meaningful practice

[g.willikers]

How do you know if your practice sessions are doing any good?
One way is to run published courses of fire with known results and then compare yourself to the rest of the universe.
The large sanctioning bodies (IDPA, USPSA, ICORE, SASS, 'etc), all have links to matches around the country and many of the clubs having matches make their stage designs available beforehand, and publish the results afterward.
While most of these stages will be too elaborate to reproduce for practice, there's always a few from just about every match that are agreeable to run on your own.

Also, the uspsa.org site offers their complete classifier book, with over 70 stages, most are very easy to set up and run. And the generous and creative folks at Ohiouspsa.com have an online classifier calculator where results can be entered and compared with the rest of the country.

Focused practice like this can make a huge difference in skill improvement. And it's lots more fun than just slinging lead downrange to no special purpose.

Just a thought.

 

[SoCalShooter]

Thats not bad. I usually know my practice is doing well when fewer holes are outside of the 10 and x ring. Not to mention it shows in matches.

 

[jmorris]

More often than not stages that are in a course of fire booklet don’t look the same once they are set up. It is for this reason I don’t bother “setting up” for a stage until I am there to look at it. Not to mention most don’t have any distance information either. There are the courses of fire that are set in stone like USPSA’s standards and IDPA’s classifier, but I don’t necessarily recommend practicing just them. You might become an EX but shoot with the SSs come match day. I like to practice with others and set up mini matches, simple stages that you can shoot forward, backward or sideways more than once without having to totally reset or shoot the same thing twice. This lets you evaluate your performance just as you will come match day (total score, raw time, points down). Go get a copy of “With Winning in Mind” by Lanny Basham (sp) it will help in this area as well as others.

FWIW you can literally see the difference of meaningful dry fire practice.

 

[Sunray]

"...IDPA, USPSA, ICORE, SASS, etc..." These aren't the only competitions. You need to practice for whatever game you're playing. You'll want to increase your general fitness level too. Especially if you're playing the 'run and jump' games.

 

[Harley Quinn]

I like to go to the range and watch others shoot (indoor) then I shoot and when I see what I did in comparison to the others I know I am still an expert.