As a newbie, i should start somewhere.
I would like to know which is more beneficial to a pistol shooter: practicing pistol drills or competing in IPSC/IDPA?
Which will give you the edge to be a better pistolero?
Already attended pistol classes to learn formally the fundamentals of which the trainer uses pistol drills, of which this curious question emerged.
Generally speaking drills are for learning, competition is for testing. The two compliment each other. The greatest benefit will come from doing both.
Last edited by 167; 01-28-2012 at 05:06 AM.
Agree with 167. It's (IMHO) a matter of inclusion not exclusion or simpler put, do both.
I got into the training class game late in life. Again, IMHO, the best use of resources is to get formal training. The big advantage is that hands on coaching can change or correct techniques that you just can't correct yourself. I wasted a lot of time and money playing on the range over the years.
Pistolero = Gunman.As a newbie, i should start somewhere.
I would like to know which is more beneficial to a pistol shooter: practicing pistol drills or competing in IPSC/IDPA?
Which will give you the edge to be a better pistolero?
Drills. Competing in USPSA/IDPA will make you better at those sports.
Last edited by markp; 01-28-2012 at 04:43 PM.
In my case, the down side to shooting only competitions is that you are devoting 3-4 hours to shooting 5 stages at around 20 seconds or less a stage. That's a hundred seconds of shooting in 4 hours (5 if you count drive time).
The up side is that I get much more complex stages (shoot on the move, swingers, ports, etc.) at competition than I am able to setup in practice. And there's the shooting under pressure aspect.
If I had to choose between the two, I know that I see much greater improvement practicing on my own with a well designed set of drills and tests where I can shoot 300 rounds in 2 hours instead of 100 rounds in 5 hours.
As others have said, do both.
Gringop
Play that song about the Irish chiropodist. Irish chiropodist? "My Fate Is In Your Hands."
In my latest Concealed Carry Skills class, I mentioned the concept of Practicing in the Resource-Constrained Environment. One of the students asked me whether it was better to expend his monthly allocation of 100 rounds shooting IDPA or doing drills. My response to split it between the two. A typical indoor IDPA match in Atlanta is less than 50 rounds. That leaves a box of 50 for practice drills.
IDPA isn't training, it's testing, as has already been noted here. An aspect that's different from doing drills is that it is someone else's scenario. When a criminal attacks, he's setting up the scenario, not the potential victim. When drilling, we set up the scenario for ourselves; that's really different from having to shoot someone else's scenario, even when we know what the other person's scenario is in advance.
When I give private lessons, if I need to demo, I use the student's gun. That way they don't think I'm using a tricked out SCCY to be able to shoot well.
I think it's nice to shoot an IDPA/USPSA/IPSC match to get out of your comfort zone and shoot different kinds of targets. I've also like that the competitive spirit of these disciplines imparts stress that you don't usually get in training. I've gone to about a 4 to 1 ratio of training to comps so for about every 4 practice sessions I do about 1 match. I've been shooting IDPA matches but I think I'm gonna switch to IPSC/USPSA. I've found is that my speed/accuracy usually isn't the problem in IDPA. My problem is remembering all the stuff I have to do during a stage. Some of the IDPA matches are just ridiculously full of BS and it seems like the guys who win are the one who can follow instructions the best and not get procedurals and not necessarily the best shooters.
One thing helps with the competition aspect. If you don't like a stage, don't shoot it. Don't be all confrontational about it, just keep your score sheet. I had no issues skipping a stage if I couldn't detect the value to myself.
The way I look at IDPA is this: it makes me think and use my consious mind for something other than draw, sight, press, sight, press, reload. The actual shooting skills I develope doing drills and practicing on the local range. In IDPA what I'm doing is letting my subconsious handle the gun manipulations part and my consious mind is working to solve the problem (be it thinking or remembering). This in it's self is a skill we will need during a street confrontation and normally not something developed on the practice range.
Scott
Only Hits Count - The Faster the Hit the more it Counts!!!!!!; DELIVER THE SHOT!
Stephen Hillier - "An amateur practices until he can do it right, a professional practices until he can't do it wrong."
There is definitely something to these comments.Originally Posted by secondstoryguy
There seem to be two schools of stage design. The first is intended to replicate the actions of a specific case study, be it actual or notional. The steps a shooter should "optimally" take are therefore a defined as a process. When done right, this can produce a useful training outcome for the individual, in terms of testing oneself against the "school solution" or the lessons of real events to see how one would fare - and of course, hopefully identifying correctives to make one a better and more judicious armed professional. The failures of such designs occur when the procedural elements exceed the limits of one's memory under stress, and when a dictated process interferes with the kind of active thinking and tactical problem solving that one must cultivate for employment in the unstructured problems presented in real world gunfights. This can charitably be a function of designers who have overlooked the purposes of design, or less so in the realm of the gamer and the would be "ninja"; as well as those who select for wins based on memory games rather than tactical thinking.
The second type of stage are those that design around a problem type, and leave open the solution set. Such design encourages the competition to become both a vehicle for individual testing (of adaptive thinking and execution under stress), but also a vehicle for experimentation (as different folks explore different solutions in search of optimization for better outcomes). This is a kind of design that IDPA has unfortunately not done enough to encourage, or rather has active discouraged (with varying reload rules, "tactical order", etc.) This is one of the reasons I have been hopeful that the KSTG discussions may produce a more useful strain of thinking in such design; and perhaps even influence the IDPA tiger teams. But this is indeed the hard part; and to many folks less "fun" than arguing over equipment.
Reply With Quote