Improving target transition speed
To execute target transitions well is fairly straightforward. Stay relaxed, keep your eyes ahead of the gun, aim your gun where you want your rounds to go, press the trigger. Application is a bit more challenging. You need to build a durable, consistent grip to manage recoil, maintain hard target focus throughout a longer course of fire, engage targets with different levels of confirmation depending on size, distance and difficulty, and employ proper body mechanics. Right now, I’m focusing on one specific element of body mechanics: driving my gun from target to target smoothly and more aggressively.
When transitioning between targets, eyes lead the gun. As soon as the last shot breaks on the first target, I want to be driving my eyes to a small spot on the second target, looking to where I want the gun to go, then aggressively driving the gun to the spot where I’m looking. I pretty consistently maintain a hard target focus and I get predictable behavior out of my gun so I’m able to get consistent, repeatable accuracy. But I want to be faster.
Then I had a realization. I was being lazy in driving the gun. My eyes moved, but the gun wasn’t showing up quick enough. So my eyes went looking for the gun instead of staying on the target. We are capable of moving our eyes from target to target very fast. Faster than you can move your gun. My challenge is to drive the gun faster so there’s a lot less lag time so my eyes don’t wander. I’m working on being much more aggressive in moving the gun smoothly to where I’m looking and decelerating so I don’t over shoot the target and still get a nice soft landing on my aiming point.
Designated Target Drill, Time: 7:80, 10 Alphas. HF 6.41
In this video I’m doing a designated target drill, engaging multiple targets, at different heights, different distances, and different levels of difficulty. Steel at 15 yds, hard cover and open targets at 10 yds and a no shoot at 5 yds. I’m training my vision so that as soon as a shot breaks, my eyes move to the next target, and I drive the gun to where I’m looking as fast as possible. As I begin to process targets faster and more efficiently, my accuracy and speed improves.
Time was 7:80. All alphas. Hit-Factor (points÷time) was 6.41. Now I have a new benchmark for this drill. I’ll be able to test my work in dry fire and track and assess my progress in live fire.