With 3 pistol matches coming up in February, and having spent a majority of my time training in December on slow fire, I needed to get out to the range to focus on sustained fire.

So, tonight, after work and dinner were done, I headed out to the range to focus on sustained fire.

Rough Training Plan

• Dry fire
• Group fire
• Blank face timed and rapid fire
• Rapid fire practice

In reality, I ended up adding the following:

• Progressive training
• Rapid fire practice

Blank Face

After talking to Daniel Miller at the January bullseye match at Dallas Pistol Club, I decided that I would add some blank face firing to my sustained fire training. The idea with a blank face is that you don’t have a definite aiming point. Because of that, you’re able to focus much more on trigger pull and cadence since there is less pressure.

Here is a picture of 40 shots fire on a blank face target.

Just looking at that group, with no scoring rings on the repair center, what do you think the rough score percentage would be? Well, let’s look at the front of the repair center with the scoring rings.

By my count, the shots are as follows:

• 10 14
• 9: 14
• 8: 9
• 7: 2
• 6: 1

Added up, the total score was 358. Out of 400, that’s 89.5%! ? Not too bad for just pointing the pistol down range and pulling the trigger, eh?

Needless to say, after shooting 40 shots on a blank face, I was feeling pretty confident. So, I moved on to rapid fire.

Rapid Fire Training

When I started rapid fire training, I noticed that I was shooting very quickly and that my shots were grouping quite low and to the left. After several strings of this, and after grouping quite well in the center of the target for group fire, I was certain that I was jerking the trigger.

So, I paused on rapid fire and moved to progressive training.

Progressive Training

Progressive training is a fun game/drill that I read about in a reply from Ed Hall on Bullseye-L forum. I did quite well with the progressive training, keeping all of the shots in the black (my chosen ring), until…

My first string of 5 shots. On that string, I jerked the trigger on nearly every shot and ended up putting 4 low left, out of the black. I recovered in my next string of 5 though by putting all of the 5 shots in the black.

Overall, I was happy with how the progressive training went. It effectively acted like a reset from when I was consistently throwing shots low left in rapid fire. Feeling happy with the results, I moved on to a few strings of rapid fire and did much better.

Takeaways

In the future, perhaps I should schedule sustained fire training like this:

• Dry fire
• Group fire
• Blank face
• Progressive training
• Rapid fire practice

The thinking behind this is that I’ll warm up with dry fire and then from there add little by little until I’m shooting full rapid fire strings. My hope is that this will minimize jerking the trigger.

Another thing I noticed was occasionally breaking my wrist. I even specifically pointed that out on one of my targets above. It’s not a big concern at the moment, but something to keep an eye on.