comments:
Ben Stoeger (world champion practical pistol shooter and prolific instructor with several books) and associated instructors (Joel Park, Hwansik Kim, and Nick Young) have a lot of free material (including full class dumps) on YouTube to chew on. IMHO they have really nailed down training methods and principles of shooting, cutting away dogma and doctrine to highlight fundamental performance shooting principles that get you shooting quickly and precisely. The idea is that by building up fundamentals, you can employ your gun in whatever context you need, be it for sport or for defense (as long as you take into account the context of the application as well), and by shoring up your fundamentals you need less mental bandwidth to actually run the gun and can dedicate it to navigating the specific context you're in (e.g. a defensive one). Ben's latest book, Baseline Dryfire, is a distillation of his and those instructors training material and is a great look into modern training methods. I highly encourage you take a look at it. It's nothing that can't be found on YouTube, but it's nice to have it all together in one package. For me, some of the core drills that got me shooting quickly and precisely from their material is One Shot Return, Trigger Control at Speed, and Doubles. You can find videos detailing these on YouTube. One Shot Return helps you understand how much input into returning the gun back on target you need. Trigger Control at Speed helps you develop a robust, on demand trigger pull whenever you need it (e.g. such as pull a trigger quickly), and Doubles have you shoot fast and induce errors that inform you of what you need to work on (e.g. low hits can indicate putting too much input, which One Shot Return can help rectify). Lastly, I highly encourage you try out competitive shooting in sports like USPSA, IDPA, PCSL, or GPA. They can really open your eyes to how good you actually are under pressure. You don't have to do the gamery things if you don't want to revolve your shooting around what's a game at the end of the day, and can use it as a form of dynamic training. Some food for thought if you're a defensive/"tactical" shooter apprehensive of competition (I'll admit I was once one of these people): if you're frazzled and don't perform well shooting paper targets that don't shoot back and whose locations you know ahead of time, how do you think your performance will be when the stakes are real with a lot less certainty?
I have good news. Evergreen Practical Shooting (EPS) will be offering public practical shooting live fire sessions at Evergreen starting this month. Even if you had unlimited time and ammo, dryfire is essential to skill development and sustainment. You can very effectively practice manipulations, movement, and target transitions without ammo or trips to a range. Baseline Dryfire Book on Amazon