Accuracy

[38supPat]

I wrote this up for my blog but I'll post it here as well for you guys...

Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas. Accuracy, Power, Speed, this is the motto for IPSC, the International Practical Shooting Confederation. The idea behind the sport was to balance these three things to find out what works in a practical context. In order to win you would have to figure out how to balance each to your advantage. Of course this all depends on your skill level and you have to find what works. Along the way however many shooters saw this as more of a contest of Speed, Speed, Speed. The big brown targets we use seem to lend themselves to the observation that we just fling lead at them and see who gets the best time. I’m going to explain a little about accuracy, why we need it, how it affects our score, how it controls our speed and how to work on it. I’ll mostly be focusing on its relevance to IPSC matches, but keep in mind that it bears the same weight if you are shooting any sport that involves speed and accuracy not limited to IPSC but also IDPA, Steel Challenge, and even some fixed time events like Action Pistol/Bianchi Cup. Also if you carry a gun think about what is written here and how it applies to you, speed and accuracy is just as important in CQB or any defensive use of a pistol.

What is accuracy? When we talk about accurate shooting many get the mental image of a tightly shot group on a paper target. But in the context of practical shooting where we don’t shoot groups, many only think of it as a difficult target, a tight partial target obscured by a no shoot or hard cover, a long shot or a small plate. I prefer to think of it as the ability to hit the highest scoring zone on the target in any and all circumstances. Now I know a few of you, ok maybe more than a few of you, will be thinking, “The A zone on an IPSC is still pretty big, especially when it’s close. So I don’t have to be that accurate.” Well that’s not really true, Saul Kirsch wrote in his book Thinking Practical Shooting, “Practical shooting is the skill of compromising accuracy for speed, while remaining inside the required target area.” You are trading precise shot placement for speed, if you do not have the ability to be accurate, even at close range, you have nothing to trade. Look at it this way, the old IPSC target has an A zone that measures 6”x 11” and it’s common to hear, “a fist sized group will get the job done” but does it? If we consider a fist sized group as roughly 4” that means to ensure an A zone hit you must aim at a 2” wide strip that’s barely 7” high. That’s half an inch narrower than a playing card. Set up a playing card at 7m and see how long it takes you to settle your sights on it. If on the other hand you develop your accuracy to where you can shoot a 1” group at the same distance, now you have an area that is 5” wide that you can place you sights in and be confident of a maximum point hit. Which do you think you can get your sights on faster, a 2” box or a 5” box? You now have something to trade for speed! As for accepting some C or D hits...well why would you? There is the illusion that dropping a few points is no problem as long as you shoot fast enough to make up for it. The problem is there is almost always someone who will shoot it at the same speed and more accurately. Continue this through a match and you will lose. A Bull’s-eye shooter would never accept a sight picture in the 7 ring as acceptable; an Action Pistol shooter would never let their sights settle in the 5 zone and consider it acceptable, why then would an IPSC shooter? If you aim for the A zone and make a bad shot, you’ll get a C, if you accept a C zone sight picture and make a poor shot where is it going? All of this just has to deal with hitting an open, full target at close range. What about something we commonly see, steel targets at longer distances? A Popper may look pretty big but how big of an area do you have to hold on one to drop it? Plates are even more of a challenge. When you miss one of these targets you have to reengage and each extra shot costs you time, usually a half second or more per shot. And that’s if you don’t run dry and have to reload because of the extra shots!

Ok, so we need to be accurate, but what does this mean. For many it means shooting slow, following the old standby of prep the trigger, slow steady squeeze and surprise break. We just don’t have time to do this in practical shooting. While it’s a good place to start in order to learn good trigger control it is just too slow of a process for action matches. What we need to learn is how to pull the trigger quickly without disturbing the sights or how much we can afford to disturb the sights for the shot we are attempting. Again this is a trade off situation, how much can you afford to give for the sake speed? Like the example given above we must have something to trade before we can make that trade off.

So let’s work on accuracy, like every other skill its best to start slow and work up. I like to do some groups off a rest, usually a sandbag. I’ll rest the dustcover on the bags with my hands in my normal two handed grip and rest them up against the bag. This way the gun is as steady as possible and aligning it and keeping it on target takes almost zero effort. I want all my focus on the sights and trigger. Working from a bag allows you to isolate everything down to just those two factors. If I’m working on strictly accuracy, I will align the sights on the center of the target and bring my focus back to the top center of the front sight blade and hold it there until the shot breaks, this should only take a very few seconds, any more and my eyes will start to glaze and lose focus. This makes the exercise a very visual one where you can pay attention to the relationship of the front sight and the trigger. Make no mistake, you can rest the gun and still shoot bad groups, or at least groups that are not up to the potential of the gun, even off a rest. You must execute proper trigger control to fire a decent shot; working off a bag is a good place to start so that you understand this. Next you can move to repeating this exercise from a freestyle platform. Adopt your normal stance and shoot a group using the same process, relax and lower the gun between shots. Do this at a distance you are comfortable with at first and then push the target back as you get better. Each shot must be made as well as you can, blasting a group in 3.5 seconds does not accomplish this, I constantly see competitors when asked to shoot a group blast 5 or 6 rounds at the target in a row. You are not doing yourself any favours doing this. All you accomplish with this is to train yourself to accept any shot good or bad and when you get the inevitable fist size group you tell yourself that it’s “acceptable” for IPSC. Fire these shots with the same precision you would from the bench and relax between shots to keep your arms from becoming fatigued. Learn what a good shot looks like. This is a good place (from the bench too) to learn about calling your shots. Calling your shot means being able to tell exactly where the sights were when the shot broke. Not where you wanted it to be, and not necessarily where the shot landed, but exactly where the sight was when the gun fired. If you can’t see this you are either blinking at the gunshot, or shutting off your vision at the point where you decided you wanted the shot to break, which is usually not the same as when it did break. A good exercise to learn to see your sights at this point is to look for the sight lift. At first you want to see the front sight lift out of the notch when the gun fires. Ideally you will want to track the sight through the whole process of lifting in recoil and returning to point of aim, in particular see how high the sight lifts at the peak of recoil. Once you can do this you should have a pretty damn good idea of where it was at the point the shot broke, you can now call your shots. If anyone thinks this isn’t possible, that it happens too fast, then you haven’t tried to see it. Even at full speed on an IPSC stage I am calling every shot, sometimes not as precisely as I want but I have a really good idea where every shot went. I can pretty much call each shot on a three shot burst out of a dot sighted full auto C8, an IPSC gun by comparison it is pretty easy.

Once you have gotten to the point of being able to shoot a decent group and call your shots you can start to work on trigger speed. I like to start with dry fire for this. I’ll warm up with some dry fire shots made with the precision I would use for normal group shooting. Next I will take a sight picture on a blank wall and press the trigger as quickly as I can and pay attention to the sight movement. If I see big movement in the sights, particularly in one direction, I want to find out why. What did I do to cause that movement? Did I press the trigger to the side? Did I have a muscle spasm in my grip that caused the gun to move? I’ll keep repeating this process until I see as little movement as possible. There will always be some movement, a fast trigger pull is never going to be as precise as one like you’d use in group shooting, you just want to get it as close as you can. When you feel confident with this you can move to the range. Start with some groups off the bag and some from a freestyle position, do this to reinforce proper trigger control and accuracy. I always start and finish every range session this way. Next grab your timer, if you don’t have a timer get one, they are every bit as important to training as your targets and your pistol, set the delayed beep for a random beep between 2-3 seconds. Start the timer and take a good sight picture on your target. I suggest using something smaller than a full sized IPSC target for this, start with a 4” square or circle and reduce the size as you get better. When the beep sounds immediately pull the trigger. You are looking for the shot to break around .2 of a second; this is most people’s average reaction time. You don’t want to give yourself time to think about the shot just force the quick shot. Where did the shot land? What did you see? The sight should have moved no more than what you saw when you tried this in dry fire and the shot should be in that area. If not what happened? If you didn’t see then you are blinking or not following through with your vision. Look for this on each attempt or go back to simple group shooting and pay attention. Your goal is to get your groups here as close as possible to your most accurate groups. Once you get good with this you need to discover where every shot you make on an IPSC stage falls between these two extremes. At this point you know what an absolutely precise shot looks like and you know how to pull the trigger fast, now you need to figure out which end of that scale the shot you are firing during a course of fire fits. Obviously a full target under five meters will be at the extreme end of pulling the trigger as fast as you can (I’m talking individual shots here, not splits) and a partial target at 25m or a popper at 50m is going to be near the other end of the scale. There’s no short cut here, a good drill is to place 8” paper plates on stands and station them starting at 5m and place one every 3m out to 32m, that’s 10 plates. Now either from the draw, or from the high ready, place one shot on each plate. How much trigger control did you need to make each shot? Try this until you can place shots on each plate in the minimum time. Alternately you can use the walk back drill, place a single plate on a stand and start at 5m, shoot five shots individually, then move back two paces and repeat and then take another two steps back and repeat the drill. Continue this until you fail to keep all five shots on the plate. Mix these drills into your regular practice sessions and keep working on it.

Make no mistake, accurate shooting takes work, it is probably one of the hardest skills to learn and the easiest to lose. It is every bit as important to your skill set as learning to control recoil, shoot on the move, or enter and exit positions. It may not be as fun, but until you can shoot accurately you’ll never be fast.

Pat

These two groups were shot using the timer drill, the first is a slow fire 10 shot group at 7m with my dot sighted .22, no times just solid aim and slow trigger press. I pulled a couple which I blame on cold hands...lol

The second group was fired using the timer, delay set at random 2.5-3.5 seconds, break the shot at the sound of the beep, all shots but one broke in the .14-.19 range after the beep. the only one that didn't is the shot that is high right between the c and o in .com, that one broke at .28. On that shot an interesting thing happened, when the beep sounded the dot was not where I wanted it and caused me to pause (subconsciously refused to pull the trigger) and then I forced myself to fire it anyways throwing it out of the group. I should have just not fired it after my vision caused me to pause, but it was interesting to observe what went through my mind in that 1/10 of a second. The other shot out of the group was from a plain old fashioned bad pull, I threw the shot.

Notice though that the other 8 shots on each group fell into almost the exact same sized area. There is almost no difference between a slow fire prep and squeeze vs. a fast pull.

[Supermoto]

can you throw a paragraph or 2 in there, the wall of text is hard to read

[38supPat]

Lol, sorry, there is paragraphs but I did a straight cut and paste and it ended up like this. I`ll try to fix it for ya.

[38supPat]

Better?

[Supermoto]

Good write up.

[Joe L]

Thanks, Pat, excellent food for thought and practice. I've been working a lot on accuracy while recovering from shoulder surgery.

Joe

[calvary45]

Awesome post Pat, I have always done the timer drills but always just concentrated on reaction time never even using a target. My next range time I will do try them now with a 3x5 card at 7yds.

[38supPat]

Yeah, I turned that drill around a bit when I noticed that some people shoot very decent groups when using it.

[1911aow]

Very informative, thanks Pat. With your permission I will print this and hand it to some of the newer shooters at my home club?

[38supPat]

Sure!

[dravz]

Thanks for the post, Pat.

"If you don't have accuracy, you have nothing to trade for speed." I like that, it's a good soundbite I can easily commit to memory.

[Magnus DUX]

Thanks for the post, Pat.

"If you don't have accuracy, you have nothing to trade for speed."

I saved that quote as one of the best ones I heard.

Thanks for the excellent write up.

[Recon'sHide]

Your writings make it crystal clear and hit a home run for me! Thanks for helping us become the better shooters.

Accuracy, Power and speed---I'm in!

David

[edit...long quote]

Edited March 8, 2012 by Flexmoney

[Rotisiv]

excellent write up!

[jdphotoguy]

Your insight is much appreciated. I've been playing at this sport for over a year and a half and while I want to improve, until recently I was not actively doing anything to move my skills along other then shooting a match several times a month. While all that time behind the trigger has helped in some areas, it has also allowed me to pick up and ingrain bad habits.

My new practice sessions will focus on fundamentals incorporating your suggestions and training drills.

Thanks again

JD

[Flexmoney]

Better?

This is the fixed version ?!?!!

Good content, Pat.

[38supPat]

Yes

[bigstick0000]

Thanks for your writeup, it really put to words a lot of what I was trying to figure out myself. Some really great info laid out for a lot of us. Really liked this " All you accomplish with this is to train yourself to accept any shot good or bad and when you get the inevitable fist size group you tell yourself that it’s “acceptable” for IPSC." This is so true.

[Wade M]

Good summary of Saul's books. I just finished reading "Perfect practice" and "Thinking Practical sSooting" and its all covered in there but requires a lot of reading. This would be a quick print to read now and then to refresh our memories about how important accuracy really is in our sport. I tried the timer drill when I read it and was suprised how long I was taking to react to the beep.

[38supPat]

Lol, that timer drill is an eye opener! It's funny but for such a simple drill I have found it helpful in so many different ways. From learning to react to the beep to seeing how a quick shot like that affects accuracy its always teaching something.

[Chris iliff]

Pat that is what I've needed to read. Thanks for writing it.

Manny suggested a similar drill, as your 1 shot each plate drill, but with only three targets widely spaced, exact same concept aimed at developing the same skills.

Once again thanks, great info.

Edited March 24, 2012 by Chris iliff

[ozdogg5]

Awesome write up!

[g mac]

Thank you for the very informative and useful write up. I am a beginner Open Gun shooter, and noticed some of the veteran OPen shooters in my club shoot very fast, but sometimes sacrifice accuracy..lots of alpha/charlies. However, they still seemed to be ahead of the slower, but all Alpha hits shooters. Thanks again for sharing your wisdom:)

[38supPat]

I think we all at some point end up shooting far more charlies in a match than we would like...lol

One thing I have noticed, particularily in Production (being scored minor only) is that the shooters see the need for lots of A's...but take WAYYYYYY too much time to fire them. This boils down to lack of accuracy practice. As I said above, if you know you are not an accurate shooter but are shooting for A's you end up having to focus your sight on a very small area of the A zone in order to hit it and that takes a long time. A really good shooter will want to drive his focus on the target to a very small area but can accept the sights not falling directly on it because he/she knows that the shot will still fall in the A zone, the less accurate shooter knows he must place the sights EXACTLY on that spot or he won't likely have an A.

And some folks wrap themselves up too much worrying about shooting all A's. Our primary goal should be to shoot all A's but realize that our sport is points AND time based. if you take too long to ensure an A, you probably should have just shot the C and moved on and your score will be higher.

[jun_1911]

Hello, Pat!

Great information and clear instruction.