One of the easiest pieces of shooting advice to give is also one of the least useful:
Slow down.
Sometimes slowing down does produce better hits, but deliberately trying to move or shoot slowly is not the best way to control performance. Instead, let your vision determine the speed. That is the idea behind visual patience.
The principle is simple: see enough to make the shot, then fire without unnecessary delay.
You Can Only Shoot as Fast as You Can See
Different targets require different amounts of visual information. A close, open target may require very little confirmation. A distant partial target may require considerably more. The physical act of pulling the trigger has not changed, but the amount of information you need before pulling it has.
That means there is no single correct shooting speed. Your speed should change with the shooting problem in front of you.
If the target is easy and the dot gives you enough information almost immediately, shoot immediately. If the target is difficult and you need another fraction of a second to confirm the sight picture, take that fraction of a second.
The target determines what you need to see. Your vision determines when you can fire.
Visual Patience Does Not Mean Slow
The word patience can be misleading.
Visual patience does not mean waiting for the dot to become perfectly still, deliberately moving more slowly, or adding a pause before every shot. It means being patient enough to actually see what the shot requires.
Once you have that information, there is no benefit to waiting longer.
Brian Enos describes the idea as, “see what you need to see no matter how long it takes.”
The important part is what you need to see. On one target, that may happen almost instantly. On another, you may need a more refined sight picture. The skill is learning the difference.
Acceptable Is Not the Same as Perfect
I use the phrase acceptable sight picture a lot because that distinction matters.
If you wait for a perfect sight picture on every target, you will give away time. If you fire before you have an acceptable sight picture, you will give away points.
Neither is efficient.
For a close, open target, an acceptable sight picture may simply be seeing the dot enter the area where you intend to shoot. On a distant partial, you may need to see the dot settle much more precisely before pressing the trigger.
The sight picture does not need to look identical on every target because the targets are not asking the same question. Your job is to recognize when the information in front of you is sufficient for that particular shot.
Over Confirming Costs Time
Many shooters learn accuracy by waiting until they are absolutely certain the sights are perfect before firing. That can be useful while developing basic control, but eventually that extra confirmation becomes time that does not improve the result.
You see an acceptable sight picture, then you look again. Maybe you wait for the dot to settle just a little more before finally firing.
If the first sight picture was already sufficient for the shot, everything after that was unnecessary.
This is over confirming.
Visual patience works in both directions. Do not shoot before you have seen enough, but do not wait after you have already seen enough.
Do Not Predetermine Your Speed
Steve Anderson often uses a traffic analogy to explain this idea.
You do not decide before getting on the road that you are going to drive exactly 55 miles per hour regardless of what happens around you. If traffic opens up, you may go faster. If traffic becomes congested, you slow down. Your speed changes because the information in front of you changes.
Shooting should work the same way.
If you approach every target thinking, I need to go faster, you may begin forcing shots before the visual information is there. If you approach every target thinking, I need to slow down, you may spend unnecessary time confirming shots you were already capable of making.
Instead, see the target, see the dot, and react to the information.
Calling Shots and Visual Patience Work Together
Visual patience is closely connected to Calling Your Shots.
Calling the shot tells you what you actually saw as the shot fired. Visual patience helps you make sure you saw enough before the shot fired.
Ideally, those two skills begin to merge. You see an acceptable sight picture, fire, call the shot, and move on. If the visual information tells you the shot was not acceptable, you know that immediately as well.
That is very different from firing first and then looking at the target to determine whether the shot was good. The decision should come from what you see while shooting, not from investigating the target afterward.
Accuracy Is Often a Decision
When shooting for score, many poor shots begin with a simple decision: the shooter presses the trigger without an acceptable sight picture.
The grip may not have been perfect. The stance may have been awkward. The entry may have been poor. Any of those things can make obtaining a good sight picture more difficult.
But once the gun is pointed toward the target, the shooter still has a choice about whether to fire.
A poor grip does not require a poor shot. An awkward position does not require a poor shot. Those conditions may mean you need slightly more time to see what you need to see, but pulling the trigger before that information is available usually makes the problem worse.
The goal is not to wait for perfection. The goal is to avoid taking a shot before the visual information is good enough.
The Necessary Confirmation Changes With Skill
What you need to see today may not be what you need to see a year from now.
As your index improves, the gun arrives more predictably. As your grip becomes more consistent, the dot behaves more predictably. As your shot calling improves, you become better at reading what the dot is telling you.
With experience, you also recognize an acceptable sight picture more quickly.
The difficult target has not changed. Your ability to process and act on the visual information has.
That is one reason becoming a faster shooter does not always feel like physically trying harder.
Sometimes you simply become faster at seeing.
Practice Different Target Difficulties
If all of your practice targets are the same distance and difficulty, it is harder to learn visual patience.
Include close open targets, distant targets, partial targets, and different levels of difficulty in the same drill. Move from easy targets to hard targets and back again.
A transition from a close open target to a distant partial should not have the same visual timing as a transition between two close open targets.
The purpose of that variation is to teach yourself to change the level of confirmation based on what the target requires rather than trying to shoot everything at one predetermined pace.
Practice Fast, Then Make Good Decisions
There is an important distinction between learning speed and shooting for score.
During practice, there are times when deliberately pushing beyond your current comfortable pace can help you experience greater speed. That is part of the Speed Mode and Match Mode framework, which we will cover separately.
When shooting for score, however, the visual requirement returns.
The goal is not to become cautious. The goal is to bring the speed you developed in practice into a process where the trigger still breaks on an acceptable sight picture.
That allows you to work on becoming faster without teaching yourself that pulling the trigger on inadequate information is acceptable.
Let Vision Set the Pace
Visual patience is not about making yourself slow. It is about replacing conscious speed control with useful visual information.
See less when the target allows less.
See more when the target requires more.
Do not fire before the sight picture is acceptable, and do not wait after it is acceptable.
As your skill improves, the amount of time required to make that decision will decrease.
You can only shoot as fast as you can see.
Let your vision set the pace.