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I'm with taliv on this. Slow trigger squeeze/ "surprise" break (once you are not a brand-newbie with your gun anymore, there are no more surprises in my opinion)/ physical ability to shoot a tight slowfire group is an important skill. I still shoot at least one group pretty much almost every practice. I want to be able to hit a paster at seven yards, a head box at 30, and a classic target A-zone at 50. If I'm doing that, I know I'm doing decent slow fire trigger pulls, or at least good enough for what I'm doing (USPSA).
In my experience, if you want to go fast, you have to go fast. The best analogy I've heard recently: Driving a Camry for 200k miles on the street gives you lots of driving experience, but it won't turn you into a race car driver that will have any hope of being competitive against other race car drivers. The point being, that contrary to a lot of old/prevailing wisdom, slow isn't fast, and "the speed" won't come by magic by itself. You have to MAKE it come by shooting faster than your comfort zone normally allows, and making mistakes. You can shoot a million rounds of perfect slowfire groups, but unless you force yourself to go faster and faster, you will never be fast. The trick of course is taking those slowfire fundamentals, and then picking up the speed. You will always “cut corners” to some degree as you shoot faster. How much you will “shortcut” depends on the minimum accuracy requirement for the shot, and what you know you can get away with based on your own results in practice.
I’m not sure where else to say this, so I’ll just say it here. I think the grip pressure balance (50% strong hand/70+% weak hand) is one of the biggest things that people are doing wrong when it comes to shooting accurately enough at speed on tight shots. You have to actually DO the common wisdom here, and I don’t think most people are doing this well enough. I know I’m one of them. Your strong hand has to be relatively relaxed for you to get the independent movement of your trigger finger necessary to pull the trigger without squeezing the rest of that hand and impacting the shot. You have no such requirement for your weak hand, so you are free to lock down that grip as hard as you want. The more grip pressure you have coming from your weak hand, the more completely isolated stabilization force you have on the gun, and the more you can “relax” your strong hand to get a good isolated trigger pull. Learning to do the correct grip force balance reflexively in dryfire is something I think virtually everyone can improve. I know I’m among them.
To the OP’s direct question: When I'm working with a student I have them do a few specific exercises to develop shooting speed. (My students are typically C/B type USPSA shooters that are looking to get better. They are already competent gun handlers, have at least an academic grasp of classic fundaments, and are probably already better shooters than 99% of the average handgun owning public). If they have a mental block initially about shooting faster, I believe all the following is a good progressive path to take, and may be what the thread starter is looking for.
1) First, I want you to prove to yourself that you can pull the trigger just as fast as anyone else, and that you can actually see the sights at that speed too. You probably can’t process whether a sight picture is correct in that time, but you can see a sight picture to some degree at least, and process it afterward (different topic). To this end, I want to remove all other inputs besides pulling the trigger as fast as possible, and seeing the front sight lift and return. Just dump a mag into the berm as fast as you can pull. No target. Just see the sight lift and return, but don’t wait. Pull as fast as you possibly can. If your grip is good, you will be able to see the sights at this speed. If you check the splits, you will see that they are probably in the same neighborhood with the very best shooters on earth. Your finger works the same as everyone else’s. If there are issues with being able to do this (and assuming you are in good physical health, etc), they are grip related, and your grip needs to be fixed.
2) Bill drills at progressively further ranges are great for this. You are going for all As or close Cs. At 7 yards you can be relatively relaxed, probably target focused as well, and your splits should be the same as they are on the berm drill. If you don’t have serious fundamental issues, you should be able to shoot As as fast as you can physically pull the trigger. Moving out to 10, 15, 25, and 50 yards, you are gradually moving back toward slower, very fundamentally correct mechanics to get the desired hits. I like to push the edge of shooting speed on the longer range bill drills. To do these quickly, you have to shoot mechanically good shots at a high rate of speed, which is a very large part of the end game in USPSA. Everything has to be right.
3) Mix in transitions, like with a Blake drill. Again, you can do these from close to far, and with lots of work you will learn what you need to do at each range to get acceptable hits as fast as possible.
A few other random points about different parts of the discussion:
-Target focus vs. sight focus: The hinge for me is surprisingly close. Anything beyond 5-6 yards I start to go sight focus, and even there, I waffle a bit especially if the shot is on a partial target.
-Intermediate steps for improvement: These are great, but I find it more efficient to not kid yourself about what the end goal is. If I have a student, and we are doing a drill, I simply tell them, “this is the GM time”. This is the goal. We are going to push as hard to hit this time as we can. If that doesn’t happen today, dryfire it up and next time out, hopefully we are closer.
-I’m not ever surprised when a shot breaks (hopefully), and I’m not feeling any resets when shooting at anything faster than a pure slowfire group shooting pace. That said, I do “ride the reset”. I just do it instantly after the shot. My finger never comes off the trigger.
-A national champion level shooter was once a newbie too. I don’t believe there is fundamentally a different path for any newbie vs. any national GM, if they are working towards the same kind of goals. They might not be at the same skill level now, or ever, but that doesn’t change the fact that they both need to develop the same skills to the maximum level that they can.