training

Advanced Pistol Operator course in Deerfield Mass. – Oct. 1-3

We have confirmed dates for an Advanced Pistol Operator course on Oct. 1 – 3, 2010. Bruce Gray and Jerry Jones will be visiting New England for the second time in 2010 after an extremely successful weekend in May.

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training

Photos from the May 2010 GGI Massachusetts Extravaganza

The Massachusetts class this past weekend a big success. This was the third year Grayguns adjunct instructor Scott Conti put together the program in central Massachusetts, and about 20 shooters participated each of the three days.

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training

Grayguns’s Practical Fundamentals: Who is it for?

The Grayguns training crew and I frequently encounter prospective students who dismiss our Practical Fundamentals handgun course program as “too basic” for their level of skill and training. Nearly as often, we’ll talk to a shooter who believes his skills don’t meet our prerequisites for attendance. Both perspectives can’t be right, can they?

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training

Examining training opportunities – finding value and meeting objectives

As someone who takes a lot of classes and teaches a lot, I spend quite a bit of time around the range. With some of the training craziness that has shown up on YouTube recently, I thought I’d share my personal litmus test on examining techniques that you pick up at classes and from your shooting buddies.

All men are naturally race car drivers and porn stars. So we tend to rate a course, or technique by the number of rounds fired. “I shot 2400 rounds in two days, but I’m not sure what we did?” Some of the best classes I have been to I didn’t shoot a lot, but the concentration in making the shots was brutal. So, how then can we examine a course or technique if it isn’t by round count?

Obviously, you should do research in selecting a course that suits your needs and is recommended by like minded folks.

First, can I perform this safely? Any technique that requires you to break any safety rule in the name of “realism” or my personal favorite “stress inoculation” should be avoided at all costs. Some people will disagree, however, I kinda put that in the same category of shooting my bullet proof vest to make sure it works. Not all that smart.

Next comes, is the technique logical? I have found that a common sense approach to training works well. If it doesn’t make sense, and your spidey senses begin to tingle, it is probably for good reason.

Next up, can the instructor explain why you should do/use the technique? Being a good instructor is more than being a good shooter. The most frustrated I have ever been in a course is the whole “Cause I said so” answer. If you can’t satisfy this answer, you should take a long hard look at one and two.

Finally, can the instructor perform the technique? The old adage, “Those that can, do, those that can’t, teach” doesn’t hold water in the firearms community. I’ve heard some instructors say that they won’t demo in front of their students as not to “intimidate” them. Horsehockey.

Sometimes demo-ing is the only way to make the light come on with some students, and it lends credibility to the instructor. I am really wary of any instructor that won’t demo something on request. Obviously, you don’t have to live fire everything, but how can an instructor set expectations for the student body, when he can’t even perform the feat himself?

In this day and age, it costs a fortune in ammo alone to take a course. I have found that asking these questions have served me pretty well over the last few years. Hope it helps you as well.

training

Competitive mindset and affirmative decisions

Learning the skills to be competitive is fun, but applying these skills on demand can be frustrating, especially when we are emotionally invested in the results. Indeed, the biggest challenge facing the competitor is to simply trust his subconscious mind to direct his performance just as he trained it to do, and set his ego aside when it really counts most. It’s not enough for you to develop the skills; you need to develop a system to apply these skills on demand.

You’ve trained hard and smart to develop the technical shooting skills you need to succeed in practical competition. Yet, your match performance doesn’t meet your potential ability. Your attention wanders as the pressure you put on yourself from your expectations builds before each stage. Rather than shooting proactively through your subconscious, you become tentative, conscious and reactive. Your fear of missing drives your performance and your results are marred by procedural errors, poor trigger control and a sense of being rushed.

If the above description sounds familiar, you are in excellent company. If you arrive at the range without having a clear plan of action, you’ll invariably make poor competitive decisions in response to self-imposed pressures driven by our expectations and fear of failure.

The difference between a great competitor and a good one isn’t in his shooting skill, but rather in his ability to deliver a higher percentage of that skill in competition. Most likely, he has a system that anchors him emotionally against the changing tides of match pressure, future expectations and past results, and frees his subconscious from these distractions to do the job he’s trained it to do.

Your system should emphasize staying in the moment, focused on the process of shooting while letting the results take care of themselves. Just as your subconscious mind responds well to the visualization techniques you use to develop practical marksmanship skills, you can use visualization to build the competitive system you need to excel.

It will help you greatly to give yourself a set of rules to follow. Here’s a set of affirmations and positive decisions to guide your thinking and prompt your best performance. I stole these from many other shooters over the years, but you’ll immediately recognize a consistent theme: each decision reinforces the process used to reach your goal, rather than focusing on the goal itself.

In no particular order:

• I’m committed to the marksmanship process.
• I’m committed to this event.
• I trust my subconscious to direct my performance as I have trained.
• I am focused on what I am doing and do not care about results.
• I take the time I need to prepare for each stage.
• I visualize each stage carefully, completely and vividly.
• Once I am loaded and ready, I focus exclusively on a visualized image of the sights on the first target, and let my subconscious direct me through the stage.
• I am not influenced by other shooters, range officers or previous performance.
• I replace tension and anxiety about my performance with a poised spirit and sense of fun.
• I have worked hard to be here.
• I want every shooter to do well.
• I give myself permission to “win”.
• I define “winning” as performing to my potential, not as beating others.
• “Performing to my potential” means seeing the sights, prepping & pressing the trigger and following through on every shot.
• I replace conscious control of the process with active observation.

Remember to have fun! You will achieve your ideal state of performance when you are poised and enjoying the process of shooting well as en end unto itself, for the simple sake of running the gun, watching the sights and pressing off good shots. Be free. Strive for this state of having fun at all times; putting a smile on your face when the pressure hits you will go a long way towards reminding you why you are there.

training

Practical pistol range commands and safety procedures

Practical pistol shooting has the best safety record of all shooting sports. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. That’s because we’ve long recognized the potential dangers inherent in handling pistols in a dynamic, hyper-competitive and high speed environment, and have developed a comprehensive set of immutable rules and procedures to minimize the risks.

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training

In the beginning, there was a gunshow

I’m often asked how I became a good pistol shooter. Looking back across some 35 years of pulling a trigger, I can see how fortunate I was to be exposed to some good techniques and attitudes early on. Read more

training

Zen and the art of hitting stuff

We can separate the skills associated with practical handgun marksmanship into three rough sets: aiming, trigger control and tactical gun handling. In my experience, handgun shooting errors are invariably trigger control related, though most shooters tend to ascribe large groups and missed shots to incorrect aim, poor vision or a “bad grip”. Blaming your sights is praying to a false idol. Let’s assume sight regulation is OK for now.

I’ll go so far as to say that just about every person I’ve ever worked with had the ability to see and focus on their aligned sights, and hold that alignment well enough to shoot a very small group. However, few have had the ability to press the trigger well enough to exploit their aiming skills without considerable training.

So, I agree with those who counsel dry firing. I’d say dry firing is far more important than any other single thing you can do to build your fundamental skills. I do not think it will hurt your pistol as much as shooting poorly can hurt you. Shooters generally seem to “flinch” (which we can define here as a failure to press the trigger and release the hammer without disturbing the sights, and/or to follow through during the entire shot) for two basic reasons:

The first is performance anxiety. By it’s nature, shooting is an exercise in truthful self-realization: the bullet hits or misses, whether completely or by degrees. Everyone wants to “do well” and not look like an idiot in front of others. Without intending to make broad gender-based generalizations, women are less prone to succumbing to this anxiety (and in fact often do better in marksmanship training as a result), whereas men do tend to become more ego-involved in the results to the detriment of their skill development. In any event, those who have been highly conditioned to feel potent and capable (such as law enforcement officers and other highly trained professionals) will tend to identify strongly with symbols of that potency to support their self image. Nothing in American society symbolizes this potency more than the gun.

It follows that when presented with an objective test of competency that challenges one’s illusory self-image, even highly educated and successful new shooters will freak out and fail. This is the person who shakes his or her head in growing frustration at each “bad” shot. In reality, shooting is pretty darn easy; it’s just the shooter’s highly personal investment in results that makes it difficult.

Everyone wobbles. The sights are never going to rest motionless and in perfect alignment on the target. Yet, our egos tend to be perfectionists. Result-oriented shooters won’t accept their wobble and are disappointed in the lack of immediate reinforcement shot as an instantaneous event mediated by their will to hit, yet are frustrated by that overpowering will when they jerk the trigger, flinch and miss. That frustration stems from the highly conscious (and thus clumsy) nature of their technique.

In the absence of a learned, subconscious and visually patient process which presses the trigger in response to the appearance of aligned sights orbiting about the target area, the results-oriented shooter jumps on the trigger when the sights suddenly look right “NOW”. This reinforces true flinching reactions from recoil and blast, which is the second reason we miss. It’s true the good Lord didn’t design us to well tolerate an explosion 18 inches in front of our eyes. Guns were our idea.

Grabbing at the trigger when the sights look “right” to satisfy the ego causes the shooter to place his focus even more on the target, and less on that icon of his increasingly conflicted, unpleasant and unsuccessful marksmanship process: his sights. When a shooter feels he’s inconsistent, it’s often because his visual attention floats aimlessly on an unstable emotional sea between sharply focused process and vaguely seen results.

Process oriented shooters develop a sense for what they must do to fire an acceptable shot for a given target and distance, and train their subconscious minds to do only that. Note, I do not say a “perfect” shot, as that’s not possible or even desirable to strive for. We must define an acceptable shot as one that puts the bullet within a reasonable target area for the style and application of shooting we’re doing.

For IPSC and other practical shooting applications, the process of making an acceptable shot varies by distance, target area, position and how long it takes to make it. Some shots require an absolutely hard sight picture, perfect trigger break and monolithic follow through. Other acceptable shots require a quick slap of the trigger with the gun on the move to the next target. Training the mind to select and apply the correct technique for each shot is the first trick.

Having the visual patience to let your highly trained mind do it for you without conscious intervention is the second trick. Guess which trick is harder to master?

While perfectionism can be counter productive, I also believe shooters handicap themselves by being too in awe of supposedly greater talents and therefore convincing themselves they can’t shoot as fast or as accurately for various reasons. The empirical nature of shooting spawns endless excuses that allow each of us to remain comfortable in our self-imposed zone of relative skill. It’s a little uncomfortable to extend oneself out of that comfort zone and try something harder. The champion differs only in that she knows her comfort zone is an illusion.

But that doesn’t mean we start out trying to hit aspirin tablets at 50 feet. For right now, we just want to hit something honestly and reliably. Let’s say a 2″ dot at 10 yards? That’s reasonable, though daunting for the new shooter. (For that matter, I know of some very experienced competitors who won’t allow themselves to hit that target reliably.)

Well, assuming your sights are aligned fairly well and you see the blurred dot somewhere behind them, you’ll hit within a 2” target area every time so long as the trigger is pressed correctly.

That’s the fundamental skill. This is how to get it:

Unload your gun, and check it three more times. Good! You’ll do the rest with eyes closed.

You note that you can easily drop the hammer without disturbing a dime when dry firing, but not when you know a bullet is present. I think you need to develop an unshakable faith in that skill, and an equally hard faith in the belief that if you focus on and align the sights and press through as you practice, you absolutely will hit the target.

You also need to have equal faith in your ability to call each shot, and know where it went based on what the sights were doing as they lifted off the target during recoil.

Visualize a sight picture on your chosen target in your mind while simultaneously pressing through on the trigger. Feel the trigger, how it might creep and wiggle under finger pressure. Try to get as close to dropping the hammer as you can, and hold it as you watch those imagined sights. You should ignore the target if your mind wants to stick one down there for you to look at instead.

Watch the sights in your mind’s eye and you’ll see them dip, jerk and do all sorts of things. Feel the recoil and blink, perhaps. That’s great! Let your visualized shooting session seem as real as possible without too much conscious direction. Just allow yourself to come back to the sights, focus on the front blade, align them and press.

Be focused on the process of operating the trigger, and learn to press through without tension, convulsive grasping of the hand, jerking or other funny stuff in response to the appearance of aligned sights in your mind. It’s a thing, a device, a machine you own and control. It doesn’t control you.

Do this for two weeks, each night for at least ten or 15 minutes, or until you can’t maintain good form and sight visualizations without your mind wandering too much, and stop when you can’t feel exactly what the trigger’s doing as it releases the hammer. It’s fine to alternate visualization drills with a sighted “shots” against the wall, but the bulk of your dry firing practice should be associated and reinforced with guided imagery.

Then, go the the range. Dry fire in this way on the line a bit. Now, here’s the deal: tell yourself the truth. You know when the gun’s loaded, but you have convinced yourself that following this process is what you will do. You must allow your subconscious to do it for you, since that’s what that last two weeks of intense repetition was for. Trust me, you’ve learned it. To actually DO it, you just occupy the ego with something safe it can do to help, rather than letting it take over in a doomed effort to make it happen and be the star of the show “now that it counts.”

So, give the ego a job: let it watch the sights. Tell it to focus intensely on the front sight and not to think of anything else. Not the target (it’s there), not the gun (it’s fine and we know it’s zeroed well enough), just the front sight, aligned in the notch just as you’ve visualized. If you visualize the pistol firing when the sights appear aligned on the target, that’s what will happen. You have only to step out of the way and watch that front sight.

The gun will fire, at least once or twice in that first session, without conscious thought making it do so. Those are the shots you’ll remember. Ignore the flinches, jerks and misses, as they don’t matter and are not any indicator of success.

That’s how top shooters get there: they focus on the process and count their hits.

Note, the most highly skilled shooters use the sights all the time, every time, as clearly and as well aligned as needed to make a given shot. Some tactical gurus, gun writers and other hounds baying at the moon will tell you that truly practical shooting isn’t about sights, and you’ll swear when you watch us on ESPN, the Outdoor Channel or at your local match that we can’t be seeing the sights at the rate we’re shooting in high-level competition.

The entire concept of “point shooting” is praying to yet another false idol. I personally think the only true god is God, but your front sight is a safe icon to regard with complete obedience when it’s time to shoot, whether at maximum warp or at aspirin tablets. Here’s some additional thoughts on trigger pull weight and technique: Yes, a 1.5 pound trigger does facilitate trigger slap without unduly disrupting sight alignment / index / pointing or whatever you choose to pay attention to during a given shot. It also makes anything but a trigger slap impossible for most shooters, particularly at moderate speeds on discrete targets where positive reset would be a good thing.

Much of what you see top Limited and Production IPSC shooters doing when shooting relatively quickly is indeed drawn from Open gun technique, in which the trigger is released and then pulled right through the reset point without stopping. Slapping the trigger is easier to learn with a dot, since you get instant feedback from that bouncing ball if you jerk the shot. I had leaned to slap with good follow through once, long ago when I shot an Open gun; somewhere along the way, I lost much of the follow through but kept the slap when I lost the dot.

I say, follow-through is everything, whether you take a hard reset before breaking each shot or blow right through. I think it’s best to learn to use both trigger techniques, and incorporate them when appropriate in a seamless skill set.

I can slap the 3X trigger on my SIG P-226 9mm with fair accuracy. It can be done. The first trick is to train your mind to apply only the pressure and rate required to release the sear without driving the trigger into the frame. The second trick here is to develop rock-solid, “dead” follow through skills. Yes, your muscles will always react to recoil in a reflexive way, as you realign the sights. Fine! Just make sure that reaction takes place well after the bullet has left the barrel. Dry firing with visualization and dummy round training at the range are keys, I believe.

Calling shots at speed means using information from the sights to determine whether the previous shot hit or missed. There’s two ways to shoot: One is reactively, in which the sight picture is read on some conscious level and coordinated with a more or less sub-conscious action of trigger pull. That’s the “watch your front sight” school, and it works…sort of. The other is proactively, in which the sight picture is recalled on a lower-conscious level as verification that the subconscious saw what it needed to see when it broke the previous shot, while the subconscious is busy making the present one. This relates to the mode of observation that Enos and others describe. The conscious mind tends to linger in the just-past, not the present. If you ever wondered why some top shooters could do the things they do, this paragraph is really the whole enchilada.

As for transitions, I do mean between targets. I stress, and can prove, that fast splits between first and second shots are not very productive in Limited, and for darn sure not in Production. (By fast, I mean faster than most anyone can really call their shots, or faster than about .16.) Despite what you see the hosers in your local club do, you will generally not find that the top guys like Todd, Robbie and Eric Grauffel depend upon such splits in Limited to make up time per se. In Open, yes, they can get away with more. But, the math suggests there’s little to gain in stressing splits over transitions, due to the points inevitably lost on the second shot and the extra physical and mental tension involved.

© Grayguns Inc. 2005

training

Expand on the Practical Fundamentals in San Diego – Oct. 30 – Nov. 1

We had such a fantastic time at Morro Bay that we’re excited to host another class in sunny San Diego. This class will expand upon the skills introduced in the Practical Fundamentals Course. Key elements of the curriculum will review and reinforce fundamental skills and core techniques as well as introduce proven training drills to maximize marksmanship and develop the proficiencies critical for competition shooting.

More information over at Sigforum.

Note a Practical Fundamentals program has been added for Friday, Oct. 30 prior to the advanced program on Saturday and Sunday. This addition provides those interested in the Saturday and Sunday program to get “up-to-speed” for the weekend’s activities.

Project 2000 Shooting Range
2082 Willow Glen Drive
El Cajon, California

Dates/Time:
The weekend of Oct 30 – Nov. 1, 2009.

I would think we would be shooting from 8 a.m. until the range closes at 5 p.m. on Saturday. The range opens at 9 a.m. on Sunday. We put out a lot of information, especially on the first day, and you’ll need time to digest it.

We’re also hoping to spend time with you, away from the range, over food and drink.

The requirements of this course will be:

• Service Pistol 9mm preferred (just from a cost point, .40 or .45 welcome)
• KYDEX holster, no radical cants NO EXCEPTIONS. Bruce does not allow nylon, leather, and shoulder or leg holsters. (This is done for uniformity)
• We use only factory ammo (No HOLLOW POINT, +P or magnum ammo allowed)
• Plenty of magazines
• Wraparound Eye and hearing protection. Electronic hearing protectors are recommended, but not mandatory.
• Cleaning & maintenance supplies
• Please bring plenty of water
• Bring plenty of sunscreen and a big hat of sorts to protect you from the sun.

Recommended:

• Jeans, BDUs or canvas type pants. No sandals or “tank tops” are allowed.

training

Grayguns Gun Camp scheduled – Sept. 18-20

We’ve been working on details for our Gun Camp II course modules that will be held in Spray, Oregon the weekend of Sept. 18-20.

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