"Cold marksmanship" vs. practical shooting

[JJN]

I've been stewing lately on the definitions of marksmanship and practical shooting. I've landed on some definitions and am interested in what the best way to teach to new shooters.

I define practical shooting as the techniques of marksmanship and gun handling that account for adrenaline and exertion. Often, practical shooting diverges from what I would call "cold marksmanship," or what works best when everything is calm and relaxed.

Most mainstream shooting instruction seems to start with "cold marksmanship" and then make adjustments as required when it doesn't hold up under stress. Does practical shooting require a foundation of cold marksmanship?

Here's one example I've noticed in the small, local match I run. Lots of shooters group really well in the chest of an IDPA target, but will shank a headshot. My diagnosis is that they loosen up their grip in an attempt to be more precise, get the perfect sight picture, and then their brain says "GO NOW" and they shank the trigger. When I coach people, I will tell them to confirm grip on a tight shot and get an acceptable, not perfect, sight picture.

I'd be grateful for anyone's thoughts on my delineation between cold marksmanship and practical shooting and on which one should form the foundation.

Thanks,
Jon

[GJM]

Another perspective is stand and shoot versus shooting with movement and multiple positions. Some classifier oriented shooters can be pretty impressed with their ability to stand and deliver but when you add movement and multiple positions, things change.

[MickAK]

Practical shooting is what I'm doing when the other guy is too fast and cold marksmanship is what he's doing when he's too accurate.

[JRV]

I don’t think these are concepts that can be mushed together. Stress affects marksmanship, but the distinction between “shooting without stress” and “shooting with stress” isn’t a binary like that. It has nothing to do with shooting and everything to do with stress. The mechanical demands of marksmanship never change. Take that out of the variable.

Practical shooting is a sport that requires time-based marksmanship and athletic movement. Those demands, especially in a peer-group environment, can be stressful.

What you are witnessing is negative stress—whether it’s the distress of competition in general and/or the perceived difficulty of a single target—making your local shooters buckle under pressure. Marksmanship skills that are set-in-stone (an IDPA headbox is a big-enough target at common distances) are being forgotten in the moment because the shooters are psyching themselves out. They are getting the jitters. The yips, in sports talk.

The stress management skills necessary to stop screwing up aren’t necessarily tied to marksmanship. Competitive shooters need mindful stress inoculation. Shooting fast drills or difficult targets in the absence of real stress can’t prepare them to meet the same marksmanship demands under stress.

Shooting under competitive stress can help. It’s probably the easiest way to stress inoculate, but it isn’t the exclusive way to build stress management skills. That is why it’s not a binary delineation like you proposed: anything that causes repeatable real stress can be used for stress inoculation, so long as the person can mindfully contextualize stress. It doesn’t have to be shooting. Tournament golf. Tournament tennis. Lifting at a powerlifting meet. Martial arts training. Speed dating. Public speaking. Playing music for an audience. Rock climbing. Stress management is about building the habit of contextualizing distress and visualizing success in spite of it.

You are witnessing people choke because they have the yips. It’s not the technique itself falling apart. It’s a mental problem with a mental solution, and it’s not something that can be “taught” like marksmanship skills.

[feudist]

I've always heard the term "cold" used in conjunction with the first shots or drill of a training session, as in "Do the drill cold", as opposed to repping it out. Cold drills assess your on demand ability.
That's one very good thing about competition. You only get one go at each stage(usually), so it's much harder to deceive yourself that you have, for example, a two second Bill Drill, when in fact you have a two second Bill Drill on the fifth attempt.
This is also the rationale behind using Variable and Random training schemes in practice. They develop on demand attributes more than Block training does. But they are kind of sucky to actually do.

[JJN]

I've always heard the term "cold" used in conjunction with the first shots or drill of a training session, as in "Do the drill cold", as opposed to repping it out. Cold drills assess your on demand ability.
That's one very good thing about competition. You only get one go at each stage(usually), so it's much harder to deceive yourself that you have, for example, a two second Bill Drill, when in fact you have a two second Bill Drill on the fifth attempt.
This is also the rationale behind using Variable and Random training schemes in practice. They develop on demand attributes more than Block training does. But they are kind of sucky to actually do.

Good point, maybe "relaxed marksmanship" or "sedate marksmanship" would convey what I am trying to get at.

[JJN]

I don’t think these are concepts that can be mushed together. Stress affects marksmanship, but the distinction between “shooting without stress” and “shooting with stress” isn’t a binary like that. It has nothing to do with shooting and everything to do with stress. The mechanical demands of marksmanship never change. Take that out of the variable.

Practical shooting is a sport that requires time-based marksmanship and athletic movement. Those demands, especially in a peer-group environment, can be stressful.

What you are witnessing is negative stress—whether it’s the distress of competition in general and/or the perceived difficulty of a single target—making your local shooters buckle under pressure. Marksmanship skills that are set-in-stone (an IDPA headbox is a big-enough target at common distances) are being forgotten in the moment because the shooters are psyching themselves out. They are getting the jitters. The yips, in sports talk.

The stress management skills necessary to stop screwing up aren’t necessarily tied to marksmanship. Competitive shooters need mindful stress inoculation. Shooting fast drills or difficult targets in the absence of real stress can’t prepare them to meet the same marksmanship demands under stress.

Shooting under competitive stress can help. It’s probably the easiest way to stress inoculate, but it isn’t the exclusive way to build stress management skills. That is why it’s not a binary delineation like you proposed: anything that causes repeatable real stress can be used for stress inoculation, so long as the person can mindfully contextualize stress. It doesn’t have to be shooting. Tournament golf. Tournament tennis. Lifting at a powerlifting meet. Martial arts training. Speed dating. Public speaking. Playing music for an audience. Rock climbing. Stress management is about building the habit of contextualizing distress and visualizing success in spite of it.

You are witnessing people choke because they have the yips. It’s not the technique itself falling apart. It’s a mental problem with a mental solution, and it’s not something that can be “taught” like marksmanship skills.

Great points all, especially about it being on a scale, not binary. Stress inoculation and choking are very interesting topics. I had a graduate class on cognitive neuroscience with one of the co-authors of the paper that became the basis for the book Choke, by Sian Beilock. They identified two mechanisms of choking, monitoring pressure and outcome pressure. Monitoring pressure tends to degrade automaticity and outcome pressure tends to degrade cognitive/working memory skills. I haven't quite figured out how all that relates to this discussion, though.

[feudist]

Great points all, especially about it being on a scale, not binary. Stress inoculation and choking are very interesting topics. I had a graduate class on cognitive neuroscience with one of the co-authors of the paper that became the basis for the book Choke, by Sian Beilock. They identified two mechanisms of choking, monitoring pressure and outcome pressure. Monitoring pressure tends to degrade automaticity and outcome pressure tends to degrade cognitive/working memory skills. I haven't quite figured out how all that relates to this discussion, though.

I would suggest that what you termed "Practical shooting" is recognition that a gunfight isn't a test of technical marksmanship, but a significant emotional event. This is seen in even the minor stress of a shooting match. The degradation of automaticity and cognitive skills would support that.While one part of the remedy is deeper learning and increasing automaticity, the training needs to account for this and replicate more stressors.

Hard skills need tougher standards during practice to match predictable challenges in fights.
Soft skills like compartmentalizing emotional responses, target discrimination, round placement visualization on 3d moving targets and even basics like using the Color Code of awareness to shift mental gears manually need to be taught and practiced intensely.

A way to address choking by practice is to extend practice beyond the common template of repeating a skill task for many repetitions consecutively. While this is necessary to develop automaticity and the technical ability to express that skill at a higher level(eg, going from a two second draw to a one second draw) it doesn't address the "One Chance" aspect of cold execution.
This is where choking and the "You don't rise to the challenge, but default to your lowest ability" begins
If you drive an hour to the range, set up targets and shoot The Test, with the stipulation that a score of less than 90% means that you pack up and go home...successful execution of that will be much harder than allowing yourself a five run average of 90%.

The remedy is to include the Random-Variable scheme I mentioned earlier.
Each skill is practiced for one rep and then another skill is practiced. For example: A freestyle draw to 7 yards. Then a SHO from ready gun at 5 yards. Then holding something in your gunhand, moving, dropping it and drawing to hit a target on the move.
You interleave different major skillets randomly with distinct variations on each rep like distance, hand position, movement, target exposure etc.
This forces your nervous system to solve a different problem every time, analogous to adding 2 numbers...practicing 2+2 will deeply ingrain that answer(automaticity) but adding 2+2, 1+5, 6+4 will prepare you to solve more problems on the fly.

[Jim Watson]

Tom Givens’ May newsletter describes his practice regimen, a series of drills and standards done once each.