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shooting around barricades


ErikW

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What's the best way to shoot around a barricade?

a) break your wrists so the gun is straight up and down even though you and your arms are leaning at an angle

B) maintain the same platform with your arms making the same triangle and your head in the same relation to it, just tilt the whole platform

c) other (please elaborate)

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i usulally shoot around a barricade with the same shooting triangle. I found this is the fastest way to hit alphas. sometimes your body is contorted but its part of our sport.

I have never encountered a barricade that will not allow the normal triangle. if i do, i will never hesitate breaking the wrist to get to the a zone, though the follow up second shot will be slower.

see what i need to see

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I asked the question knowing about the TGO lesson. I've seen more than a few wide barricades with narrow boxes or fault lines lately. Sunday I noticed most people breaking their wrists to hold the gun straight up. It occurs to me it's going to recoil very strangely doing that and the sights would be difficult to follow. I thought maintaining the triangle would be difficult with the Open gun and I'd lose the dot but I didn't.

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I use the TGO triangle whenever I can. However, since I'm short and have short arms I had to break the triangle on the right side of that barricade on stage 7 for the left most target.

Those have been showing up a lot lately. I think it's a conspiracy against short people. I'm going to battle it with low ports and barrels for the next match. :D

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Guest Larry Cazes

Erik, I think the barricade at stage 7 this last sunday was unnecessarily difficult for everyone who I saw shoot it. The fault lines should have extended to the edge of the barricade.

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I agree and I hate those stages where the "shooting challenge" is to contort you into awkward positions. However, I wasn't the stage designer and I wasn't the M.D. As part of the Match Committee, I insisted the three-string single stage be broken down into three stages and that targets were removed from each stage to make them 8-round neutral, thus conforming to USPSA rules.

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Erik,

We had a nasty stage from hell for limited shooters, 8" plates at 15 yards WAAYYYY around a barrel. I think keeping the triangle is good, but sometimes I find it works to twist the wrist forward to get around a barricade on especially awkward angles. I don't mind shooting sideways, but I hate trying to keep the gun upright, it just seems to mess up the recovery.

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On Matt Burkett's IDPA DVD, he does String 1 on Stage 3 of the classifier (from behind a Bianchi barricade, two on three IDPA targets, six feet apart at 20 yards, RWR, two on three from the opposite side of the barricade) in 8 seconds and change. And he holds the gun straight up and down, breaking his wrists to do it. In Jerry Barnhart's video series, when demonstrating the barricade, he does the same thing.

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That's a good question, and I don't feel there is one answer. And none of the options are "easy."

The details of the scenario dictate your response, and within the same scenario different folks will deal with it differently.

As a general rule, I only would break my upper index if the scenario forced me to, just to shoot at the targets. But the problem is that the "tilt" involved often causes shooters to drop points, on targets where they normally wouldn't. So this is something you should train. You need to know where you need to aim to shoot the A's before hopping into the barricade.

Now and then you might find it advantageous to break your index so your sights remain looking normally perpendicular. But then the pistol will track funny because of that, so the best thing is to experiment on various array's in practice until you start to get a feel for it.

Don't forget that your goal is shoot the points, so experiment to find the best way for you to do that.

be

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