Going to the range is not necessarily practice.
Neither is putting on your belt and doing the same draw fifty times in dry fire.
Both can be useful, and both are certainly better than sitting on the couch if your goal is to improve. But simply performing an activity does not guarantee improvement. If you want to become a better shooter, your practice needs a purpose.
Know what you are trying to improve, work on it deliberately, and determine whether you actually got better.
That does not mean every practice session needs to be complicated. In fact, making practice too complicated can become another reason not to do it. What matters is that you have some idea of what you are trying to accomplish before you start.
Start With an Objective
Before a practice session, ask yourself a basic question:
What am I trying to improve today?
The answer can be broad or very specific.
You might be working on transitions. You might want to improve your reload while moving. You may be trying to get comfortable entering a position and firing as soon as you have an acceptable sight picture. Maybe you simply want to confirm that your accuracy has not deteriorated while you have been working on speed.
The important part is that you are doing something for a reason.
One of the problems with unstructured practice is that most of us naturally gravitate toward the things we already enjoy and perform well. Those things are fun. Success feels good.
Unfortunately, the thing you enjoy practicing the most may not be the thing holding back your match performance.
Purposeful practice forces you to look at your shooting a little more objectively.
Work Where the Return Is Greatest
I am a big believer in applying the 80/20 principle to shooting practice.
I do not mean that exactly 20 percent of your practice will always produce exactly 80 percent of your improvement. The important idea is that some areas of your shooting will produce a much greater return on your training effort than others.
Suppose your splits are already around .19 seconds, but your transitions are .45 seconds. You could spend weeks trying to reduce your splits another few hundredths of a second. You might eventually succeed.
But transitions are probably where the bigger opportunity exists.
Work on the .45 second transition.
When that improves, reassess. The limiting factor may now be movement, reloads, accuracy, entries, or something else.
Your priorities should change as your shooting changes.
We will explore this much more deeply in a separate article on The 80/20 Principle for Shooting, but for now the important question is:
What improvement would make the biggest difference in my shooting right now?
Spend additional practice time there.
Measure Enough to Know
You cannot always tell whether you are improving by feel alone.
Sometimes a run feels incredibly fast and the timer says otherwise. Another run may feel controlled and almost slow, only to be considerably faster.
That is why at least some of your training should include objective measurements.
A timer is one of the most useful tools we have. Hit factor, points, group size, accuracy, transition times, reload times, and other measurements can also provide useful information depending on what you are practicing.
You do not need to turn every practice session into a research project. There are plenty of times when I practice without recording every number.
But you need enough data to answer two questions:
Where am I now?
Am I getting better?
Without measurement, it is easy to become more consistent at what you are already doing rather than actually improving it.
Use Both Dry Fire and Live Fire
Dry fire and live fire provide different benefits, and I believe a good practice program needs both.
Dry fire gives you a tremendous number of repetitions without ammunition expense or travel to a range. It also lets you isolate movement and mechanics without recoil and noise competing for your attention.
You can work on draws, transitions, reloads, entries, exits, movement, target acquisition, and stage skills in dry fire.
But dry fire cannot tell you everything.
Eventually the gun needs to fire.
Live fire confirms that what you are practicing works when recoil, noise, ammunition, timing, and actual hits are involved. Paper targets are particularly honest. The hole is where the hole is, regardless of where you thought it was.
The two forms of training should complement each other rather than compete with each other.
We will cover the relationship between the two in much greater depth in Dry Fire and Live Fire: Why You Need Both.
Stay Well Rounded
Focusing on the biggest opportunity does not mean ignoring everything else.
Practical shooting can expose you to strong hand only shooting, weak hand only shooting, table starts, unloaded starts, ports, awkward positions, distant targets, steel, movers, kneeling, retreating, shooting on the move, and plenty of things you did not expect.
Your practice does not need to give all of these equal time.
It should give them enough time that a match is not the first time you have ever tried them.
I like to maintain broad categories in my practice such as accuracy, transitions, draws, splits, movement, reloads, stage execution, and occasional specialty skills. One area may receive extra emphasis because that is where I believe the biggest improvement is available, but I do not want the rest of my shooting to disappear while I work on it.
Focus without becoming one dimensional.
A Match Is an Evaluation, Not a Substitute for Practice
Matches are valuable, but I do not consider simply shooting matches to be an effective replacement for deliberate practice.
At a match, you generally get one attempt.
You do not get to stop after a poor entry, change something, and immediately run it six more times. You cannot isolate one transition and repeat it until you understand what is happening. You cannot experiment freely with three different techniques and compare the results.
Practice gives you those opportunities.
A match shows you whether the work transferred.
That makes competition extremely useful. It exposes things you may not have anticipated and shows you what happens when the timer matters. Afterward, those lessons can feed back into the next practice cycle.
Practice. Compete. Evaluate. Adjust. Practice again.
Over time, situations that were once unfamiliar become part of your experience.
That is how you begin building what I call your Shooting Knowledge Base.
Do Not Wait for the Perfect Practice Session
There is one potential downside to telling people to practice with purpose: they can make the process so elaborate that they stop practicing.
Do not do that.
In a perfect world, every session would have a detailed plan, clearly defined objectives, measurements, and exactly the equipment and time you wanted.
Real life does not work that way.
Sometimes you have fifteen or twenty minutes. Sometimes the range is crowded. Sometimes you forgot something. Sometimes you simply do not have the energy to create the perfect training session.
Do something useful anyway.
A good plan helps. Consistency helps even more.
Your long term improvement comes from repeatedly putting in useful work, not from occasionally designing the perfect practice session.
“Every day, make progress toward your goals. Long term success is the result of what you do daily. The little things add up.”
Evaluate and Adjust
At the end of a session, take a moment to ask what happened.
Did the thing you were working on improve?
What worked?
What should you continue doing?
What needs more attention?
You do not need to solve every problem immediately. In fact, trying to fix everything at once is usually counterproductive.
Identify the next opportunity.
Then build another practice session around it.
This is where purposeful practice becomes a continual process rather than a collection of drills.
Your transitions improve, so movement becomes the priority.
Movement improves, and now your entries are limiting you.
Entries improve, and you discover that your accuracy on partial targets is preventing you from using more aggressive stage plans.
Improve that, and the cycle begins again.
There is always another level.
Practice for Improvement
There is nothing wrong with going to the range simply because you enjoy shooting. Shooting is fun, and not every round needs to serve some larger performance objective.
But when the purpose of the session is improvement, treat it differently.
Know what you are trying to accomplish.
Spend more time where improvement will provide the greatest return.
Measure enough to know whether the work is producing results.
Maintain the rest of your skills so you remain a well rounded shooter.
Use dry fire and live fire for what each does best.
Then evaluate what happened and decide what comes next.
You do not need a complicated training system to begin.
You need a reason for what you are doing.
Practice with purpose.