How to record/log live fire drills

[AEuropa]

This may be a question seeking an answer for an issue that doesn't actually exist, but here goes:

For my live fire training, I need a way to easily compare day-to-day performance on the "standard" drills.

For example, today I did 15 Bill Drills and 6 El Prez. Obviously, while I'm at the range I make a note of each run and the hits, but for comparison purposes, that seems a bit unwieldy. Instead, I'm thinking about using some type of "time plus" scoring so that I can easily compare the average and best performances from one day to the next. I was thinking about using hit factor, but I'm not sure if that's super helpful for this purpose.

Data:

Bill Drill - 2.97, 3.37 1C, 2.58 2C, 2.75 1C, 3.12, 2.93, 2.52 1C, 2.66, 2.67 2C, 2.94, 2.71, 2.98 1C, 2.78, 2.71, 2.52.

El Prez - 8.04 1C, 7.34 3C, 7.63 1C, 7.83 3C, 7.11 clean.

So, is there a good way to distill this information down to an Average and Best so that I can more quickly compare one day to the next? Or perhaps I'm overthinking this...?

[Greg in VA]

Excel spreadsheet using avg for the total, set up by days then you look to see if your getting better.

[AEuropa]

Right, but how do you determine the final "score" by factoring in non-A zone hits?

Using El Prez from the above example, I could list the average in 2 ways (that I can think of)

7.59 -3.2 pts

7.99 (using 0.25 sec time penalty per C)

[Nimitz]

you are over thinking this ....

our sport uses hit factor to determine score so If you want to get an overall sense of how you're doing as time progresses just shoot the drill as many times as you want for the session, record total hits & total time and you will get an average hit factor for that day which you can turn into your average percentage on that classifier for that day. Done this way, over time you can see if you are improving or not. Knowing your score on an individual run of a classifier in training is very misleading unless it is your first cold run of the day since this is how you will do it at a match. Shooting a 95% one time on El Pres is meaningless by itself if it was the 17th run of the morning for you ....

When I was doing USPSA training full-time (3x/week) I selected about 6 different classifiers that represented a wide range of skills and then once every 2 weeks I would setup one or 2 classifiers to run. I would start out the session by running the 2 classifiers once as a cold stage run & record that score just like in a match. Then I would go back and start running them multiple times but didn't score the targets until I was done ... just record run times. Once done I would then get the total hits & calculate an ave HF for the classifier & determine an ave percentage score

So in my spreadsheet I'd be tracking cold stage runs & ave percentage score over time. A very simply, efficient way to see if I was progressing over time ...

Edited March 9, 2016 by Nimitz

[AEuropa]

That makes sense for many of the drills that I plan to run regularly.

I think what was throwing me off was that I hadn't actually looked at the math to compare HFs and didn't realize the fairly significant disparity between say a 2.5 clean Bill Drill and a 2.6 1C.

I guess what I was trying to avoid was comparing a 0.03 HF difference from 1 week to the next, but in reality, if I'm making steady improvement and using a decent sized pool of "baseline" drills to rotate from week to week, then it shouldn't be an issue for a LONG time. And really, if a certain drill gets to the point where I'm making such minuscule improvements every few weeks, then maybe it's time to rotate in a new drill for something that is probably a bigger weakness with more room to improve.

[Nimitz]

Anytime you have been working on a drill for a while and after 3 sessions in a row you are unable to achieve a new personal best it's time to put that drill aside and work on other stuff ... It's very easy to get tunnel vision and wrapped up in numbers that don't mean anything ....

[motosapiens]

It's very easy to get tunnel vision and wrapped up in numbers that don't mean anything ....

I agree with this. I tend to focus on just a few standard drills, and I only record the first and/or 2nd run on them, because I don't think the 10th run is really relevant to what I can actually perform on demand. Then again, I don't usually do 10 runs of any drill. for me training like that seems to suck me into the fast-but-crappy vs. accurate-but-slow cycle.

So I tend to try to focus on small chunks, like individual splits or time between two positions, and then record a couple things, like a 15 yard el pres, a new personal best on bill drill (I no longer count anything that is not all A's), the number of alphas on a shoot-on-the-move drill, etc... Mostly I'd rather shoot and pay attention to what the gun is doing than write stuff down.

[AEuropa]

I don't usually do 10 runs of any drill. for me training like that seems to suck me into the fast-but-crappy vs. accurate-but-slow cycle.

...snip...

Mostly I'd rather shoot and pay attention to what the gun is doing than write stuff down.

As I get better, I definitely see myself getting to this point when the shooting part becomes sub-conscious. Right now though, consistency is a big part of the overall picture for me and more reps reenforces what to do versus what not to do.

[GunBugBit]

I capture my data much as you did in your example.

I don't feel there's much to analyze as far as the numbers go, it's just good to know where I was some weeks or months ago.

What I think about is: how can I move to the next level and stay there? The notes I write about what I was seeing and feeling during the range session are useful. It's also useful to watch myself in recordings from the head-cam and external camera. An upcoming project is to set up small stages with movement and reloads, such as those shown in Ben Stoeger's Skills and Drills, and record myself running them. Drills like the Bill and the El Prez are great though, I'll always return to them to keep working on the fundamentals.

One more thought: consider sandwiching your live fire between dry fire sessions. That is, dry fire for a while, go to the range and practice live-fire, and dry fire again when you get home, all in the same day, always thinking about everything you're doing. Why are you doing it and what could you do better? I bet you'll see rapid improvements from that.