Q: Does your draw get better (a) by practicing the draw a little bit each day or (b) by dedicating a lot of time on the draw in one session?
A: YES

Significant improvements involve significant effort. Whether that effort occurs 15 minutes a day four days a week or a single 1-hour session a week, the difference over the long run is going to be negligible. The guy who does the 1-hour dedicated session and another 15min 2-3 times per week is going to be ahead of the curve.

As GJM said, maintaing skill is different than building skill. Most folks don't really even maintain their SHO/WHO skills. They let them degrade to a certain unacceptable level, then the spend a few cram sessions building them back up... and then let them degrade again. Rinse, repeat.

I'd also agree completely on SHO helping trigger control. A good two-handed grip stabilizes the gun so well that your trigger finger can do relatively little to throw a shot significantly off target. Take that support hand away and suddenly it becomes much easier to move the gun with just your trigger finger.

As for prioritizing SHO and WHO, this thread does a great job of showing how hard it is to make a universal rule. Chris wants to make GM and along the way he's going to face a lot of WHO shooting in classifiers. For Chris, WHO is a serious facet of achieving his goal.

For folks who prioritize based on "real gunfights" instead, the data becomes murky and debatable. For example, a lot of studies show that SHO shooting is common in LEO OIS. But delve deeper and you get a better idea of why. Most of those 1-handed shootings are caused by one of two things:
  1. A relatively poorly trained shooter who doesn't have the experience/habit to come to a good two handed grip automatically under stress. Anyone who's done a lot of Sim/FOF work with novice shooters will probably tell you he's seen a lot of those students revert to a SHO grip under stress. As skill level increases, the automatic default begins to trend toward the two handed grip when there is nothing specifically preventing it.
  2. An officer who is holding a flashlight with his WH in reduced lighting. As WMLs become more common, you'll see this statistic change. (fwiw, as someone who doesn't have a WML on his carry gun, flashlight use is one of the main reasons I put as much time into SHO shooting as I do)


Very few instances of "shot one handed due to injury/inability" occur. That doesn't mean they never occur. It doesn't mean we should ignore them or stop training for them. But if you put a significant amount of your training effort into preparing for the highly unlikely at the cost of training for the likely, you're prioritizing based on emotion rather than logic.