Getting better at steel without shooting steel

[UpYoursPal]

Hello shooters!  After a string of recent matches, I've found that I'm shooting a lot of extra shots on steel arrays and it's costing me quite a bit of time.  At my last match, as an example, the one thing that kept me from winning the largest stage of the match was the four extra shots I took on an array of three mini poppers at 15yds.  Granted, those are probably medium-difficulty targets, but I was trying to slow down and go one for one on the array, but I still ended up taking a bunch of extra shots and it cost me several seconds.

 

So now you see my issue.  Unfortunately I don't have any steel I can practice on, which further compounds the problem.  What I do have is a dry fire arrays of mini poppers and regular poppers that I integrate into my daily dry fire routine.  Typically I don't shoot these with a par time, but rather set the par for 10 seconds and shoot an array as many times as I can, or try to mix in an array with other targets, paying extra attention to getting good hits.  However, it doesn't seem to be helping as much as I need it to.

 

What other options are there for practicing steel without having actual steel to shoot at?

 

Edit: I should add that I shoot open/major

Edited May 6, 2021 by UpYoursPal

[Edwards30]

I'm only about a year into USPSA but at the beginning, steel was horrendous for me.  I was shooting production and would do multiple standing reloads while trying to hit steel plates at 10-15 yards.

I also do not have access to steel to shoot outside of matches so I ordered the Go Fast Don't Suck decal sticker pack and have been using those in dry fire.

I realized for me it wasn't just one thing that was making me miss.  It was a combination of not letting my gun settle while transitioning and jerking the trigger on precision shots.  Working the transitions is easy to verify in dry fire, I think for trigger, you just have to be honest in dry fire and call your shots.  You could always setup headbox only in live fire to work on precision as well.

[BoyGlock]

I try to use my live fire experience guide me in dry fire. Be very honest, and desciplined in df as in lf. 
Going or trying to be slow is not a guarrantee of error-free performance. Im just more carefull and descriminating in my sight pic and trigger pulls on hard targets. 
 

A Class Open ipsc here fwiw. 

[Boomstick303]

Probably need to video yourself shooting steel in a match to analyze exactly what you are doing wrong so you can isolate the issue and work on it. If you do not know what to fix how do you fix it?  Also, have you checked your equipment lately?  Optics do loose zero, screws come loose, etc. If something seems off (you slowed down and still missed steel) I always check equipment first.  I once had a brand new optic that essentially lost zero and was chasing my tail for a half a day due to equipment issues. 

[MattInTheHat]

I was playing golf with a friend recently and he asked an interesting question while we were discussing the LOCAP Nationals. "Are there days where you just don't have it, like in golf?" It was a really interesting question. After a bit of thought, I said no, and explained a bit about how it feels to shoot USPSA/IPSC, but I've thought about it quite a bit more.

 

The game we play is similar to hitting a 2-4 foot putt in golf. 2 feet is pretty easy with some practice, 4 feet is pretty easy too with a lot more practice. But given a ton of practice and all the time in the world, you're going to hit that 2 foot putt. So, we added time to the equation, which makes all the difference. At 15 yards I assume that if time is not a factor then you can hit that steel 99.9% of the time, yes? If not, different problem, go to the range and just learn how to line up the sights and operate the trigger well enough that the sights don't leave the target.

 

On a timer, you have a range of performance that is entirely dictated by yourself that puts you somewhere on that curve of "Never shot before" to "I can hit a paster at 15 yards." What you actually do is up to you, the gun and the sights and the trigger and the bullet didn't change, and they are far too accurate to blame for missing a steel at 15 yards. So you go faster and faster and your mind fills up with what came before and what comes next and most disturbingly, what comes IMMEDIATELY next. This really affected me the first day at LOCAP, less the second, and not much at all the third as I started to remember what I was doing. I saw that I was throwing D hits on the last shot of an array, meaning my brain was already off the current shot before it left the gun. Or, and I found this really interesting, I could maintain my shot focus for the first two moonclips but then I ran out of brain juice and the groups opened up. Simple lack of shooting matches for a long time, it's a skill that takes practice as well.

 

So if you're missing those steels, you aren't seeing a sight picture and/or cleanly pulling the trigger, full stop. WHY you are doing that is a personal thing, and something you have to dope out. HOW to fix it, is to go to the range and shoot the steel first slowly, accept nothing more than a couple of inches outside of the dead center. Speed up. When the group starts getting near the edge, stay at that speed and see if your body and brain can catch up and bring the group back down. If it does, keep speeding up and stopping, until you find your "out of control" speed, then back away from that. To be clear, I'm not talking about a perfect sight picture at all at 15 yards. For a mini popper, the sight picture I want is my whole front sight in the rear notch, but I would still execute the shot if one side or the other is closed off. At 25 yards, I'm going to want to see some light on either side, at 50 yards I'm going to make the sides match and the top match and see the corners of the front sight clearly.

 

When the groups are getting tighter, remember the sight picture and feel of the shot execution that leads to it. That's what you have to hold onto regardless of time. Maybe it's your first stage and your muscles are tight and you wait an extra .1 to get to that picture. Maybe you hit flow and the sights are already there before you can even get the trigger reset and moving again. But you wait for that picture and have enough brain left in the tank to execute the shot, every time.

Edited May 15, 2021 by MattInTheHat