Travis Tomasie Tip

[TRev1911]

During a class in KY while practicing movement drills during a downpour Travis gave us the following good natured tip - " If your practice these drills for 9 hours a day for 10 years you may actually get good at them." He went on to say " It is truely amazing what the human body can do with enough repetition."

[Jake Di Vita]

And I've had dozens of people contact me wondering why they don't get better practicing 15 minutes a day...

*sigh

[lugnut]

Guess I shouldn't complain that I'm where I'm at now. I feel like I've plateaued and I know why. If I don't put more time into this nothing will change.

[Jim Rusert]

10,000 hours required to achieve mastery in almost anything according to Malcom Gladwell in the book "Outliers".

I highly recommend it along with his book "Blink".

[mildot1]

At the Ill class last august Travis also commented that by doing the dryfire drills perfectly a slow diliberate cadence would cut the time it takes to acheive the muscle memory required to master the drill.

Case in point

A friend of mine has trouble with grabbing the second mag back on his belt instead of the first while shooting matches. He goes to the correct one when he dry fires at home. I asked him "how many times have you practiced that move"? The answer was about 200. I responded that after 2500 the problem would probably not exist.

The way ya get to carnegie hall is practice!

[Graham Smith]

It is truely amazing what the human body can do with enough repetition.

I harken back to my days shooting archery. The fellow who was my mentor said that you had to learn to "not think about shooting". During practice, he would have me concentrate on one little thing at a time. It didn't matter that much about how well I shot, but how well I did that one little thing. Pretty soon I was able to stop thinking about the little things and let my training take over, then it was time to concentrate on "the whole of it".

Edited May 4, 2010 by Graham Smith

[CenTX]

I took a couple of five day courses from Jeff Cooper in the late 1979 and 1980. There were hours and hours of repetition standing in the hot sun to learn each step of the draw, firing, reloading, failure drills, etc.. As ann example, the draw was broken down into steps and you did step one over and over dry fire. Then step two was added and you did step one and two over and over again, then step three was added and it was 1,2,3 over and over again. Step four was added and so on. Everything was done slow and deliberate over and over before you started working on speed. The whole time you were doing these drills Jeff and the other instructors were going up and down the line correcting any flaws in your technique. At the end of each day we were told to practice in our motel rooms. After spending 5 days with way more time doing dry fire then live fire, the skills were burned into muscle memory.

If you can't do it right, slow and deliberate, you won't do it right fast..

[pjb45]

Outliers is a great book. It ranks up there with "With Winning in Mind."

Mike Seeklander at USSA has some great stuff along the same lines. Your conscious mind trains your sub-conscious. Mike likens it to a subroutine in a computer program. Your training develops the subroutine. If you do your training correctly when in a match the mind goes out and enacts the subroutine subconsciously. You want to get the right subroutine so Mike talks about training scars, building the wrong subroutine which is enacted rather than the correct subroutine. He says it is important to train correctly.

I was talking with Mike about how I missed a shot at L10 Nationals one year. His reply was I trained myself to make that error. Instead of always employing the firing cycle rules in training I would get lazy and skip shot confirmation sometimes. Well when it came to that stage, I grab the lazy subroutine rather than the correct one and I pulled my head away before I confirmed my shot and got a Mike. I spent a lot of rounds rebuilding the correct firing sequence in my subconscious mind. It has really paid off. I get alot more As and a whole lot fewer Mikes. In the SSNationals, I had one mike due to rushing and not running the correct sequence. Another because it was a very hard head shot A.

Saul K emphasizes the same philosophy in his book about Perfect Practice.

[TreblePlink]

It was a great class - poor weather, but I still got re-motivated to practice more. I can clearly see the specific areas I need to work on, and it is obvious that if I can improve a bit in those areas it will help me a bunch in a match. The only thing is, almost all of the excellent trainers assume that you can dryfire six times a week, and live fire almost that frequent. Many of us simply cannot devote that much to the sport on a consistent basis - but our goals fall short of GM in a year too. I'd be happy moving up one click (to A land) in one or two years. I hope it's possible to do that with one monthly match and weekly live fire. We'll see.

During a class in KY while practicing movement drills during a downpour Travis gave us the following good natured tip - " If your practice these drills for 9 hours a day for 10 years you may actually get good at them." He went on to say " It is truely amazing what the human body can do with enough repetition."

[Corey]

i can usually dry fire 5-6 times a week for an hour or so (either before or after work). no way could i live fire that much, once a week if I'm lucky. not enough time or money for it right now. maybe one day, haha