[Learning to Dry Fire]

I am new to the forum - and new to competitive shooting as well. I decided I needed to do some serious work on dry fire training to improve my shooting. So I bought the Steve Anderson Book.

Initially, I started doing the drills in his book, but have changed things up a bit. I created some of my own drills to replicate the IDPA classifier. I found online some PAR times for people shooting at a high level in the classifier and set those as goals (not my PAR) for the drills. Typically, in a 40 minute dry fire session I can drill through a stage of the classifier. Here is the neat part though - When I look at my times compared to the goal par times, I can start to identify where I am weakest and need to focus my work.

For example - after the first few ties doing drills on the stage 1 strings, my weakest string was the weak hand drill. Only three shots but I lost the most time in that string so began working on that 80% of the time. Also I created live fire drills to help me learn and reinforce. Learned that my biggest hiccup was an eye dominance problem that was causing my first shot from low ready to take forever. Once I knew that was the issue it was easy to solve by lifting the weapon up with a bent elbow and the muzzle high and really concentrating on the eye dominance part. Now that string is very fast - and I confirmed this with some live fire practice.

Now my weak point seems to be the turn, shoot three, slide lock reload shoot three. So am working on that and when I break it down in to the blocks, I have found my slowest part is the turn and draw. So working on that and seeing big improvements in my dry PAR times.

So - long story short - the building blocks from Steve Anderson book are where I go to work on a problem, and comparing myself to some "Goal PAR times" is how I prioritize what to work on! This has been incredibly fun to do. Am curious to learn how others approach this - a lot of posts I have read of folks trying to get better seems like they just cram a bunch of brand name drills in with no real purpose - I found that by having the set routine of the classifier and PAR times to compare myself to I can create a purpose for each workout (Dry or Live) - like improve my turn and draw or practice transitions, etc etc.

Oh - and I am not really trying to gme the classifier as much as identify skill building blocks and how I rank on each of those building blocks.

How do you guys approach intentional practice? Different or same or...

[Hello from NorthWest Arkansas]

Lester - yes we have been shooting at the Nighthawk range. It is a great facility - wish there was more access to it! Did you have fun? Hope to see you out there again - that was both of our first USPSA match and we both really enjoyed it.

Antichrome - I may try to make it down there. Sundays are hard to get away with Church and family stuff, but I may try to get some special dispensation from Mama! How many shooters usually show up and do you get to shoot multiple guns?

[Hello from NorthWest Arkansas]

Where at in Fort Smith? I'd be interested!!

[Want to get 13 year old son in USPSA]

Hey - new to the forum. I have a 14 year old son and just bought him a G17. I have a G34 and it's nice that everything is interchangeable. Mags, holsters triggers etc.

I would recommend getting him something that would have as much in common with yours as possible. Let's you experiment with holsters etc:)

[Hello from NorthWest Arkansas]

Hey all. Long time gun enthusiast here. Not a new pistol shooter but very new to competitive shooting and action shooting. IDPA is a lot more prevalent here so I have shot a couple matches with IDPA and one local USPSA match.

Bought a Taurus pT 92 20 years ago when I was in ROTC. Shot that in my first match but couldn't find mags holsters etc. so I bought a G34. That was three months ago. Have put 5k rounds through it. My 14 year old son has started shooting with me so I traded my Taurus in and got a g17 for him and we have twelve mags between us.

Anyway - I am hooked and hope to improve my shooting and have some fun! Have an IDPA classifier coming up and am hoping to make expert in SSP. Would like to do more USPSA but there isn't much here.