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Cranking it up
If your fundamentals (meaning—accuracy) are
rock-solid, but you have difficulty "cranking it
up," you might experiment with the following.
In practice, push yourself to shoot at a quicker pace
than you would normally be comfortable. Don't worry
about your hits, with good fundamentals, you can
always return to basics. Shooters with a tendency
towards accuracy often have to force themselves to
shoot out of their comfort zone to get the feeling of
what "driving the gun" feels like. Once you
experience what it feels like to "let go and
crank away," you will have the perspective needed
to effectively balance speed and accuracy.
A great drill for this is the Bill Drill. The original
drill tests how fast you can shoot all your shots into
the A zone of an IPSC target at seven yards; however
for your practice, change the drill to put the
emphasis on speed. For example, at seven yards,
instead of the goal being to shoot all A's, initially,
just shoot as fast as possible with your only accuracy
goal of keeping all your hits on the entire target.
(If this sounds crazy, this drill is definitely for
you.) Shoot within these parameters until you
establish the average time it takes you to just hit
the target with all your shots. Then, try it again,
this time with the goal of keeping all your hits in
the C zone—in the same time you just discovered—do
not shoot at a slower pace. This is the opposite of
the usual method; however, I assure you this is
possible. After mastering this, you should be able to
carry what you’ve learned up to this point into
shooting all your shots in the A zone in the same time
you needed to just hit the target.
When you are doing everything JUST RIGHT, on a target
at seven yards, you should be able to shoot A's as
fast as you can shoot hits. I've had tremendous
insights into "speed shooting" while
training in this manner.
It helps me to visualize a "Control/Abandon"
scale. I picture it in my mind as a horizontally
sliding knob like you might see on an older stereo, on
which one end is Base and the other end is Treble.
Substitute two opposite concepts for Base and Treble,
i.e., control/abandon, or sights/trigger. Then, before
you shoot, imagine where the knob is positioned.
Or, if you prefer thinking to imagining, think of two
opposite concepts that have a ratio that has a total
value of ten. For example, you might shoot a given
string with "8 Control/2 Abandon," or
"1 Control/9 Abandon."
The key is, every time, before you shoot, DECIDE
exactly what you are going to do. And then after each
string, without attaching to or judging the results—simply
notice what actually happened. Allow clear SEEING to
create your activity.
Brian Enos
USPSA #: A387
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