How To Practice

[pjb45]

I was watching Matt Burkett's How to Practice DVD last night.

I was interested in his 50 yard practice idea. As he stated, " I like shooting at 50 yards because when the targets are closer they look so much bigger." He also starts out doing slow fire groups.

At the range today, I set up two hanging steel at 45 yards. They are smaller then a full-size but larger than just the A-zone.

I did what Matt talked about in the DVD, I took my time, had a good sight picture but I really paid attention to trigger control. I was very pleased with my results.

Typically out of 16 shots fired, I banged the steel 15 times. I did this for several magazines. Rarely would I miss two in a string of 16. Every time I missed, it was because I hurried the shot and yanked the trigger.

After about 60 rounds on one piece of steel, I start doing transistions. Same story, out of sixteen rounds, I would miss once. Sometimes in a 19 round string I would miss two but it was pretty rare. Each and every time I knew I had a miss because I did not pay attention to my trigger control.

I painted the steel every string so I could see how I was grouping. The odd part was my right target shot groups were much tighter than my left target. I am not sure what this means. Any ideas?

[Micah]

It might have to do with your index and shooting stance.

Welcome to the forums, btw!

[Flexmoney]

What did you notice/feel/see during all the hits ?

[j1b]

50 yards is tough. My suggestion on this is going to lead to more exercise than it will shooting - but I am a firm believer in the practice.

My first suggestion in shooting out beyond 25 yards or so is to shoot paper. I'm not a huge advocate of steel anyhow - but definitly not at longer ranges. Your sights are so important at that range, and I believe it is crucial to become solely dependant upon them and your trigger finger. Getting that confidence boost from a "clang" after the shot is nice - but it won't be there in a match.

So - what I'd do is shoot 4 shots on a paper target at 50 yards, contemplate where I believed those shots went - then walk down and confirm. If the correlation wasn't there, then figure out why. Ideally I'd do this with two shots at first - just so you can clearly distinguish what you saw with what happened.

I've told this story 1,000 times - but it was such a huge learning for me that I like to keep it in the forefront of my mind. When we got the 9X25's going, muzzle flip was non-existent. That was undeniably the gun that tought me the most about the dynamics of gun movement when shooting. One day I was shooting 25 yard targets and every now and again a shot would go way right, or way left and I couldn't correlate a dot picture to it. So I just started paying a ton of attention to the dot and what the gun was doing. Like that, I began to see it. Every now and again the gun would start moving (or I'd start moving it) just prior to the shot breaking. The dot was in the right spot when the shot broke, but the gun was beginning its movement and through freaky timing - I'd push the round.

In 100 shots I'd do it may 6 or 7 times. So it wasn't perpetual. But it WAS there. As soon as I became cognizant of it, I started seeing it more in matches. Shots I couldn't explain before were now common sense. Wasn't long after that I began controlling it better, and calling the shots when they happened.

The learning of the story for me may not be relevant to you. You may not do any of that. The fact is, I would have never noticed, or fixed, that issue if I didn't walk down and paste after two shots, or at max 4 shots per target. I would have seen those flyers, but after 16 rounds on a target, I wouldn't have had any kind of good educated guess on what bullet was what.

Sorry for the long post. Welcome to the forums and hope some of this made sense.

J

[kevin c]

Thanks, J1B, for reminding me of that. I'm no GM (not even M), so my technique isn't "perfect". To save time, I often get in the bad habit of only taping hits outside the A zone. That means, of course, that if there are no B/C/D hits, I am on, but still not calling the shot as accurately as I might/should, because I can't tell by looking exactly where that last shot went. Gotta make the extra effort to tape each string, and to do shot calling drills as well.

KC