be even better ...

Now that I'm about to expend a lot of 9mm training with my new PCC I've started processing brass again. I put some new crushed walnut in my vibrating cleaner to get started, along with 2 capfuls of Nupolish like I used. Unfortunately after only 3 batches the walnut is coated with a nice grey film which gets deposited on all the cases ... Is there a clever way to clean crushed walnut or should I be using some other protocol for cleaning brass .... need some help to relearn this essential part of shooting centerfire again ... lol

please delete the "USPSA" hyperlink line since that is no longer active & my new Steel Challenge # is: TY75116 Thx!

I'm trying to update my signature with a current SCSA # in the hyperlink but I keep getting an error msg saying my signature does not meet guidelines when I try to save it. It says there are too many images but the only image I have is the M.O.M. gif provided by the M.O.Ds ....

Now that 2018 is under way, I’ve completed my shooting plan for the year: I plan to shoot as many Majors as my schedule will allow I’ve eliminated all ‘results based’ activities from my training. I’ve concluded that it’s difficult to eliminate results based thinking in competitions when you’re focused on results in training. Therefore, my training this year will be process orientated instead. I’ve stopped recording anything that has to do with results; stage times, par times, etc and instead my training journal will only have things which have to do with the process of executing proper shooting techniques and any issues I uncover that I need to find solutions for. I’ve also stopped recording match results (stage times, match times, etc). For several reasons I’ve removed the Comp on my RFPO and will doing some training without it to see if I want to make the switch permanent. If it works out like I hope, the resulting elimination of Comp cleaning will be a welcome change. Given how much fun I’m having shooting long guns I’m going to do a lot more of that. A friend brought his RFRO to last week’s match (another gun I’ve never shot before) and although I failed to make GM, my score was good enough for a 92.8% initial classification. I shot 3 of the 8 stages at or above 100% but could only manage low 80% ish scores on 2 stages which dragged down my overall. Shot an 81.87 sec match. Using the same 6 stages & comparing that to the 6-stage 58.60 sec score I had 2 weeks earlier in PCC I shot a 57.45 sec time. That still would not have made GM for me (93.8%) since RFRO times are a little stiffer than for PCCO. However, now that I have some clue how to shoot that rifle I’m confident I’ll make it next month. I’m also in the process of building a TacSol X-ring rifle to compete with. I've posted video from 4 of the stages from that match on my YouTube channel. I’ve recorded my first 2 podcasts and as soon as I have 4 in the can I’ll upload the first to iTunes. I want to get a month’s worth recorded to relieve some pressure for producing them to start. I’ll be continuing with ‘The Steel Challenge Shooting Corner” in Front Sight magazine for 2018. Jan/Feb issue just came out and I’ve already submitted the Mar/Apr piece. Topic for that one is on shot calling. 2018 is shaping up to be a great shooting year …

yep, the 'shooting' portion is usually never the issue. Unless you're a long-range bulleye rifle guy you're most likely pulling the trigger fast enough; you need to learn to do everything else faster since all those other things constitute time when you're not scoring points. It's all this dead time where most shooters lose time on a stage. If you're a USPSA shooter & have the opportunity to take a class from Ben Stoeger you'll discover this in spades ....

Ok, having just come back from my last match of the year, it's time for my annual review to see how i did against my planned goals & what that suggest's for focus for next year. Given that the extractor for my Buckmark did not arrive until last night and I could not zero my gun, I just decided to take out my PCC & go shoot today's 6-stage match for fun since I've never shot it before except to zero it & come up with a workable load. Although saying this may be a little dangerous since the results are not posted yet & it's never a good idea to do math in public, I shot on a squad with the PCC GM who usually wins this match & I ended up shooting a 58.26 which just edged him out. If my math is right that score is also enough to give me my 2nd GM card (95.26%) ... we'll see when the results are posted but whatever it turns out to be I was very pleased with not only how well I shot but the 'teaching moment' behind it which is way more important to me. Because this was the the first time I'd ever shot the gun & had done exactly zero training, I shot the match without any expectations & results were the farthest thing from my mind. These are exactly the lessons Lanny & my current mental coach are trying to teach me: shoot without expectations, don't ever TRY to do anything & ignore results. This reminds me of my best finish at Nationals which also happened to be my first Nationals where I had no expectations since this was literally my first major. The lesson here is as plain as can be and demonstrates what i can do when I have my mental game on track. As for my goals, the only goals I set for myself in 2017 was to average for all 8-stage matches sub 80 secs & for all 7-stage matches, sub 70 secs. My 7-stage ave time was 71.68 secs & 8-satge was 82.85 secs. Although not a specific goal I also took a look at my scores as compared to last year which were 75.12 & 87.70 so the trend continues in the right direction even though i missed my actual goals. I did manage to push my classification to 101.5% which shows that on an individual basis I can still lay down some good times. I set new personal bests on 5 of the 8 stages as well & again, no surprise, the 3 i didn't were also the ones I struggled with the most as compared to the others. When I look at individual stages to get a feel of where i need to focus next year I see the most improvement over 2016 on Accelerator (-13%) & 5 To Go (-8%) with Pendulum & Smoke & Hope actually a few percent worse than 2016. The other stages were basically a wash with improvements of only 1-2%. Digging a little deeper I see some interesting items that point to things i need to continue to work on. Showdown is a good example. Even though I had 7 of 14 matches were I shot a sub 8 sec stage, my overall ave for the year was .1 sec worse. this is due to a couple of matches where I had truly ugly times due to penalties which easily skew averages. The same can be seen in Smoke & Hope were I had 9 of 14 matches with times of 8.2 secs or less, 6 of those being sub 8 secs. i also changed my shooting order in mid season which could account for a small part of this. One other thing I decided to track this year for helping determine where my training focus should be was something I called the 'consistency metric'. I tracked 2 things: first, the number of times I shot each stage with either all 5 or 4/5 strings at my current ability. 2nd, I kept a running track of both my best & worst scores on each stage. Well, no surprise, on the stages where I had the lowest number of stage times with either 4/5 or 5/5 runs, my overall ave was worse. Also, the difference between high & low score made a big deal as well. Something I learned this past year from arguably the greatest ISS skeet shooter ever, Todd Bender is that you should be impressed with your worst scores & not your best scores. The goal here is to have basically no difference between your best & worst scores which would represent the ultimate in consistent. Obviously I need to continue working on consistency but this will continue to be a major training focus. I don't need to shoot a personal best run during a match, I just need to shoot 4 really good runs. This something I only recently learned from my mental coach, namely that 'perfectionism' is a bad thing WRT your performance in competition. I had always thought that trying to be perfect was good ! My coach calls this "winning ugly" which is something all champions (& championship teams like the NE Patriots, the greatest team ever to play the game!!!, along with the greatest QB ever to play the game!!!) understand. If things are not going exactly to plan they dig a little deeper & still find a way to win because in the end its winning that counts, not how you look getting there. Champions think in terms of winning, others thinks in terms of statistics or other things which are secondary. Now I get it that everyone is not in this sport to win championships but if this does happen to describe you then taking this lesson to heed should help Overall, I'm happy with my shooting from 2017 and I continue to make progress in the right direction. I plan to get back & shoot a full schedule of Majors in 2018 and am even considering shooting the Canadian Nationals and make it a vacation to visit Calgary. In addition to continuing to teach, write a column every issue for Front Sight & push my book & dry fire system on anyone who'll listen :), I plan to host a podcast beginning some time in mid to late January called : "The Ultimate Steel Shooter Show" where we're going to talk about all things Steel Challenge & I'll be answering questions from listeners on how to become a better Steel Challenge shooter. If you have a question you'd like discussed, send me a PM and I'll definitely talk about it on the air ...

It's been 2 weeks since I returned to a full-time training schedule so this is a good time to assess how things are going ... I've continued with my per-surgery plan of working on Roundabout during every live session and the results so far are encouraging; Of the 5 training sessions I've had there have been 2 sub 7 sec cold stage runs with the other 3 all sub 8 secs. This is with the new shooting order I adopted of: 1, 2, 5, 4, S. With this new order I'm averaging about a .6 sec first shot; mid .8 secs for the 1st 2 shots & sub 1.2 secs for the first 3 shots. Given the significantly shorter transition of 5 to 4 vice 2 to 4 I'm able to be a lot more aggressive and it's allowed me to drop a good .1 - .15 secs off runs. In over 150 runs of the stage in the last 2 weeks I've had exactly 1 run over 2 secs. I'm at the point where even runs in the 1.9s are unSat. I'm also spending a lot of time doing the 'first shot + 2" drill instead of just first shot or 1st shot + 1. I was finding that even though my first 2 shots were sub 1 sec, the transition times for my 3rd shot were not where they should be. That seems to be helping my overall stage times so I'll probably continue that for a while. On the mental training side, at the recommendation of my coach, I'm spending 30 mins a day visualizing; usually in three different 10 m in sessions throughout the day. That seems to be helping as practicing my match mental routine is becoming second nature and I'm making fewer and fewer mistakes. There are still a few slots open in Ben's Fundamentals class I'm holding at my range at the end of March. E-mail me if you're interested.

Unfortunately that's not an excuse in my case as there is no one but me on my trust. The only reason I did a trust was that in the case I predeceased my wife she would have the SBR and suppressor legality and could then decide to sell or keep them. Probably should have forgone the trust and just left instructions will my estate attorney to abandoned them if I passed away first. At this rate I may be dead before I get to shoot them ...

1, 2, 4, 5, s just shoot straight across, make one reversal transition then the stop plate. If you're more comfortable shooting l-r then shoot it: 5, 4, 2, 1, s. Don't make it harder than it has to be ...