Most shooters have more things they could practice than they have time to practice them.
Draws, transitions, reloads, movement, accuracy, splits, entries, exits, strong hand shooting, weak hand shooting, table starts, steel, partial targets, stage planning. The list keeps growing.
So the question is not simply: What should I practice? A better question is: What should I practice right now that will make the biggest difference in my shooting?
That is where the 80/20 principle becomes useful.
The Principle
The 80/20 principle is often used to describe situations where a relatively small portion of the inputs produces a disproportionately large portion of the results.
For shooting, I do not treat 80 and 20 as exact numbers. The value of the principle is much simpler: some areas of your shooting will give you a much greater return on your training time than others.
Find those areas and spend more time improving them.
If your transitions are costing you far more time than your splits, spending another month trying to shave a few hundredths from your splits probably is not the best use of your training. Work on the transitions.
If your transitions improve and movement becomes the thing costing you the most time, shift your attention to movement. Then reassess again.
Your training priorities should change as you improve.
Find the Limiting Factor
When I first became serious about improving my shooting, it was easy to find things that needed work. A newer shooter may lose large amounts of time on a reload, hesitate entering a position, struggle with one handed shooting, or spend far too long transitioning between targets.
Those are relatively easy opportunities to identify. As your skill improves, however, the differences become smaller. You may eventually be trying to save .10 seconds on an entry, .05 on a transition, or a fraction of a second by beginning a movement earlier.
That does not make the 80/20 principle less useful. It makes objective evaluation more important. At every level, something is limiting your performance.
Find it.
Do Not Confuse What You Enjoy With What You Need
Most of us naturally practice things we already do well because they are fun. If you are good at shooting fast splits, Bill Drills are enjoyable. If you are good at draws, it feels good to keep hammering draws. Success is rewarding.
The problem is that the skill you enjoy practicing may not be the skill that is holding you back.
Suppose your splits are around .19 seconds, but your transitions are .45 seconds. You could continue working on your splits and perhaps reduce them to .17. That is an improvement, but reducing a .45 transition to .30 would probably have a much larger effect on a stage, particularly because you may transition many times during a single run.
The question is not: What can I improve? Almost everything can improve. The better question is: Where will improvement matter most?
That distinction is central to purposeful practice.
Your 20 Percent Changes
The area that deserves additional attention today may not deserve it six months from now.
One of my own examples was one handed shooting. When I first started shooting competitively, stages requiring strong hand or weak hand shooting gave me problems. I did not practice it much, and because I was not particularly good at it, I did not enjoy practicing it either.
That became a cycle. I was not good at it, so I avoided it. Because I avoided it, I did not get better.
Eventually I made one handed shooting a deliberate part of my training, and it improved. Today, I am much more comfortable when a stage requires it, and sometimes I can even use a one handed shot to solve a shooting problem around a barrier.
I still practice one handed shooting, but it no longer deserves the same percentage of my training time.
Something else does.
That is how this should work.
Stay Well Rounded
There is an important limitation to the 80/20 principle: do not allow it to make you one dimensional.
Practical shooting requires a broad set of skills, and matches have a way of exposing the things you never practice. You may encounter strong hand only shooting, weak hand only shooting, table starts, unloaded starts, ports, hard leans, steel, movers, long shots, kneeling, retreating, or unusual entries and exits.
You do not need to devote equal practice time to every possible problem, but you should maintain enough exposure that the match is not the first time you encounter one.
I like to think of practice as having broad areas such as accuracy, transitions, draw, splits, movement, reloads, stage execution, and occasional specialty skills. You can touch several areas while still putting additional emphasis on the one that currently offers the greatest return.
Stay well rounded, but do not distribute your training time equally.
Measure Before You Guess
The timer can help you identify where the real opportunity exists. Sometimes what feels slow is not actually the thing costing you the most time.
You may believe your reload is terrible because you notice every fumble, while your transitions quietly cost you several tenths of a second on every target. A drill that combines multiple skills can be particularly useful because it lets you separate the components and look at your draw, splits, transitions, reload, and overall time.
The goal is not to obsess over every number. The goal is to identify where additional work is likely to produce the greatest improvement.
This is one reason measurement is an important part of Practice With Purpose.
Matches Can Reveal the Next Priority
Practice is not the only place to find your 20 percent. Competition will show you things.
Maybe you discover that you consistently lose time entering positions. Maybe a retreating stage exposes a skill you rarely practice. Maybe you struggle with swingers. Maybe you realize that your stage plan forced an unnecessary standing reload.
That information is valuable. Do not simply leave the match frustrated by the problem. Add it to your Shooting Knowledge Base and decide whether it deserves a place in your training.
Not every match problem deserves to become your new primary focus. Ask yourself: How often am I likely to encounter this? How much is it costing me? How much improvement could I reasonably gain by working on it?
Then decide how much training time it deserves.
If You Do Not Know What to Work On
Sometimes the limiting factor is obvious. Sometimes it is not.
If you cannot identify it yourself, ask someone who is better than you to watch you shoot. A good instructor or experienced shooter may see something you do not.
You may believe you need faster splits when the real issue is movement. You may believe you need a faster draw when the larger loss is occurring after you arrive on the first target. You may believe your stage plan is the problem when the real limitation is that you do not yet have the skill needed to execute the more efficient plan.
Outside perspective can help identify those opportunities.
Improvement Changes the Problem
One of the most satisfying parts of training is that solving one problem usually reveals the next one.
Transitions improve, and now movement is the limiting factor. Movement improves, and now you can arrive sooner, but your entry shooting needs work. Entries improve, and now you can combine positions, but the longer shots created by the new stage plan expose an accuracy issue.
Improve the accuracy and another opportunity appears.
That is continual improvement. You are not trying to reach a point where there is nothing left to work on. You are trying to continually identify the thing that will move your performance forward the most.
Get the Biggest Return From Your Practice
Training time, ammunition, range access, and energy are limited resources. Use them deliberately.
Stay broad enough that you remain a capable, well rounded shooter, but within that broad training program, identify the area that offers the greatest return and put additional effort there.
When it improves, reassess. Then move to the next opportunity.
The numbers do not have to be exactly 80 and 20. The principle is what matters:
Spend more of your training resources on the things that will make the biggest difference.
That is how limited practice time produces meaningful improvement.