Nationals Critique

[MikeRush]

Nationals was a blast! Like area 1, I had 2 cases of trigger freeze, and a pair of failures to seat my mag. I have been working on trying to let the sights tell me when I need to shoot and getting set up to shoot and leaving positions faster. My stage finishes were all over the map, with a 12th place and a 200 something-th place. I finished at 61% and I am a B so I definitely have some room to improve. On the stages where I finished well (shoot house, stages 20 and 22) I felt no sensation of rushing or speed- I felt like I was in total control. Stages 1, 12, and 16, not so much. I know I need to work on my strong/weak hand shooting- but what else should I put more emphasis on? I am ramping up training for area 2, so any feedback is welcome!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksyYcEZC8dg

[motosapiens]

Hey Mike, did you see you made the front page of the local paper in st george? I was working stage 8, I thought you shot pretty well there.

[Sarge]

I only watched half of the video but saw the mags fall I think. Looks like both were reloads. I would download the mags by a round or even two to make sure they seat first time every time.

[Nimitz]

I only watched the first couple of stages but noticed that every time you had to move only a couple of steps you opened up your weak hand grip which then forced you to have to take time to rebuild it when you reached the targets. Try pulling the gun back into your body if you only need to take a step or two but do not release your grip. This way as you approach the next array all you need to do is extend your gun and you'll find that you will be shooting the targets much earlier and saving time. This is very easy to train in dry fire ....

[Nimitz]

also, when faced with PPs that are stacked behind each other it's usually faster to shoot across them then wait for the front one to fall ... does depend on the stage setup though ...

[bullsi45]

mike looks like when u are moving on stages 1/2 u got your finger in the gun as far i know u if u are not shoot ing at a target and moving you finger must be out of the gun. i say this becasuse i had a freind dq at a area match for doing this

[Cd662]

At 1:30, did you have to take that shot? It sounds like you already engaged a target with two shots, then you ate up all that time getting the last round in the gun.

[MikeRush]

Thanks for the feedback so far!

I saw the online album from the newspaper, wasn't able to get my hands on a hard copy. Stage 8 was a fun stage!

I really need to sort out the mag seating problem. I had issues with my tuned 140s with SNLs that I normally load to 20 (sometimes 21) that I didn't seat on 12, then after that I loaded 20 in a friends spare 19 reloadable mag. After 5k rounds without a hiccup my STI became a nosediving machine, I took too much off the back of the lips to fit the gauge. I definitely will load down so that I don't risk not seating it like that. It cost me far more time than any extra planned reload.

I will work on keeping my grip solid, I didn't even know I had that issue- must be a stage walkthrough/dryfire scar. I have certainly noticed if the gun is recoiling too high or is inconsistent it is from lack of support hand pressure.

I will keep the trigger finger issue in mind, when I am moving unless its for some distance I just barely pull it out of the trigger guard and don't index it on the frame like I do on the reload- perhaps I should, I absolutely do not want to get a DQ over a misunderstanding.

The shot at 1:30 cost me a ton of time, I had pulled a shot into hard cover and tried to make it up right away but had my first nosedive issue. Timer was at 19.05 before the make up shot, 4 seconds I certainly should have taken the mike!

Again, thanks to all for the feedback so far!