When I was a teenager, the misconception I had about professional racing was that the trophy would go to the most powerful car, or perhaps the most aggressive driver.
It was in the mid-90s that a number of racing games hit the market that tried to simulate the physics and details of motorsports as closely as possible, from real-world courses to tire wear to allowing modification of a car’s suspension characteristics. Years before I obtained my driver’s license, those racing simulations taught me a great deal about what it meant to have a “fast” lap time.
Chief among those lessons was this: I didn’t shave seconds off my best time by mashing the gas or trying to drift the car around corners. To the contrary, my best performance always came through figuring out the smoothest, most consistent path through any particular track. Often, I would break a previous record without realizing it. Watch a professional race today, like LeMans or F1, and you may actually find yourself bored of the consistency to which the world’s best drivers carve each corner methodically, with nearly every one of them following an identical “racing line.”
Indeed, I’d first heard the phrase “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast” used in the context of racing, but it would be repeated often as I gained interest in the shooting sports. At first it seems paradoxical, but once you really understand it, it’s the most common and sensible path to improvement.
First Steps
There’s a lot of hub-bub on the internet about things like “split times” and trying to get the duration between fired rounds from a sixth of a second to a seventh of a second. This may matter to the one person out of a thousand gun owners who is trying to win a competition; for the rest of us mortals, it’s a distraction.
If you ever need to use your firearm in a serious context, your first shot is going to be the most important. As such, the very first point of order is to minimize the time it takes to go from a draw (or from the low ready) to having your sights aligned where you want them.
Remember that “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” axiom? This is absolutely where you want to be sure you’re deliberate and consistent with how you approach all of the biomechanical aspects of making that first shot. If you’re working from the holster, is your grip consistent? Are you gripping the firearm differently than you would if you pick it up off the table at the range? If you look at it in your hand, does the bore of the firearm follow the same general line as the bones of your forearm?
If you’re working with a long gun, the same considerations apply. Is your grip consistent? Are you placing it into the same part of your shoulder? Is your cheek coming to rest along the same part of the stock? When you bring the gun up, does your optic or iron sighting system seem to naturally point toward the object of your interest?
Supposing there are any hiccups with this process, starting slow is a great help. You can begin figuring out how you and your firearm can move fluidly and consistently, along with how to track the sights from target to target. Fine tune this approach for about five minutes a day (consistency is more important than intensity or duration) until you begin figuring out how to remove any wasted motion or variability in your presentation and trigger pull.
Only once you feel that this task has been accomplished should you try to go faster. Again, I’d stress moderation until the new variables are sorted out. For example, do you find yourself “swinging past” your point of aim when you increase your speed? Are you seeing your muzzle dip when you work the trigger more quickly? If so, slow down a little and begin to work through those new gremlins.
The great news is that this can be practiced in the comfort of your own home for the total cost of zero dollars. Just remember to triple-check that your firearm is unloaded each and every time you engage in a set of reps.
Subsequent Shots
Just about any yahoo can yank on the trigger and “mag dump” a gun (which can be fun to a point), but in practice I’ve found it’s a good way to blow through ammo without learning much about one’s technique. I’m a much bigger advocate of practicing controlled pairs — assuming that the shooter has learned to get the gun up, align the sights, and the press the trigger cleanly.
Again, rather than shooting nine rounds at a time, shoot just two. After the first round (in which you incorporate all of your careful practice), you want to track the front sight or red dot until it settles back onto the target. And then, with a minimum of delay, you want to press the trigger straight back and send the next round. Most shooters will find this easier said than done.
More than any other drill, shooting controlled pairs taught me the relationship between speed and accuracy. There will be a point where a “good enough” sight picture will allow you hit with your second shot — depending on the size of and distance from the target, of course. But as the shot becomes more challenging to make, it will take more time for the sights to settle to a point where the hit can be assured.
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Whereas a first-round draw and trigger pull may be practiced indefinitely and at zero cost thanks to dry-fire training, controlled pairs are a live-fire only proposition. The challenge lies in understanding how any particular gun behaves under recoil and how long it takes in your hands to return to its original point of aim. For an additional measure of difficulty, one can fire the second round on a different target.
Let the Numbers Tell the Story
If one is serious about improving their shooting, a shot timer is an excellent investment. The PACT Club Timer III seems to be the industry standard: Push the big green button, and you’ll hear a beep after a delay of a few seconds. The beep is audible enough to be heard on a busy shooting range, but not so loud as to become obnoxious.
When practicing via dry-fire, the shot timer will give you a less predictable point at which to begin your draw. But, when practicing with live ammo, the timer will record the time from the beep to your first shot, along with the “split times” of every subsequent round. It seems a simple thing, but recording and analyzing this data over time is one of the best things you can do to measure your own progress.
If you start using a shot timer, you’re bound to encounter another strange paradox: your best times are unlikely to feel fast to you. Often, you’ll set a new personal best on a drill in which you felt comfortable, relaxed, and more invested in the “journey” of working smoothly and consistently as opposed to the “destination” of hitting a milestone. The shot timer is an impartial, unbiased observer, and it is particularly good at quantifying and magnifying small differences in our performance that would otherwise escape us.
The Next Level?
Supposing that one has a goal of running “Bill Drill” times under two seconds or winning the regional USPSA match, there’s a lot more to shooting fast. For the world’s top shooters, it often requires a total reassessment of their trigger pull and upper-body conditioning, along with some equipment and ammo choices that provide a competitive advantage. For the overwhelming majority of shooters, however, the tips above will be far more consequential when it comes to building confidence in one’s technique and seeing palpable gains.
To some, my suggestions might seem like slow going, and far less exciting than ripping through one’s ammo as quickly as possible. However, they’re both cost-effective and tailored to produce steady and measurable growth as we keep sight of what’s most important in our shooting. To quote the famous lawman Wyatt Earp, “Speed is fine, but accuracy is final.”
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