To paraphrase the late Ron Avery, the point of stance and grip is to make the sight(s) predictably return to the same place. My add on, is to say that when the sights return aligned and pointed to the desired spot, it makes the see what you need to see part a lot easier.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
Back a bit, I started writing a new curriculum for work based on perceived deficiencies and ambiguities within the present one, based on my personal experiences and instructorial observations; and this is a segment of that with a few additional notes added to it.Originally Posted by Doc_Glock
Jules
Runcible Works
Stance is a portion of your overall shooting position and posture. Personally, I think of building this platform from the hands back starting at the grip. Your arms, shoulders, upper body chest, core, legs and feet are part of that platform.
Find what allows you to shoot comfortably and control recoil consistently and move from one target to the next and or move to a new position.
You can copy somebody else's stance but effective stances can vary across body types.
I would suggest pointing the gun at the target first...then adjusting the rest of your body around what supports that.
A71593
Can I shoot a pistol accurately standing on one foot, holding the pistol upside down, working the trigger with my pinkie? Sure, but if you are into performance shooting in any genre, the stance is critically essential. It is also my belief that anyone I am working with regarding firearms is also mature enough to understand the concept of stance and its benefits from the start. And yes, this includes brand new shooters.
For a newer shooter, after safety, avoiding a negative psychological response to the gun going bang is my priority. Proper recoil management is vital, and this starts from the feet up, not hands down. The biggest issue with the majority of new shooters is the rapid psychological and physiological response that can quickly embed as we fire more rounds. It doesn't take many shots to create a detrimental pre-ignition performance problem. These issues are much harder to correct if we don't address it early. Even before any precision or accuracy goals. The stance is a key player in this game.
Another way to think about it is organized sports with children. When a child is two years old, and we are throwing a ball, do we care about their stance and harp on it? Generally, no, the goal is to create interest and pleasure for the activity. When that child, 4-5ish, and starts to show greater interest in success at that activity, we pay more attention to their skill development. When the child enters organized sport, there is a reason we teach correct stance and other fundamentals. Moving in and out of a proper stance, allows them to develop spontaneous performance to adapt to improvised positions. Without proper stance and footwork, never mind the big leagues, you won't make it far it the little leagues.
Well done! I would love to see the entire curriculum when finished.
Last edited by Doc_Glock; 10-18-2019 at 06:46 PM.
Doc Glock: thank you for the kind words. There's a modest amount of it posted around here, frankly; but I try not to copy pasta at every opportunity. It's the origin of some of my stranger ideas about running guns.
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nwhpfan: I agree that one's shooting stance is whole-bodied; I disagree with most everything else. Humans are more alike than not, and success strategies in this vein trend towards being more similar rather than more dissimilar.
More so, the stance is arguably the only fundamental that can be demonstrated in the absence of the firearm - after all, it exists before a pistol is drawn; and remains after the pistol is reholstered. It must index off of something other than the pistol itself in order to be ready in advance; and the only certainties to exist are the shooter, some sort of surface, and some sort of target. Therefore, the stance must be built from the feet (if standing; or knees, if kneeling) upwards, and index off of the target's direction.
Jules
Runcible Works
@runcible
Which part do you disagree with?
Last edited by nwhpfan; 10-19-2019 at 11:44 AM.
A71593
nwhpfan,
Pardon, but that's a severely overly-simplistic conclusion to be drawing from that observation.
Folks shoot with a broad variety of stances for a diversity of reasons and with a range of demonstrated performance. Not all stances are worthy of advocacy, and very few stances are worth teaching to the majority of potential students.
I write the opinions as I do, after working with several hundred of my peers across several years, in this specific vein and as a deliberate approach to the discipline. I offered a far greater diversity of options initially, but with every iteration of the material, the consistent trend was that a singular scalable solution suited the grand majority. As with combatives: we have to be able to solve a range of problems with a modicum of solutions, with those solutions being drilled to the point of proficiency and automaticity; and with firearms, that means I have to offer something common to nearly or all of my students\student-peers.
I have the bias of working heavily and more than any of my fellow instructors, with those requiring remediation and\or being slight of size. What I have to offer draws tremendously from those efforts, but has no difference from what I offer to others not in those demographics. I've worked with 4'10" folks that are sub-90lb, and I've worked with 6'6" folks that are well past 340lb; and the more I do so, the more the same trends emerge, with the only difference being in what margin they have for dilligence in applying the techniques.
When I write curriculum, it is not enough to know what works - it is nearly enough, to know why such works, and why others things work less well or not at all. We've got to know the underlying fundament or root structure, above which the trunk or methodology rises upwards.
"BLUF: teach the mechanics of shooting stance through mountain-goating, attempting to push over a structural wall, or keeping an inward-opening door pressed shut;" is legitimately the grand majority of what is offered to the student-peer needing improvement to their stance, for anything more than the smallest of modifications (e.g. "roll the hips back and keep the shoulders forward of them in space" woud be a small modification). I offer as much or as little verbally for them to index what emerges in their memory as a deliberate posture; but they certainly don't get a multi-page wordwall launched at them.
There are those that still advocate for the feet being next to each other, and they often name it or liken it to a "boxer's stance," despite their inability to present photographic support that such a stance is used in the world of boxing. Nevertheless, that lack of staggering in the feet means that the effective longitudinal depth of their stance, and the associated ability to resist the shoulders being rocked backwards under recoil, is measured in the length of their foot from heel to toenail. I've got feet about 9" long - and with even a moderate step backwards of my shooting-side foot, as if loading for a punch, the longitudinal depth increases to 24". If I bend that leading knee, then I effectively have more depth still, without moving my feet. With increased depth, my shoulders can be further forward from my hips, and my body is better able to transfer that recoil impulse into the ground around me. Therefore, a staggering of the feet in a shooting stance.
Why are the hips squared to the target, but the shoulders turned slightly away? Because the hands are offset, even with a pistol - the distance from backstrap to front-strap stands in between. If the shoulders were squared with the target and you introduced that divide, then the collective shooting grip averts towards the support-side; most shooters then bending the shooting-side elbow in order to return the muzzle-line to intersection with the target. Bending one elbow but not the other robs one hand of a small measure of strength, uneven from the other; and there is either loss in the ability to have a muscularly opposed trigger press, or there is uneven recoil management generally expressed through a diagonal movement of the weapon and\or the hands coming apart.
I do not wish to belabor the point: I have cause for every point and iota that I advocate for, and would be truly uncomfortable recommending something for practice if I did not. Receiving in return that it's a wholly subjective matter out of hand, does not seem a rebuttal describing equal investment to the craft. We don't have to agree, but if we're going to disagree aloud, it seems a kindness to articulate for what cause.
(Response written before your last edit.)
Jules
Runcible Works
@runcible.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with you as a shooter or instructor. It's one of the reasons I put my USPSA number in my signature line and post videos of me shooting.
My journey towards my own "stance" came from more accomplished and much better shooters than me in search of the highest level of performance. I'm sharing my experience and observations of how I was able to get here. FWIW....
As far as building stance from the ground the issue I see is the terrain may change causing you to take up different feet position of lower body shape. Or you may be seated, leaning around objects, or you may be standing on the rails of an armored vehicle shooting junkyard.
I say that people's body types are different and caution against a full and complete copy of somebody else...and I suggest building the stance from the hands back.
You say you disagree....I'd like to know where. It may be of value to somebody or the OP who asked the question.
Sincerely,
A71593
Sorry, I thought my first response was a bit snarky...which is not my intent.
A71593
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