How can I shoot faster?

[BillChunn]

Glock 3# trigger

Last night my friend and I shot my new limited gun I just got.

Is the new Limited gun a 1911- style gun? If so, transitioning from the Glock trigger (long pull and hold, then move trigger finger forward to reset) to the 1911 trigger (short pull, get the trigger finger off the trigger as fast as possible so it can reset) is going to take practice and an investment in your time to master. Two completely different mechanisms.

As stated, you are not going to win based on your splits. There are other places that time can be made up such as your draw, reloads, target transition, leaving a shooting position, arriving at the next shooting position looking over the sights at the first target, etc.

BC

Edited March 20, 2014 by BillChunn

[Chris iliff]

RobertLx,

I wouldn't get too wrapped up in this endeavor. Use Bill Drills and Berm Drills as a learning tools to watch the sights while shooting fast . I think solely focusing on fast splits is a waste of resources.

Learning how to shoot 2 A's on every target, despite target difficulty, in the appropriate time frame, will get you a lot further. I've proved it over and over to myself that splits don't win, A's do.

Applying the appropriate sight picture and trigger pull for every shot is way more important than a 1.8s Bill Drill. I am simply amazed how many people don't understand this. Everyone just wants to squirt 2 bullets at each brown target and 1 close to steel, then hope for hits on paper. That's crazyness.

IMO, YMMV... good luck!

Couldn't agree more with what Chad is saying. ^^^^^^^^^

I should have prefaced my post with this info, but I was thinking solely of how to answer your exact question, not necessarily anything else. I tend to take people literally, so I gave a literal answer. Basically how to go about shooting faster and learn to do it from a beginners perspective. If you want to shoot faster (better splits) do what myself and several others have mentioned.

Just understand that if you completely mastered fast consistent splits it won't equate to much of a leap in final placement at most matches. I think it is a worthwhile endeavor if that's what you really want to learn; and you may be a shooter that doesn't care about final placement. But if you do care, there are sooooo many other things that will get you more gains. In fact, splits would be the last thing I'd worry about.

Again, good luck.

Edited March 20, 2014 by Chris iliff

[benos]

Last night my friend and I shot my new limited gun I just got. I shot 6 rounds into the berm with no aiming and got crappy splits. I did not record them, but it was along the lines of .20, 28, 30, 24 .32. His were all low 20's and down to .15 splits.

Mine are all over the place and slow. Not sure how to get that finger working any faster.

My friend says its in my head and you hardly ever need to shoot more than 2 rounds anyways.

Between starting routine dry fire, and maybe bill drills when the weather gets a little warmer, Im not sure what else to do.

Sound like you might be too tense. Stop caring, relax and loosen up - just whip the pistol out there and crank away!

[GMB]

Last night my friend and I shot my new limited gun I just got. I shot 6 rounds into the berm with no aiming and got crappy splits. I did not record them, but it was along the lines of .20, 28, 30, 24 .32. His were all low 20's and down to .15 splits.

Mine are all over the place and slow. Not sure how to get that finger working any faster.

My friend says its in my head and you hardly ever need to shoot more than 2 rounds anyways.

Between starting routine dry fire, and maybe bill drills when the weather gets a little warmer, Im not sure what else to do.

Sound like you might be too tense. Stop caring, relax and loosen up - just whip the pistol out there and crank away!

That's what she said!!!!!

[benos]

Last night my friend and I shot my new limited gun I just got. I shot 6 rounds into the berm with no aiming and got crappy splits. I did not record them, but it was along the lines of .20, 28, 30, 24 .32. His were all low 20's and down to .15 splits.

Mine are all over the place and slow. Not sure how to get that finger working any faster.

My friend says its in my head and you hardly ever need to shoot more than 2 rounds anyways.

Between starting routine dry fire, and maybe bill drills when the weather gets a little warmer, Im not sure what else to do.

Sound like you might be too tense. Stop caring, relax and loosen up - just whip the pistol out there and crank away!

That's what she said!!!!!

[kylehb]

I came up with a little 'finger conditioning' routine, if you will, to improve nothing other than the speed at which my finger moves back and forth. Despite the fact that a lot of people thought I was weird or just out of my mind, It ended up working very well - I can now pull a trigger repeatedly almost as fast as I can click a mouse. However, I feel I must give you both sides of the story. Although it sounded great, (in fact so good that the timer periodically registered a few double taps as a single shot - which could just mean it was not the best timer) it wreaked havoc on my match scores - at times I think I was focusing more on how fast and close together my shots were than how well I was actually doing. Not only that but when I lit up an array of targets at top speed my hits were terrible.

I also recorded the split time difference between trigger pulls on a number of stages - shooting some at top speed and some at my normal rhythm. The result was this: on the average 30 round stage the cumulative effect was that pulling the trigger at top speed cut off an average of 2 seconds, the typical range was between 1.5 to 3 seconds. Of course even 1.5 seconds can make a huge difference at the end of the day. The problem was that the points I lost on those stages compared to others shot at a normal pace far outweighed the improvement in speed.

Anyhow, I approached finger speed the same way you approach speed of movement for any large muscle group. Using rubber bands as resistance I first determined my finger's 'one rep max' (hahaha I know this is rediculous) by adding more and more bands until I found the most I could possibly perform flexion (trigger pull motion) with. Then I did the same thing for the backward motion or finger extension movement. I split up the training into three days per week with a day in between each so I chose MWF. Day one was 6 sets of 3 using 70-85% of the 1RM with exactly 4 minutes rest between each set. Day two was 10 sets of 5 with 30-40% of the 1RM with 2:00 rest, emphasizing speed as much as possible. Day 3 was 80-90% of whatever I used on day 1 for 6 sets of 3 with 3:00 rest in between. I did this for both forward and backward movement.

[mese341]

bill drill

[Kyle7735]

The counting and shooting when the time is up is what got my splits consistent and fast. And now im down to my consistent .19s all day with my stock G34 trigger.

[glockified]

I agree with CB45. Concentrate on getting alphas and the speed will come!

[Moltke]

Do a bill drill and record the times / hits

Run your gun out of control at an almost reckless speed for a few 6rd strings while trying to keep up with the sights (target or no target, whatever). Go faster than you are comfortable.

Do another bill drill and record the times / hits, and compare results

Get used to seeing the sights fast, and you'll be shooting fast

Train yourself to naturally pull the trigger in the presence of an acceptable sight picture

[Onepocket]

What is a fast split at 7 yards?

[StraightUp_OG]

.12 - .14

[nitrohuck]

Really try and isolate your forearm muscles during practice. The trick, at least for me, seems to be finding the balance between a firm solid grip and relaxing everything else. Tension where necessary, and nowhere else.

Also as stated above, run a few extra bill drills