Training drills to focus on?

[5early]

I'll start by saying I feel very good about my performance overall. This was my first major and it was a great experience. But there's a lot of progress to be made and I'm ready to kick up the training and get it done.

Ok. Here's what I'm thinking. There's another video of James Oliver who won SSP Expert. It looks like he's just a little more crisp with his movements and transitions. My movement between positions looks ok but I'm trying to be smooth and slide the gun into my view on the transitions in order to not overswing. I need to trust my index more, which will take dryfire time, and break the shot when I see the front sight in the notch.

Another thing. On followup shots I seem to lose the front sight, having to refocus in order to verify sight alignment. I see the sight. The shot breaks. I see the sight begin to move. Then my vision loses focus slightly and I have to reacquire the sight. This happens in group shooting as well. I've videoed my eyes and I'm not blinking. I'm double plugged most of the time in practice and at the match. Maybe I'm just thinking of this the wrong way and my body is fighting my mind in some expected versus reality situation.

So what do you guys see. Where is the low hanging fruit (I'm sure there's plenty)?

[CHA-LEE]

This is what I see….

First stage – Why did you take the time to put your second mag on your belt? You could have left the second mag on the night stand and reload straight from the night stand. This would have saved at least 2 – 3 seconds on your stage run. In the second shooting position why are you getting so unbalanced that you need to shoot on one foot. Always use a wider and lower stance so you can keep your feet planted and simply shift your weight left to right as you cut around the threashold of the door.

Second stage – Were you mandated to engage those targets in a specific tactical order? If not then you could have better optimized the stage by shooting the steel first and then the drop turner followed by the close paper then the swinger. Then finish on the far away target on the left. This would have kept you shooting the whole time without needing to wait for anything.

Forth Stage – Watch your movent from one side of the shooting area to the other. Are you taking a stroll in the park? When you are not shooting and moving to the next shooting position move aggressively. When you need to run, RUN like your life depended on it. Another thing to watch for is having the gun up and ready to shoot before you enter the shooting position. Getting into the shooting position then raising the gun to shoot is a huge waste of time.

Fourth Stage – If you are going to shoot from a strong hand side biased stance, why not start with your feet in that position? Maybe your feet had to be touching some X’s or something so you couldn’t?

Sixth Stage – When you start this stage you should have taken a big step to the left as you draw the gun. This would have allowed you to shoot all of the standing targets from one position and then have less distance to travel when shooting the weak hand section. Another thing to consider is that taking a knee takes a long time to get into that position. You could have kept your left foot on the ground and just squatted on that leg to get low enough to shoot the one handed stuff.

Seventh Stage – On the first three targets you shoot them right to left. In a situation like this where you have to move latterly wile engaging targets its usually better to engage the targets in the same direction as you are moving. This keeps you from twisting your body up more than it should be. If you shot the targets from left to right then you could have moved more aggressively to the second shooting position while engaging the targets. Its hard to see where all of the targets are located in the second position or the timing of it. So I can’t give any suggestions there. The one thing I found funny is that through the whole video there is someone in the back “Gaming” the stage. I thought that gaming wasn’t allowed in IDPA

Stage Eight – Given the lighting its hard to see what is going on here.

Stage Ten – You obviously lost track of your stage plan here in the first position. Even though you are not suppose to air gun the stages in IDPA you still need to program them correctly so you can execute your plan.

Stage Eleven – You tend to shoot to slide lock so you can dump the mag instead of retaining it. When you have an opportunity to move while reloading you should retain the mag then finish the reload. It takes way longer to move to the next position, shoot one shot, reload, then finally start reengaging the targets. Simply retain the mag then load as you are moving to the next position.

I am not a regular IDPA shooter so some of my advice may not be right given the rules they use. But from what I can see you need to work on hauling ass when you are moving and not shooting. You also need to work on having the gun up and ready to shoot before you enter the shooting position. These are two things that you can practice at home without even firing a single round.

[5early]

"gaming" is of course allowed in IDPA. It is afterall a game. "rehearsing" however is not ... And that is what they were doing. There was a surprising amount of this tolerated at the match. And I'm in favor.

Good stuff. some of the points were rules related. Low cover requires a knee on the ground. The shooting order was partially mandated. Near to far as available. I'll cover some of the others later but thanks for your reply. I'll work on hauling butt between shooting positions and having the gun up and ready. I really appreciate the tips.

[5early]

Ok. I'm back with more time now.

Stage 1- my fault with sticking the mag on my belt and poor foot placement at the door. I thought the added movement of going back to the table would take longer but I wasn't planning on having so much trouble getting it in the pouch. The shots at the door were head shots at 3 yrds and I thought it better to lean more and not adjust my base. Just poor setup.

Stage 2- near to far priority on the targets. I think it would have been faster to go near left, far left, steel, swinger, drop turner, far right. I'm just not sure I could have pulled it off. Dave Pruitt (gm) did it and it was smoking!!!

Stage 3- dark house killed me. Need to practice more with the light. I'm not sure it would help but I don't use a fiber optic front and I had trouble seeing the front sight and the target at the same time. Does anyone have experience here? Does the fiber optic front stand out at all with a flashlight from the rear or slightly over the slide?

Stage 4- yep. Like I'm in molasses. From the lean to get to the pop-up-and-hide (?) target I should have drop stepped to get going faster.

Stage 5- there was a weight on the leash that had to be off the ground and it took a long pull to get it up. Normally, my strong hand stance is much more squared up. I dropped a lot of points on this one.

Stage 6- I see exactly what you're saying on the big step left.

Stage 7- makes sense. Shoot in the direction of movement.

Stage 8- only thing here was getting the reload before the first movers disappeared.

Stage 10- first stage we shot. The movers were spring loaded and then went behind a wall. You had to move to the outside to re-engage. They went faster than I thought and I couldn't get two aimed shots off on the one on the right. So I had to change plans on the fly. I should have been more conservative and shot the one on the left and moved immediately to the right position. Or I could just learn to transition faster . They were quick!

Stage 11- two bobbles with foot placement. One I was afraid of getting a cover call and the last position I didn't go far enough and had to lean way out. The reloads can't be done when moving from cover even if you've engaged the targets you're exposed to.

Stage 12- I was a little slow on my time but I was happy only dropping 3 points out to 35 yards. I've struggle with accuracy and some hard work is paying off there.

Good insights CHA-LEE. I appreciate your time. It gives me more to think about and that's a good thing.

Anyone have any help with the vision thing? Is this pretty normal or is there specific drills I can do to help?

Edited March 26, 2011 by 5early

[JayJayJay]

Great video!