Quote History Originally Posted By d_striker:
In my experience, setting an aggressive par time like that builds bad habits. At one point, I dry fired like that and pushed everything to meet a par time per Ben Stoeger's Dry Fire book. There's no way you're shooting 2A on each target at that par time.
The biggest thing that dry firing unrealistic par times on drills like that did for me, was establish visual impatience in live fire. The reason it establishes impatience is that you're ingraining a schedule in your head of how long that should take. When you do it in live fire, you start to feel like you're "behind schedule" and start pushing shit beyond your capabilities. Feeling "behind schedule" takes you out of what I call "ninja mode" or "boss mode." You can't let go and flow when you are consciously trying to make something happen.
I really started to progress into a higher level of shooting once I approached dry fire as realistic as possible. Visualizing the recoil, visualizing realistic splits, and focusing on pushing transitions.
I don't dry fire with a par timer at all anymore.
Your draw and reloads look awesome. I would also recommend making dummy rounds and fill those mags up for weight if you're not doing it already. Hard to tell but those sound like empty mags.
ETA-El Pres is one of the only 99 series classifiers where a 100% is pretty easy. Even in Open, all alphas in 5 seconds is 100%.
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Are you familiar with Steve Anderson's three "modes" of practice? In the video, I'm in "speed mode" where my only focus is letting my body get used to what it feels like to go that fast. The thought is that as your body gets used to going faster in practice, your "normal match" speed increases. Speed is my biggest point of emphasis right now; however, I always end my dry fire sessions with a drill or two in "match mode," where I'm calling all of my shots and making up any that need it, as well as trying to hit my reloads 100%. In these drills, I don't use a par time. The match mode practice keeps me from carrying over that "go as fast as possible" feeling into matches. In the video, I did notice myself sweeping through the targets sometimes, which I've been working on remedying. I noticed some improvement in a subsequent dry fire session, but I also noticed other things that need work.
I use dummy rounds in my mags. I put 4 or 5 in the mags that I drop and I fill up the mag that goes into the gun (max reloadable, not total max capacity).
I use El Prez (and other 6-reload-6 drills) in practice a lot because it involves many of the basic skills you need to score well in USPSA. I also do more single skill specific drills as well.
Thanks for your input!
In case anyone is interested, here is a video from one of my most recent dry fire sessions.
Dry Fire 1/24/17