For my session last Saturday, I tried something quite difference for me.  My first iterations of my pistol reload drill  (2 on left target, two on right, reload and repeat – 10 yards) I decided I would go for pure speed – I wasn’t really concerned if I hit the prefered target area or not.  I did this for about the first 100 rounds of practice, and saw some facinating results.  My previous record on this this drill was 4.39 seconds.  I’ve been improving my first shot speeds, but it still hovers between 1.20 and 1.30 seconds.

Here’s my blazing fast first run with no concern for accuracy – 3.87 sec., with a .97 second 1st shot.  Wow!  I didn’t know I had a sub 1 second 1st shot in me!   No shots in the prefered (white) target zone, but most shots were just above the white, so not horrible given the speed.

Thinking that perhaps the 1st run was a fluke, I tried it again:

Nope!  This run was actually faster than the first – 3.79 secs. with a .94 first shot.  I landed a couple in the white, but again most shots were above the prefered target zone.  I repeated the drill a few additional times before I decided I would dial back the speed to what I thought would be necessary to get all eight shots in the white.  Here was the first run where I did just that:

The overall time was 4.18 secs., with a first shot of 1.06 secs – well faster than my previous record of 4.39 secs.  The next time was even faster:

My experience with these drills cemented my belief that I need to do more to enhance pure speed.  I KNOW how to shoot accurately.  But giving myself permission to shoot with little regard to accuracy helped me breat through a performance plateau I’ve been stuck at for months. I think a key is getting the feel for shooting that fast, and getting my eyes used to tracking the dot on my optic at that speed.

A similar approach to PCC yielded another personal best – 4.03 seconds, with a .80 first shot (port start).

That beat my previous best by about .20 seconds.

I’ll be continuing to do incorporate a few iterations of “fast but not accurate” runs in my future training.