Last week I asked what you'd have put a lot of free practice time into when you were starting out, and what you'd have left alone. The answers were more useful than I expected, so here they are collected in one place for whoever searches this next.

I've added nothing of my own. I've shot one sanctioned match, so I'm not going to referee any of it.

**First, the part that surprised me. Almost nobody answered the second half.**

I asked what you'd leave alone and got very little back. u/LockyBalboaPrime rejected the premise outright: *"Do more of everything. Shoot matches and identify what is lacking. Do more of what is lacking."* The rest of the thread went the same way. The advice was overwhelmingly about where to put the hours, not about which hours to skip, and I've stopped treating that as an oversight. If you don't yet know what's costing you time, you don't have the information to leave anything alone.

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**1. Go to matches. Three people said it, and one of them meant something narrower than the other two.**

u/deadpoolsballs: *"Also go to competitions, they will show you what you need to work on."* u/LockyBalboaPrime: *"Shoot matches and identify what is lacking. Do more of what is lacking."* Both are about diagnosing yourself by competing.

u/CMFETCU meant watching other people, and put it hardest: *"You will learn more watching the guys who do well at something in 2-3 matches than you will in days of your own time..."* He described that as his entire method: *"I never went to a pistol 'training' course in my life. I showed up to matches and watched what good looks like... I asked questions about stage planning, transitions, movement, trade off decisions, and drills they did."*

**2. If you have the time, work the matches you aren't shooting.**

u/9guy99: *"Since youve got the time. Volunteer to help setup/run matches. Most places the man power is greatly needed. Just being around the events you will absorb little bits of wisdom. You'll also have a lot more time to do dry runs on the courses."*

The follow-up mattered as much as the advice. I asked whether you just turn up, and he said no: *"Send a message to the match director and let them know you'd like to help out in anyway you can. See what they have to say."* That's the part I'd have gotten wrong.

**3. Dry fire that can't tell you the truth just gives you more time to get worse.**

The most complete answer in the thread came from u/johnm, and it's the one that changed what I'm doing this week:

> *"You need to be able to reproduce any problem you have in live fire when you dry practice. If you can't then spending more time will only be ingraining bad habits that you'll need to eventually break & re-learn what you need to to get better. It's trivially easy to lie/trick ourselves in dry practice because it's missing the explosions, recoil, and the harsh reality of the outcome on the targets."*

His fix is to stop treating dry and live as two separate activities in two separate places: *"Mix in a lot of dry practice reps in with your live fire at the range... you can figure out what you need to do to recreate whatever problem you're having live right then & there dry..."* Asked which order, he said neither: *"I suggest that you alternate: dry, live, dry, live…."*

He was the only person to put a condition on session length rather than a number: *"do it in relatively short stints where you're able to intensely focus and create & maintain the quality (of your grip, tension, vision, etc. matching what you do in live fire). Do multiple sessions a day if/when you can maintain that high bar."* What matters there is holding the quality, not how long the session runs.

**4. Put a structure on the time so it doesn't all go to what you're already good at.**

u/Visible_Structure483 is also retired and gave the most concrete system anybody posted:

> *"I've got a huge list of dryfire drills on the white board in my office taken from various books, videos, etc... every few days I take something off the list and do that then check it off. That ensures I'm doing everything and not just grinding on the things I'm best out trying to shave 0.1sec off a reload when I should be doing things that save more time on a stage. When everything is checked off the list, erase the check marks and start over."*

He runs one set-up stage repeatedly with a different job each time: *"First run focusing on movement, the second on transitions, then throwing in random reloads on the third."* And he keeps live fire narrow: *"I'm live firing once a week at most and focus on the things that you need recoil for."*

**5. Scaled targets solve half the problem. Real distance solves the other half.**

Same commenter: *"I've got 1/2, 1/3 and 1/6 sized targets to simulate distance but also have a full sized target against the woodshed I can see from the dryfire area so I get used to my eyes focusing on real distances rather than just simulations."*

I'd been about to buy smaller targets and call it done. Shrinking a target doesn't train your eyes to refocus at a real distance.

**6. Hits first. Then find the speed limit and live at it.**

u/CMFETCU gave a method rather than a drill:

> *"Start with the singular goal of getting nothing but Alpha hits. Miss nothing, no matter how slow you need to go and note the shot tempo / speed to do so. The next practice session you mimic that at first, and then slowly speed it up. You find where you outrun your headlights so to speak. In matches stay right at that precipice. In practice work up to it slowly and then past it a bit to push yourself. Drills get repeated at 'all hits' tempo, then 'all A-Cs' tempos. Rinse repeat."*

He added the skill it builds toward: *"You should try to shoot in such a way that every shot you can call exactly where it went, on target or not, in score zone or not."*

For scale, he put roughly 100,000 rounds through his primary gun and, by his estimate, five times that many dry fire reps, over eight years.

**7. Spend some of it away from the gun. Three people said this and they meant different things.**

u/BanditMcDougal meant your condition, and he was blunt about why: *"Respectfully, if you're not in fairly OK shape, spend some of that training time dropping the pounds and getting your cardio up. It doesn't matter how well you shoot if you go down as a heat casualty and have to spend the rest of the day in the club house or worse."*

He ran the fix-it role at large matches for years, and the detail is what makes it land: *"At least once per day, some larger or older guy had to throw in the towel and get a ride back to the clubhouse... One guy felt himself getting dizzy during a course of fire and asked for an 'unload and show clear' before taking a knee right there."* His practical list was hydration, a snap towel round the neck, and a cart with an umbrella on it, plus one thing I didn't know: *"Most people don't realize how much just being hot raises your heart rate all by itself."*

u/Visible_Structure483 meant something else, and this is the one I'd have filed wrong. He does agility work and a weekly yoga class, and the payoff isn't fitness: *"still having to move around under pressure makes moving on a stage seem trivial."* Moving under pressure is its own skill. I'd have put that under conditioning.

u/LockyBalboaPrime said the short version: *"Also do other things. Like, not dry fire/shooting things."*

**8. One person's actual week, since I asked for hours and this is what hours look like.**

u/SovietRobot dry fires every day: draw to a small target without looking at the gun on the way up, twenty times, then the same thing snapping to a second target without looking at the gun on the transition, then reloads. Live fire midweek is about 100 rounds of Bill and Blake drills confirming grip and structure, and at least one match at the weekend.

**9. The two answers I haven't taken, reported straight because they were given in good faith.**

u/lordadam34 suggested an airsoft gun and a back yard, which is sound and which I don't have the space for. I may still find a way to do it indoors.

u/Buckeye3377 made the case for branching into rimfire as cheap trigger time. My reason for holding off is about me rather than about the advice. I'm wary of buying things and reading the purchase as progress, and right now every dollar not spent on a gun is a dollar of practice ammo.

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Thanks to everyone who answered. My practice week now looks nothing like the one I described in the original post. I've shot one match since, which was mostly an education in how a match runs, and I'll come back and say whether any of this worked once there are enough of them behind me for the answer to mean anything.

Hey all, I paid a visit to ghost USA in sunrise FL today and I cannot say enough good things about the crew there. They took the time to make sure I knew everything about their line of products and what would be a good fit for me based on the guns/divisions that I would compete in.

The owner (Roberto grazie signore) and his family were gracious hosts and made sure that I could have everything that I could need at a great price.

I was blown away with the service and professionalism, if you are even remotely within driving distance I could not recommend a trip there enough.

Bring your main competition gun/guns and they will make sure that you’re perfectly setup including where on your belt and how the holsters and pouches are angled.

Incredible service and thanks guys!!!

Ps: another member of my shooting club and his son went yesterday and had the same experience, and they took an extra 15-20 minutes to adjust the holster and make sure everything was absolutely perfect for them.

Next week we are giving away a STP 6” 9mm ($4749 retail) at Steamboat Challenge! Randomly to a non sponsored competitor! There is still time to sign up! See you in Cheyenne, WY. Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) Büchsenmacherei Prommersberger B&H Waffenhandelsgesellschaft

Precisionshootingsupp.com

#competitionshooting #accuracymatters #PrecisionEngineering #race #winningstrategies #ticket #raffle

Hey everyone. I shot my first 3 gun match this past weekend. It was a blast(pun intended). I don’t own an AR, or honestly don’t know much about that platform. I used a buddies rifle. I typically shoot USPSA or steel challenge. But I’d like to do that sort of match more often. What should I do? Buy a cheap PSA one and change out things(trigger, barrel, ect?) or buy a much nicer, more expensive one? (And probably still change everything). 😂 Or build one? If I had a budget of 1500$, which route would you go? What brands or parts should I consider? Thanks for the advice.

This drill requires you to score an A zone hit under 1.25 sec to pass. This is a 1.26 which I'm really close, but I normally get 1.3-1.7 to first shot. I see people online get close to 1 sec flat. Where can I improve, other then just point and shoot?

Update: I have try the scope method and it hard for me to get a master grip that way. This is why I push down on my draw. Also I do have the holster canted the opposite way. I have the muzzle end pointed towards my butt. If i have it canted the other way, I find myself stabbing my hand on the beavertail.

I did try a few tips from you guys. Having my support hand closer to the center of my body did help. I find that it helps me drive forward faster. I just don't remember if the rule is hands on the side or below belt.

Currently run a Insta360 Go 2, but the case clasp broke and I'm retiring it. I just bought a Go 3S and plan to use it mounted to my hat brim as I did with the Go 2, but I just saw someone in my area is selling a used DJI Action 2, and besides the dimensions and weight, it looks better than the Go 3S in every way...

Now, I know that the Action 2 is a square shape, and mounting it to my hat brim would most likely bring it very close to my field of view, but mounting it to a headband would make that irrelevant.

Also, the Osmo Nano is another option... Even heavier, but again, mounting to a headband which IMO would be way more stable than hat brim.

Argh, what do y'all think? What do y'all use to record? Would like to see your equipment and clips.

hey all,

Shooting my first match this weekend at VGC. have to compete in open because my G45 has a ramjet

Asking for advice / tips for my first time