OP - What is your context for your shooting skills? Self defense? Competition? Fun? (All/some/none are ok; I’m just trying to figure out what you are trying to achieve, and if I missed it in your posts, I apologize.)
OP - What is your context for your shooting skills? Self defense? Competition? Fun? (All/some/none are ok; I’m just trying to figure out what you are trying to achieve, and if I missed it in your posts, I apologize.)
Someone here has noted before that TLG (our late P-F Founder), when asked about shooting stance said, "Most of the stance that shooting occurs from is happenstance."
You are 100% overthinking and overanalyzing stance when it comes to shooting. Pick whatever brings the gun up to the dominant eye in an efficient and consistent manner. End of stance discussion.
The reason your WHO only shooting is better than SHO only is - elucidated in your next line -Single hand shooting- About 70% of my rounds were SHO or WHO. I've only done ball and dummy two handed shooting before. Wow at watching me steer the front sight wildly more when the dummy round was on deck. Oddly my WHO is far better than SHO. Splits were the same or .01 faster WHO than SHO but my WHO was far more accurate. As an example, I worked a few strings of ball and dummy with 5 of each per mag. Headbox at 7-8 yards. SHO I was only 3 or 4 of the five live shots even in the headbox. WHO I was 5 for 5 in the head box each time. (I know. I suck that I can't at least place the shot every time on demand.)
A firm grip is different than a hard grip. A lot of folks think they need to squeeze the living shit out of the gun. You do not need to do this. You need to grip the gun with sufficient strength that it doesn't jump around in your hand. And I mean that, literally, if you have to adjust your grip between shots, you need a firmer grip OR a different gun/different grip (i.e., your hand isn't fitting the grip well).Can still only seem to hold one detail in my head at a time and everything else goes autopilot- Focus on a hard grip and everything else is on autopilot. Think about running fast to a position and I barely remember whether the plan was to take 3 shots at the target or 2 from that position.
Otherwise, there is no reason to white knuckle grip a pistol. A 9mm pistol does not produce enough force at the muzzle end during recoil, to drive you off your feet, to bring your arm above your head, whip-snap your wrist, etc. Hold it about as firmly as you would a hammer you were swinging at a nail. Like a hammer with a nail, your arm doesn't have to do all the work, the weight of the gun will settle the front sight and absorb some (quite a bit actually) of the recoil.
The front sight always wobbles - that will never change - and trying to push a shot "right now!" when the sights are aligned is guaranteed to drop it low and possibly left. But if the front sight is swaying like a ballroom dancer, you're gripping the gun too hard.
Your WHO shooting is better, because your weak hand is likely not holding the gun in the same hard grip and instead, you're a bit more relaxed and thus able to "go with the flow" a bit more.
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You're having trouble thinking about each step, because to be honest, it sounds a bit like you're trying to do too much at this stage.
Pistol shooting is difficult to master, but easy to learn. The fundamental aspects of pistol shooting are sight alignment, trigger press, follow through. Combat pistol shooting adds a drawstroke, target transitions, and reloads to the mix as fundamental aspects.
Right now, it sounds like you're still in the beginning stages of establishing pistol shooting fundamentals. I won't discourage you from including moving drills and shooting two, running a timer, etc. But until you can start from low ready, using a two handed grip, and put five shots touching each other at 10-yards, with split times less than 0.35 seconds - You're not really in the right position to move on to more complex things.
We focus on fundamentals to produce the precision we need to do more complicated things with a pistol. Until those fundamentals are ingrained, you'll struggle to add bits and pieces. I would encourage you to pick a fundamental aspect of pistol shooting and focus on it to the exclusion of other things in your dryfire each week.
Once you are confident in those skills. You can move on to the Combat Pistol Shooting fundamentals.
Accuracy only depends on sight alignment and trigger control (see Jerry shooting a snubby upside down at 200yards). Grip and stance just enable those to happen repeatedly and faster.
I’ve found “let recoil happen” a helpful way to explain it. Align the sights, smoothly work the trigger straight to the rear, let recoil happen, call the shot, recover your sight picture and reset the trigger (the TPC reactive shooting cycle).
Another trick I’ve used to help flinch issues is to have the student grip and aim the gun and then I will pull the trigger for them. Since they’re focused on aiming and I’m taking care of trigger control, they don’t fear the recoil and don’t flinch. It gives a feel for how the gun recoils when you aren’t fighting with it. If you have a shooting buddy that might be worth a try.
Next time you shoot get some video, it might help us give useful feedback.
Good luck!
Thanks for taking the time to give me the perspective of your far more advanced skill set than mine! There's a lot of information to unpack in your response and I don't mean to condense it to just this snippet that really struck me.
One of the things I appreciate about shooting over a lot of other sports is how quantifiable it is as far as provable results like you've mentioned. Having said that, that's a pretty humbling standard and I accept that part of making progress as a new guy in a new endeavor is to be suitably crushed/humbled and then suck it up and keep training to the standard.
I'd been training with an eye towards participating in IDPA this year (before the Pandemic hit and pushed that off the table for me for a 2020 shooting goal). The encouragement had always been along the lines of, if you can be safe with your firearm, you should sign up for a match sooner rather than later. Other things I'd been hearing on podcasts (Practical Shooting After Dark Ben Stoeger) were generally setting a bar of participation of "If you can make the shots you'll see on the course but with no time limit" then it was an appropriate time to move forward and work on the field course skills.
I guess I'd taken that to give myself a relatively low bar of "if I can shoot alphas with no time limit and typical IDPA target arrays" I should work on all the elements that the general IDPA/USPSA guys work on (obviously I'm outing a lot of assuming on my part here which is why I'm looking for clarification.)
If I'm following correctly, your standard tells me I should return to square range style shooting only though for some time as at my current level, 5 shots touching at 10 yards 0.35 splits seems downright godlike. I'm open to being set straight here. Just looking for some extra confirmation here as I cope with just how far behind the curve I am.
Again, thank you for taking the time to help someone on the bottom rungs of the skill ladder.
Last edited by Eyesquared; 06-17-2020 at 11:24 AM.
I think your original tack was better and you should not be distracted by RevolverRob. As for your pre ignition push I think there are a couple things to note:
1. There's no magic technique, you just have to force yourself to let the gun recoil and return the gun down after all the recoil is done.
2. Personally I don't think anyone is cured forever from preignition push or overreturning the gun (especially overreturning the gun). There's a video on PSTG of Ben Stoeger doing the Doubles drill pushing for speed and in the video you can see him fighting to avoid tensing up and over-return the gun. IMO this is one of those things like trigger control that you don't really outgrow as a shooter (assuming you are always pushing to go faster, this will always be a challenge).
Last edited by Eyesquared; 06-17-2020 at 11:16 AM.
Travis - Gabe White runs a good class with objective performance standards.
http://www.gabewhitetraining.com/tec...-skills-tests/
Are you able to perform any of these? It will help add some numerical assessment to your current shooting.
A (much) simpler test is using a NRA B-8 set at 10 yards. From low ready, shoot 10 rounds, with a strict time limit of 10 seconds. Add up your score.
Post results here, and a picture of the target.
You will likely get some good feedback to help your shooting.
Good luck with the IDPA matches.
good advice.
let the gun kick. pre ignition push is just improper timing. when done correctly it will become a gentle subconsciously performed post-ignition push, assisted by the slide returning into battery, that returns the sights to their original position. it's odd to say that "you just have to force yourself to let the gun recoil" - force yourself to let go?!?! - but it is sage advice.
use the force!
Last edited by gomerpyle; 06-17-2020 at 12:26 PM.
I think you can work those things in, but focus primarily on square range shooting to make sure your pistol shooting and then other fundamentals (draw stroke, primarily) are in order. It frees you up to focus on those other things, if your drawstroke is more or less automatic and your sight alignment and trigger press are relatively clean.
Maybe my standards are high - substitute in the Gabe White standards that @RJ linked to.
The 10 shots in 10 seconds on a B8 standard that RJ suggested is an excellent way of evaluating your trigger press and sight alignment. Our goal with that standard would be a minimum of 85 points. If you can shoot that drill 3x times and score 85+ each time. Then by all means - ignore my square range advice and move on to other things. If you're struggling with that standard, you're going to need to work on sight alignment, trigger press, and follow through a little bit longer.
To be honest...it really isn't champion GM shooting. But we can amend the standard - How about 5 Alphas at 10 yards with 0.4 splits from low ready? That's marginally easier than the Bill Drill Standard criterion in Gabe White's Dark Pin Challenge (which is 6 alphas at 7 yards with 0.4 splits and a 1.5 second draw)
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I should be clear the standards you choose depend on your goals. My personal standards for pistol shooting are very high, because my focus is on highest level of accuracy at the fastest speeds I can achieve, in the event I need a pistol to defend myself or my family. I don't play shooting games to win them, I compete to push myself to do different things and think through shooting challenges. I hold very high accuracy standards (Alphas or bust is basically my motto) and set tough time goals for those reasons.
If one is looking to compete - and I mean actually compete for a winning spot - in competition - Speed and movement will take precedence over accuracy. We've hashed that out before here on P-F.
However, if we do push ourselves to achieve the highest level of accuracy at the fastest speeds 100% at 100% speed - Then when time comes, if we shoot 90% at 90% speed we will likely do okay (see the thread "The Wisdom of Bolke and Dobbs")