Target Focused Shooting

[LukeNCMX]

I think a good amount of this is the camp of people who don't train misinterpreting fast/aggressive/predictive shooting and conflating it with panic fire. The mechanics and vision, awareness, and control that are built along the training journey are utterly alien to folks who don't train that way and have never seen it happen in person, cold, then over and over again on-demand.

The goal of all these various schools of thought is control and awareness. The uninitiated are improperly focused on trying to manufacture an outcome (X split time at X distance with X accuracy) instead of focusing on a correct training process (practical shooting methodologies, hit factor etc.) that has no arbitrary floor or ceiling.

To keep this thread moving on towards vision and some of the remarks about sightless pistols I'll add that I am now fully in the camp of target focused shooting with irons under all circumstances. I've come to the conclusion that hard front sight focus is basically a range gimmick that has very limited application outside of indirectly helping some people keep the gun still while they press the trigger (only a static shooter on a static target). I think a classic emphasis on hard front sight focus hamstrings tracking targets so badly that it should be verboten for any practical/defensive purpose.

[P.E. Kelley]

Great post. I had my dot go out at a recent match, and it went pretty well. I'm going to do more "dot off" practice. I think there's value in it.

You are a better man than I! I found that transition from Dot to Dot Off really difficult, why? Because I was
visually wedded to the Dot housing! That big ass unit became a distraction. My fix...taller front sight!

I am probably in the minority, but I won't carry a dot gun for personal protection. Irons are nearly always there and if not
I still have a slide without that Dot housing obstruction.

Great thread gents. Target focus is "natural" and dots let us be accurate while we perform "naturally".
I was fully on board with "Front Sight Press" for decades! Still am for ultimate accuracy, but I came to
love target focus as my eyes and continuous Rx updates in order to maintain a crisp front sight, got to be more trouble
than target focused shooting (within its limitations).

[GJM]

A few thoughts on visual processing and splits, but first, @Gio congratulations on the excellent finish at Nats.

Bill Rogers addresses this in the context of falling and disappearing plates at the Rogers School. He says, short of someone firing in frustration, almost never does a Rogers School attendee fire at a plate after it disappears. Given that the plates disappear on every stage, that speaks to the mind's ability to quickly process information faster than .25.

Steve Anderson did a recent podcast with Joey Sauerland on the iron sight/LO Nats. Anderson noted that on day one, he didn't observe a single split faster than .30. Sauerland discussed how when he was an A shooter, he thought the idea was to run real fast and shoot real fast splits. Looks great in video. Once he became a better shooter moving efficiently and arriving with the gun ready to shoot, and shooting consistent accurate shots is where the money is. Joey commented, not in jest, that you should figure out what your splits are to shoot A's at 25 yards, and that is the speed you should be splitting in a match.

Ironically, Sauerland lost first place on one stage on day two, the Bill drill stage. Here is a link to the results from that stage, a six shot Bill drill:

https://practiscore.com/results/new/220816?q_result=5

Last year, Lockwood shot 1.20 something to win in a side match, with a bunch of attempts. The fastest time out of all the shooters in the match was 1.73 and Lockwood was 1.98. For guys trying to win a match, big difference between stunting, or shooting on your home range with the camera, as opposed to one attempt that counts.

Whether competing, or shooting elk in the field, it seems like linking your trigger press to your vision, and delivering hits on target is priority one.

[Gio]

A few thoughts on visual processing and splits, but first, @Gio congratulations on the excellent finish at Nats.

Bill Rogers addresses this in the context of falling and disappearing plates at the Rogers School. He says, short of someone firing in frustration, almost never does a Rogers School attendee fire at a plate after it disappears. Given that the plates disappear on every stage, that speaks to the mind's ability to quickly process information faster than .25.

Steve Anderson did a recent podcast with Joey Sauerland on the iron sight/LO Nats. Anderson noted that on day one, he didn't observe a single split faster than .30. Sauerland discussed how when he was an A shooter, he thought the idea was to run real fast and shoot real fast splits. Looks great in video. Once he became a better shooter moving efficiently and arriving with the gun ready to shoot, and shooting consistent accurate shots is where the money is. Joey commented, not in jest, that you should figure out what your splits are to shoot A's at 25 yards, and that is the speed you should be splitting in a match.

Ironically, Sauerland lost first place on one stage on day two, the Bill drill stage. Here is a link to the results from that stage, a six shot Bill drill:

https://practiscore.com/results/new/220816?q_result=5

Last year, Lockwood shot 1.20 something to win in a side match, with a bunch of attempts. The fastest time out of all the shooters in the match was 1.73 and Lockwood was 1.98. For guys trying to win a match, big difference between stunting, or shooting on your home range with the camera, as opposed to one attempt that counts.

Whether competing, or shooting elk in the field, it seems like linking your trigger press to your vision, and delivering hits on target is priority one.

I had a similar epiphany doing some training with JJ and Sean Griffith about a year ago on a drill with about 3 shooting positions. Sean is an excellent super squad CO shooter. Sean and I were consistently out-splitting and out-drawing JJ on the drill, but when we first started shooting it, JJ's overall time was faster than either of ours by about .5-.75 seconds. When we really dug into the time breakdown, we realized JJ was blending the 3 positions much more efficiently than either Sean or me resulting in a faster overall time.

[Gio]

Bill Rogers addresses this in the context of falling and disappearing plates at the Rogers School. He says, short of someone firing in frustration, almost never does a Rogers School attendee fire at a plate after it disappears. Given that the plates disappear on every stage, that speaks to the mind's ability to quickly process information faster than .25.

Another data point on this: I also agree that our mind's ability to process information subconsciously is much faster than the conscious .20-.25 reaction time. An interesting case study I do on this I demonstrate fairly often for shooters at the range:

If I aim at a 5 yard open target, sights already on the target, and press the button to activate the timer, and then fire 2 shots as fast as possible when the timer beeps, my splits are usually around .17-.18. This is the fastest my conscious mind can tell my finger to press the trigger. If I shoot that same target, but this time have a 25 yard target out there that I draw to and shoot first, then transition into the 5 yard target for 2 shots, my splits are around .13. This happens because my brain switches from the conscious thought of "press the trigger twice," to the subconscious process of "shoot these targets as your visual process allows."

[rhino on INGO]

It's almost always going to reduce to "see what you need to see" for any given shot. As people progress and their relationship to the sights (or an alternate sighting method such as using the top of the slide) evolves, what they need to see, how well they need to see it, and for how long they need to see it will continue to change. The guys here who are deep diving into the details get it.

It just occurred to me, and I'm sure many others have thought of this and discussed it, but as skills and experience advance, the sights (of any kind) become less of an aiming tool and more of a timing tool and a QA/QC tool. When the sights or other visual index return to the correct position, it's time to shoot again. When the sights or other visual index are lifting after the shot is fired, the snapshot of their position provides feedback on whether the shot was good or no good. Both of those elements can be accomplished effectively and efficiently while maintaining primarily a target focus.

[Default.mp3]

Another data point on this: I also agree that our mind's ability to process information subconsciously is much faster than the conscious .20-.25 reaction time. An interesting case study I do on this I demonstrate fairly often for shooters at the range:

If I aim at a 5 yard open target, sights already on the target, and press the button to activate the timer, and then fire 2 shots as fast as possible when the timer beeps, my splits are usually around .17-.18. This is the fastest my conscious mind can tell my finger to press the trigger. If I shoot that same target, but this time have a 25 yard target out there that I draw to and shoot first, then transition into the 5 yard target for 2 shots, my splits are around .13. This happens because my brain switches from the conscious thought of "press the trigger twice," to the subconscious process of "shoot these targets as your visual process allows."

I think there's a lot of mixing up of different things happening.

The visual reaction time in general is what it is. It averages 0.25 seconds to react to any purely visual stimuli. Anything 0.15 seconds and under is considered to be the very edge of raw human performance.

Reacting to visual stimuli is not the same at all as the speed of how the mind processes information; the latter is a fairly nebulous term, anyway. Are we talking about the pure speed of how long it takes the mind to make a decision once it has received the information, and before it actually sends out the signals to execute the reaction? Or is it about simply how much of a snatch if data is needed for the brain to make a decision? Etc. For example, it's pretty well documented that most folks average about 0.25 seconds to react to a simple visual stimuli, such as pressing a button the moment you see something green flash across the screen; that is the speed of reaction to a visual stimuli. But the human brain has been shown to be able to easily detect a green flashes much faster than 0.25 seconds, with the possible human threshold being as low as 13 ms (0.013 seconds); it would be perfectly reasonable say that the human brain can process information as fast as 13 ms in this context, even if we are totally incapable of reacting at that speed.

And to apply it to shooting, the problem is that shooting is not a purely visual sport. Not only is there visual feedback, but there's also auditory and kinesthetic/haptic feedback involved, both of which typically have faster reaction times; typical times for audio averages around 0.04 seconds faster than visual, while haptic averages 0.06 seconds faster. There is also the fact that you're usually able to do a certain amount of preplanning as to exactly what you plan to do. I am extremely doubtful that folks doing 0.15 splits and faster on target are making actual purely visual decisions the majority of the time, that simply defies the current science.

That's where the of a 0.25 split being the upper realistic limit of what you would see in the real world comes in (though I will strongly agree with @JCN's proposition that the faster your mechanical ability, the faster your overall decision cycle in general, so working toward sub-0.2 splits on the flat range has actual duty implications), as the idea seems to be toward that ever single shot needs to be a conscious decision. I cannot speak to how viable an argument that actually is from a legal perspective, but to use competition statistics to debate about the viability of sub-0.25 splits in the real world to me seems to completely gloss over the extremely different decisions that must be made, given that one can use a combination of kinesthetics, auditory, and visual feedback to determine a good shot in competition, while in a duty context you are almost certainly completely restricted to visual feedback (auditory being different in this case because it would also require the processing of the the audio into language, rather than simply acting off an auditory cue).

[Noah]

@GJM great thread. Those podcasts were fantastic. I'm fortunate enough to be local to Joey and got to shoot my first USPSA Match shooting limited minor with him a year ago.

[GJM]

@GJM great thread. Those podcasts were fantastic. I'm fortunate enough to be local to Joey and got to shoot my first USPSA Match shooting limited minor with him a year ago.

My wife and I really enjoy his perspectives.

[LukeNCMX]

Force Science reaction times, splits etc

I don't buy the Force Science stuff but I could give a hoot about Force Science. The problem is a large chunk of the legacy industry is wrongly taking Force Science's conclusions and deciding cadences faster than .25 splits in training leads to illegal use of force and panic fire.